Like Stories You Know

away

2012-01-31T10:36:00.004-06:00

ice on the windshield.
i chip and scrape
until my hands are blue.

the blinds cut the evening
sun onto the wall.
waiting for you to return.

stranded roadside
smoke billows from the engine.
starlings black against the sky.

the refrigerator hums,
the heater clicks on.
the house without you.

headlights pass over walls.
even the dog
perks his ears for you.

a cold moon
hangs in the window.
your pillow still bare.

still here

2012-01-18T21:25:00.005-06:00

bald monk on my screen
while rain makes the road a mist.
watching more nothing.

frost on windows.
the cat licking her butt,
then falling asleep on me.

i don't remember
the last time i simply
wanted to touch you.

i said i was sad.
You said that was sad but okay
because that's all it was.

taking the trash out
to forget this zen.
dead dog on the wet road.

our cat
quietly mauls a squirrel.
nothing to do.

goodbye things

2011-11-14T10:42:00.010-06:00

i don't trust anyone who says a book saved their life.

it's so confusing: the red kool-aid in Malick's The Tree of life.

if someone says they get a good meditation in in the morning before they start their day, they're not meditating. they're masturbating.

when you're hating or liking a book know that it wasn't written by anyone.

the most difficult thing to do is stop. the most difficult thing to understand without having stopped is that stopping is something which cannot be done.

first i wanted to be writer, drinking whisky, talking loudly. then i wanted to be a monk, living in the rainforests, going on rounds for alms. then i wanted to not want. now there's nothing to do.

if you think someone is beautiful, thinking of their poop will end that illusion for you pretty quick.

the present is a darkness which goes further into darkness. by which i mean, take some time to die.

bliss is a lot like coke: there's nothing to like. surrendering is a lot like withdrawal: there's nothing to not like.

reality was no longer boring when i realized i had never been in it.

spirituality: there is no higher spirituality to channel.

the activity of the mind is unceasing and stupid, a lot like a fat man eating whoppers. stopping is a thing to consider. how to: just watch some.

i don't know, gratefully.

nothing to improve. my farting cat is proof.

Wow. Sepak Takraw. Kung Fu Soccer.

2011-07-26T21:15:00.004-05:00

watch closely.

Blip

2011-07-05T15:40:00.002-05:00

grateful to be among some fine stories on Blip Magazine, the new Mississippi Review (if you haven't heard, which of course you have, whoever you are): Summer 2011 Issue.

2011-06-24T16:35:00.003-05:00

just saw a car drive by which read "COUGAR" along the side but sadly was driven by a man.

didn't drink coffee for days and thought, Cool, i get to have a big coffee.

been having some serious cramping in left leg while running and my wife keeps saying, Maybe you have diabetus.

really want to play on a grass tennis court.

i like walking out on a tennis court before a match and feeling the court under me and being on it and being in the world of a new kind of awareness.

a baby racoon lived in our house for a night.

saw a man make a shack in the woods near our house.

a woman tossed a check at me today at work.

had a dream where there was a great wind and all the buildings were shaking greatly in the wind and i was riding a bike in an unknown city searching for someone i didn't know.

the cicadas work in the morning but take afternoons off, i thought insanely today. i've seen their skins still holding onto trees and it made me wish people molted. people shapes climbing trees or laying on the sidewalk or holding a lampost but no one there.

what there is, sometimes

2011-05-25T10:15:00.014-05:00

the only thing to learn from stories are stories. or paragraphs. or sentences. or words. stories are in this world but always about another. someone has said dreams and everyone hates that.

western philosophy is always about another world. the one made up by the philosopher, ha. here it is best to debate which philosophy is more accurate. existentialists like to win.

when i read a story, i look at the mind through which the story was created. then maybe the publication information or the typeface and often read the last sentence first and wait for it like a wave seen far away. sometimes that sentence gets louder and sometimes it comes in just a brush of skin, which is okay.

watch the mind enough and some stillness reveals itself. it's the same with a story or driving on a motorcycle the very first time. one should, if driving a motorcycle the very first time, wear the proper gear (helmet, etc) and do the proper low-wave and wear the proper face, for people can tell.

it is the wanting that is the problem and then it isn't. a lot like raining or a train going.

there is a homeless man who wears cyclist gear and rides around our town. he is properly dressed for what he is doing and yet everyone knows what he is, i think, because he doesn't really hide it. we like to hide it: that we are just wandering around. i want to often just wander around and then there it is, wanting, and then there it is gone, just wandering, again, oh yeah.

the sameness between stories and mind is this: an imagined ego. here we go again: the individual, the personal and the breaking through of that or the fear of the breaking through of that or the looming of the breaking. oh, not the doors.

as soon as we say it's all about the emotion or the sentence or the language or the rhythm we say what or how? say craft or say write or say lose yourself or say read.

Tree of Life as prayer

2011-05-19T10:46:00.002-05:00

A very fine review of Malick's new film. my favorite director by far, and the reviews are very positive right now. so excited. Ebert calls the film a prayer; i've thought of Malick's movies as meditations. not in that they "think" or "concentrate" or even "explore" a particular subject, but that they vibrate with the aliveness of awe toward all things, an experience similar to meditation.

books for no one: 2011 reads

2011-05-17T12:17:00.005-05:00

Waste by Eugene Marten: if i hadn't finished Infinite Jest at the tiniest beginning of this year, Waste would be my favorite book read in 2011. it's a small book but there's nothing of smallness in it: Sloper is unique in his lostness and living; the sentences are as well crafted and surprising as any; the world is as large, dark, perverted, and somehow gentle as anyone could want.

The Second Book of the Tao by Stephen Mitchell: reading Mitchell's mind on the page is like letting someone wipe your mirror clean. you forget you are anyone at all. and what a thing to be grateful for, to not be anyone for some time of each day.

About a Mountain by John D'Agata: written in a fever of historical, linguistic, and personal chaos of hilarity. a memoir that doesn't feel like one, finally.

Players by Don Dellilo: the empty dialogue, the boredom of days, the need to be someone in a vast cityscape of someones, the relentless oppressive hemmed-in-living of city life and the prose, which seems lost in his later work. there's a doomed feeling here, but not of great circumstance or terrible violence: the doom here is quiet and unrelenting and relishes boredom. these players aren't distant or detached, they're too unaware that this is a possibility, that they might look at their lives and see what they really are: unfeeling to anyone other than themselves. it's beautifully, sadly done.

these are my favorites of the year so far. other mentionables, which i may hit later. the ones i'm looking forward to: Us by Michael Kimball, another early Dellilo, Butler's There is No Year, and some of Dogen's Zen essays.

Winter's Bone: Where's My Daddy?

2011-05-13T23:57:00.003-05:00

in the most highly acclaimed independent film of 2010, the main character has to ask a lot of people where her dad is. if she doesn't find him, her house is gone, and she and the kids are on the street (er, i mean, "in the field like dogs.") finally, someone tells her where he is. she gets money. the end.

here's the authenticity of the Ozarks: cars in lawns, trash in lawns, trash on porches, rusty trampolines, no cell phones!, grim faces, eating squirrel, cooking meth, speaking in accents, woods.

here's the twist: it's noir-realism, in the Ozarks.

here's the danger: every character feels, looks, acts like every other character. mean-faced and humorless. what's worse: we're not dealing with characters here, we're dealing with character types. the lead, jennifer lawrence, has the most convincing "character," which at the very least has some hopes and aspirations and, you know, a body and hair and clothes. everyone else in the movie might as well be mindless, serving her either dutifully or scornfully in the film's slow and sometimes overly dialogue-driven plot (Looking for my dad, hey, need to talk to him, need to talk with him, really do) Note: a slight exception can be made for John Hawkes, who brings some life and a bit of humor to an otherwise empty role.

the thing about Winter's Bone is not that it's unconvincing, not that it tries too hard for a kind of realism, and not even that it's going for a kind of noir take on this story. it's failing is that it feels rather mundane: we're supposed to want this girl to find her dead dad's bones so she can stay on her land; we're supposed to follow her initiation into this "world" of her father's. problem is, we don't know her dad, we barely know her, and that makes it hard to care; secondly, this world, while seeming somewhat dangerous, isn't all that interesting. so, her dad cooks meth, so what? so, wait, mean people are associated with this world...of course they are. there is talk of "kin" and these people seem to adhere to different codes than the "kin" code, but all of that is small. worse, the emotional resonance of Winter's Bone is lacking. we do see reasons to cheer for Lawrence's character (I can't even remember her name), but none of them are surprising; all the reasons are cliched. we see the dangerous world she's entering, but none of it is surprising; most of the people here do the cliched things we expect them to do. this is Winter's Bone major failing: it takes an interesting situation, a terrific setting, and the possibility of some great characters, and instead of doing something unique and exciting, it gives us a paint-by-numbers noir piece.

finally, a spoiler alert: in the end, Winter's Bone almost feels vapid - a movie in which the exact problem we started with was solved almost perfectly (even better, she's handed a bag of money!). here's another cliche: for my money, give me Blue Valentine; or, if we want to get sort rustic, how about Old Joy or Wendy and Lucy; or even Junebug - all of these films decide to do the thing that great independent movies should: surprise at every turn and rip our hearts apart over and over in myriad small ways.

early spring haikus of course

2011-03-09T12:56:00.005-06:00

rain is a grey sheet;
outside streets smell like ramen.
i'm trying to not want.

the kid hid from cops
in the woods next to our house
while the train screamed.

in june dogs were killed
in mississippi yards, so
we brought ours inside.

she brushed her red hair;
the knots made a ripping sound.
i sat on the sofa.

headlights on in the rain
headlights through bare trees and rain;
awaiting spring again.

the rain on the tin
shed reminds me of a thatch hut
i need to live in now.

where's that white cat now?
the one the kids chased and kicked.
i've not seen him in months.

last night i heard gun-
shots, or were they just fireworks?
oh, gunshots, you said.

enter the void: do you have any drugs?

2011-02-19T13:00:00.002-06:00

i saw Enter the Void yesterday. this is a movie i've been aching for, seriously jealous of people who'd seen it and showing the trailer to everyone who i imagined hadn't seen the trailer. i thought Irreversible was strong, but wanted to see what Noe would follow up with. here is my take on Enter the Void:

do you have any drugs? i'm like looking for some drugs right now. your sister is hot. she's my sister, dick. let's get some drugs. good idea. is this book like about death or something? yeah, it's called tibetan book of the dead and it's really trippy. death is like really trippy. yeah, let's take some drugs. yeah. but be careful. why? because drugs are trippy. yeah, i know, i've taken them before. hey. what? this guy has drugs, but he'll like maybe rub poop in your hair or something because he's a pretty hardcore drug dealer. oh, that sucks, but he has like drugs right? oh yeah, we can go get some tonight. that's cool, because i want my sister to live with me. our parents died. yeah, that sucks, you told me. oh yeah. your sister's hot. yeah i know. i'm probably going to give her some drugs. good idea. oh wait, i'm dead now, i got shot. what's really weird about getting shot and being dead is like i'm tripping some of the time like it said in tibetan book of the dead. oh really, that's really thematic. yeah, lights and stuff are cool. yeah, when you're tripping lights and stuff are really trippy. i like sex. yeah. with my sister. trippy.

completely honestly, after the first twenty minutes, this was easily the most boring movie i've seen all year.

tree of life

2010-12-25T18:29:00.002-06:00

i just learned of this magic.

welcome to my destroyed ankle

2010-12-06T13:18:00.006-06:00

day one: balloon foot.

day two: balloon achilles.

one week: no balloons, just sadness.

i don't believe i have ever sprained my left ankle before. i have sprained my right ankle, to various degrees, about six times. i would call this a second degree sprain, i think. there are three degrees. some people say there are five, or four, but i think there are just three: mild, moderate, severe. this latest ankle sprain i would rate, of my sprains, as tied for the most painful, but probably only third in ugliness of appearance. after a week, i'm able to apply weight and walk on the outside of my foot. for some odd reason, though i rolled my foot inward (an inversion, the most common type, i'm pretty sure), most of the really acute pain is on the inside of my ankle and higher up into my leg, making it appear that i somehow injured the deltoid ligament, though not really sure how. there's also considerable bruising on inside of foot, but didn't feel like taking anymore pictures. dorsiflexion is still pretty limited after a week; inability to fully point toes or really bring the toes up at all. ankle feels "tight" up and down and "loose" side-to-side. i believe i screamed fuck for a solid three minutes immediately after the injury occurred. there happened to be three or four kids who were playing some futbal near us and when i finally stopped screaming fuck, these poor children were no longer playing futbal and seemed as if they might never play it again. felt like, after i was done screaming fuck and i tried to apply some weight and walk off the field, that people were running around saying things like "get some ice," and "i'll get some ice" and "what you need to do is, sit down" and "you look pretty pale" and "take off that shoe" and then "no, keep his shoe on" and "yeah, he's looking white" and hearing myself say, upon trying to stand and walk, "i think i'm going to pass out" but that never actually happening. remember being more angry than anything because i kept thinking now i can't finish this game and i won't be able to run or play futbal or swing a tennis racket for like four weeks, maybe three if i really do a good job getting the swelling down and just continually thinking, man, this is bullshit. but then later i saw someone on crutches at the grocery store who didn't have a leg and i felt like i should try hard to stop limping. later still, emily made me feel better by explaining that i had stopped the goal and it all looked very "cool." until you began screaming like a little boy, she added.

modern racism 2

2010-11-09T20:22:00.002-06:00

a policeman with aviator sunglasses tackled a guy across from my house. he tackled him, pushed his head into the ground, put his knee on the guy's back, then cuffed him. the guy sat on the curb, spitting some, while the cop talked on his radio and kind of strutted around. some other cops came over the train tracks. one was a girl and she jumped the railroad gate and then talked into her radio, too. the last cop was overweight and couldn't figure out a way over the train track gate. he kept trying to step over this gate, which was wrapped in barbed wire. his hat fell off. then he tried to wiggle his way between the barbed wire, but his gunbelt got stuck. eventually he yelled to the cops near the cuffed man, Hey, somebody come hold this up for me.

later, a policeman came to our house and asked if i'd seen anything suspicious. i said not really. i said i often saw people walking over the tracks, but that that was normal. to which he replied, black guys?

Window Wasps

2010-10-21T17:56:00.002-05:00

can't get much worse (or better)

2010-10-06T20:57:00.005-05:00

there's nothing even remotely funny about my life, someone said at work today.

i woke up afraid late in the night, believing a dead animal was on the floor. it was my hat, i learned, after poking at it.

i watched someone walk up to an suv of some kind, remove a purse, walk away with the purse, look through it, then return the purse to the suv and jog away.

let's keep this dialogue going, he said to me, then walked off.

twice now, i have seen my neighbor take his dog on a walk just as it's beginning to rain.

there comes a point where it becomes unclear whether the life you're living is real or not.

one of our cats is becoming terribly fat on squirrels and chipmunks. it appears that we force feed her.

there were geese crossing the road today and i just couldn't not get out of my car and wave my hands at them.

a man once walked down our street shouting, You'll be sorry when i'm gone. i'm the greatest thing ever happened to you and you'll be fucking sorry i'm gone now. cause i'm gone, you hear me. gone.

one of my students drives a school bus, surprisingly.

i told one of my classes that i fail at least fifteen students a semester.

it becomes more and more difficult to make things go slow.

modern racism

2010-09-25T11:10:00.004-05:00

i got home from work one day last semester and a blue truck - the kind with metal bars in front of the grill and spotlights for offroading and oversized tires - screeched down my street and did a quick u-turn. my attention was on the truck; i didn't want one of the cats hit. then, from the bushes across the street, scrambled a man wearing suit-pants and a tie, without the suit jacket, running up the street the opposite way the truck had come. he looked like he was probably employed as a teller at a bank. the truck, still doing work to complete the u-turn, backed up, and again peeled out after the guy running up the street, his tie aflap. the truck caught up to him, and the man ducked onto someone's porch, threw a couple pots and kicked some plants. the man in the truck told him to get in, at which point the man kicking the plants and throwing pots on the porch began shouting, She's fucking a black guy. A black guy. Your sister, my wife, is fucking black guy. then he began screaming "nigger-fucker" repeatedly. i was holding a credit card offer from chase and one of our cats was rubbing against my leg. eventually the man got in the truck. later, the police arrived. they put some of the pots back on the porch where the scene occurred.

blogging

2010-09-13T21:36:00.007-05:00

i was going to write this long, rather involved blog post about how my blog had "fallen into a state of clinical depression" in order to explain the blog's absence or rather lack of content in the previous months with a sort of humorous yet still sort of "literary" bent, which all would signal the "grand return" of this blog and all these stories that are like stories but aren't really stories. and i was going to use all these seemingly clever, yet probably easily constructed personifications for the blog's depression. mainly stupid things like the blog hasn't really felt like writing anymore, but it's more than that. it's that the blog doesn't really feel that expressing itself is meaningful because every time it tries to express itself, the expression trying to be expressed immediately changes or suddenly becomes seemingly trivial or cliched and thus not really worth expressing. and that the only thing really worth expressing was/is this feeling that nothing is worth expressing and how sort of frightening that is, meaning mainly that everything is basically meaningless, from this blog's perspective (and how fun would that be as a blog post?), thus leading the blog reader to understand that the blog understands the depth of its own depression, yet is clearly unwilling to do anything about it. and the depression, the lack of being able to express anything except that nothing is worth expressing would offer an explanation as to why the blog had been "out of commission" for some time. yet that seemed kind of stupid and dull (and probably mean-spirited if viewed by a person with actual, serious, suicidal-type depression), so i decided to write about writing about that, which somehow seemed like it would show i was a bit more clever and etc, possibly less mean-spirited, which of course is how i'd like to be viewed, but this also seemed terribly posing and self-ingratiating, so i decided to let all of that go and write about Novak Djokovic losing the US Open final to Rafael Nadal. but instead of doing that (because i saw no conceivable way to really convey the sadness i felt when Djokovic lost to Nadal, who (Djokovic here) played so well and showed so much grit and heart and all the other terrible cliches one can imagine associated with sports, but which turn out to be terribly and beautifully true: how Djokovic fought off match points against Federer, arguably the greatest tennis player in the Open era, and got down into himself so far to see what he could bring back up into the lights in Flushing Meadows and actually did so and beat Federer in five sets, only to lose to Nadal, who might now and all of a sudden be arguably the greatest tennis player of the Open era), instead of doing any of that, i was just going to leave the blog alone, as has been the usual, but then i said fuck it. and maybe the best part about Djokovic losing was the way he lost really fighting, both Nadal and himself, and still, afterward, not whining about it, taking Nadal's check, making the joke, as is his wont, and saying that he'll be there again to win it. which i sincerely hope he does. go Novak.

in a whole other post, i might explore how tennis might be the closest sport there is to writing, no joke

Return

2010-07-30T10:18:00.005-05:00

i was gone for a month and in that month, the finest place, the one that calmed us and awed us both, here: Vernazza, the view from our room.
Hiking the mountains above town.

Emily's fingers crushing Vernazza. We were on a hike that took us away from everyone to the peak of the mountains and would eventually lead to another coastal town.
Not quite so high up.

it's impossible to explain how beautiful and how new we felt here. the bell chimed every half hour and for a long time in the morning, at 7, waking the town. the water was so clear, you could easily see the rocky bottom, fifty or sixty feet, at all times. we snorkled and there wasn't another soul near us, not a boat or body, only waves and water and fish and rock. we saw people having public sex, twice. we hiked to a monastery and sat and drank cold spring water. we spent 8 days in Vernazza, which was the right amount of time, somehow. england was lovely, france was fun to see, but Vernazza was the place. ate very good italian food, the pictures i won't post. i didn't write for a month, but came back and wrote two new stories and feel all fresh to write more.

new literary journal new literary journal new literary journal

2010-06-17T09:57:00.006-05:00

is called: Giraffe Swimming Pool.

tagline (journals have taglines, right?): Our Stories are Really Deep.

first theme issue: Domestic Realism.

first guest editor: David Lynch.

Submission guidelines: Only paper submissions of stories from 10 to 12 pages in Cambria twelve point font. Please staple manuscripts together along the edge of the manuscript, the staples touching all the way down the page (roughly 22 staples; it's not that expensive). If there are less than 22 staples or more or less than 10 to 12 pages, the manuscripts will be returned with lewd drawings and mockery of the prose. If you would like to submit a review, you are not allowed to review a poetry book, a chapbook of any kind, a book published by an independent press, a book published by an author held in esteem in any genre that might be considered "experimental" or "innovative" or "language-y" or "conceptual" or "magically realistic" or "science fiction" or "horror-like poe stories masquerading as literary experiment"; ie, you must review a current book in the top ten of the New York Times Best Seller list, an example being "The Help." If you write a story in the voice of Darth Vader as Gordon Lish about a story Annakin Skywalker as Gordon Lish once wrote and published for a childhood friend to fulfill a promise you will certainly be published.

penis size: Less than 9 inches. Let's be reasonable.

vagina size: if elliptical, then the eccentricity of the ellipse should be no larger than 3 inches, please. If circular, please query the editor.

Please attach, along with your story or review, the answers to the following questions:

1. Have you ever thought something dead smelled kind of good?

2. Have you ever been to jail? What did you think (either of jail or about)?

3. Have you ever seen an animal do like a really weird thing (not like calculus or anything, just something weird) and then think, maybe they're all just fucking with us.

4. Do you think writers should get "fail" cards and that these "fail" cards should be publicly announced by some authoritative law-group policing writing and writers? Such that when a writer receives a "fail" card one never has to read that writer's work ever again (it would really help, there's a lot of stuff out there)? Like, should this same policing group give writers "success" cards? Stipulation: once a card is given, that card cannot, under any circumstances, be revoked.

5. Do you think David Lynch should have to make a Domestic Realism movie?

6. Do you think Ramin Bahrani should have to make a Beckettian/Tarkovsky-like horror film about a European Futball star?

7. What do you think of the new world cup Jubulani ball?

8. Which: Early or late Wittgenstein, Taoism, Tibetan Buddhism, Existentialism, Hegelian Dialectic (I know, sorry, some people), Nietzsche, or, I don't know, Leibniz?

9. Do you think Suttree is by far Cormac McCarthy's best novel and that Blood Meridian, on second thought, is actually sort of boring despite all the violence?

10. What did you score on SATs?

Thank you for your interest in Giraffe Swimming Pool.

oh, retinas, monkeybicycle

2010-06-08T09:37:00.003-05:00

in ohio for a short week where the spring is still spring and my mother has a detached retina possibly from an enormous sneeze; in ohio, that sad heartland, where i've seen an old friend and missed another, and many babies have arrived and taken over. in ohio, that land of rain, watching ray allen drop 8 threes, the dog afraid of the floors. while here, Monkeybicycle picked up a story of mine. i read this story in spartanburg and then everyone disappeared to other places in the country and i felt something go with all of them. europe is happening soon and we need a clothesline. i feel like i'm on the verge of being on the verge, which, with that repetition of verge, sounds a little perverted.

wigleaf is nice

2010-05-22T12:14:00.003-05:00

happily suprised to see wigleaf's top 50 of 2009 included one of my stories. that was nice to see. thank you wigleaf. really. like, that was really nice. wow. also, one of mine is on the longlist. also, again, nice to see. wow. um. i've read many of these stories from the top 50 before i saw them here and so here are my favorites that i read before i saw them in the top 50: "We Cannot Cross the River," "Graduate Seminar," "What Happened," "I Cook, I Clean," "Cat in Mouth," "Modern Love," "A Sinking." now i have to go read the rest.

also, will anyone be in england, france, or italy between june 24th and july 21st? that will be fun if you are going to be there. we will be there.

oh, i am married now. emily and i are married. we got married in the probate court. the woman who married us had on a pink sweatshirt with a kitten's face on it. that rocked. one of my friends knocked out a racist at a bar. that was pretty cool. it's summer. pretty sweet. emily got a new tennis racquet. awesome. there's beer. cool. got my grandfather's old wedding band. badass. killed a squirrel. pretty sad. saw the squirrel wasn't actually dead yet after i hit it and had to re-run over it to make sure it wasn't suffering. even sadder. saw a purple sky and a hazy moon. rad.

a man

2010-03-24T13:17:00.002-05:00

a man came to our door and asked if we wanted a dog for fifteen hundred dollars.

we said that seemed unreasonable.

he mumbled a lot then said, okay, seven hundred.

emily said she didn't even pay seven hundred for our dog. she said she paid like fifty at the shelter.

i knew this was a lie because someone gave us our dog. i stood there grinning.

fine fine fine, the man said. he said this in a rushed and high pitched voice. he said, what i am supposed to do with this dog this dog just out in the backyard and i can't feed it and i got this woman trying to get me to get rid of this dog and nobody helping me how about fifty dollars.

i said he dropped his price a lot.

this is a good dog, the man said.

well, we don't have the money, i said. and we don't want another dog.

why you stringing me along? the man said. he mumbled some more, stamped his foot, then walked off our porch. they don't fucking want it, he yelled up the street.

unimpatient

2010-03-05T17:29:00.005-06:00

i want to learn how to not want. i think the only thing getting in the way of myself right now is wanting too much. i ate an enormous red-velvet cupcake and had serious feelings of being a failure. i have been in something like two real car crashes, i have hit one deer but not killed it, and i have known several people who have gone to jail for writing bad checks - i tell each of these stories when drinking with a great amount of pride, which i then try to conceal. the only thing stopping me from quitting what i'm doing right now is probably cowardice. i'm trying to find a way to turn off my brain and let a story happen. this is the opposite of what i did last semester, which was write in third person. i'm not really sure i can write in the third person, but i spent a year working on it. i have almost nothing to show for that, which i say with a great amount of pride while trying to conceal it. i plan on getting very drunk tomorrow and i'm most looking forward to the hangover, when i can walk through the world with enough connections in my brain burned away that i won't be selfconscious, looking at myself looking. if i could burn enough of my brain away, i once believed, i could live sort of like a monk, only i wouldn't have to do as much work to get there. it was such a bad lie. then my body started feeling really bad and i gave all that up pretty quick. if i would've properly rehabed my sprained ankles i wouldn't have had to sit out a month from running and both my achilles wouldn't feel like they're about to snap now. the days are getting longer and the trees are beginning their budding just because, i'm trying to watch without watching.

my office is in the language lab

2010-02-26T11:31:00.002-06:00

i have no idea. i keep hearing "uscupstate esta bien" from various voices. my tire was flat this morning. i think it got slashed. i timed myself changing t he thing because i can't help competing with anything. i changed it in under ten minutes and at the same time gave someone (this girl) directions. i was on the ground changing the tire and she asked "if i make a left up there at that intersection, can i make another left then another left?" yes, i told her. that was a possibility. "are you sure?" she said. "there's no like one way streets that are gonna mess me up." i think i made an aggravated gesture at this point. one of the lugnuts and the stud was completely stripped (how does that happen?) so i'm hoping it's okay to drive with three lugnuts today.

i have gotten some rejections. and by some, i mean like a million. this book i wrote last year has now been officially rejected by everyone (sent it to four places). so, uh, okay. one rejection i got in two weeks. the rest took five or six months. so at least there was some anticipation.

saw shutter island. i think it's a remake of the ninth configuration, which happens to be sillier and better. i read justin taylor's everything here is the best thing ever and was going to blog about it, but then i saw a review of it in nytimes so i figured blogging was unnecessary. i have no will to blog.

kill author

2010-01-31T17:27:00.002-06:00

i've got a new story up at kill author. there are many fine words in this journal, it's one of my new ones i always read. i'm very pleased to be there. i have some other things that i want to say about quietness and how i need quietness, and something about prose and stories of quietness, but i have not learned how to say these things yet. it snowed here, then melted.

calf heart attack

2010-01-27T09:36:00.003-06:00

for the past year, i've been having bad calf problems. actually, it's not the calf, it's right below the calf, i'm pretty sure it's the soleus muscle. in any case, when running, i've been having intense cramping in both calves for a little over a year. what happens is: i go for a run and then in the middle of the run, the muscle feels like it explodes. no reason. it can just happen on a steady run. i'll go two or three months with no injury, then bam, muscle blows up again. i stretch well, i eat well, all that. it's been just an intensely frustrating year of working out. right when i feel like i'm getting to a kind of peak, the calf blows. and it's not just one, it's both. either. doesn't matter. anyway, i finally found some reassurance that i'm not just crazy and this actually does happen and is sort of a condition, so i wanted to put this up: Chronic Calf Spasm/Strain. also, this: Calf Heart Attack. the calf heart attack article pretty much exactly describes what i've got going on, as well as almost all the commenters on that running forum. i did a six miler yesterday and with less than a mile remaining, completely blow my calf and now it's weirdly swollen (never had the swollen part). but, i'm hoping this The Stick device actually does work. if any runner comes across this, any words of advice on this chronic and strange injury?

why are there random asian language comments on my blog

2010-01-23T10:59:00.003-06:00

i don't know why this is. is this something called "bots"? i have not deleted these asian language comments because it feels just strange enough to keep up. i would not advise clicking on them though.

i have read some books.

Brautigan's In Watermelon Sugar: beautiful otherwordly fairy tale; gentle souls abounding; let's all have a nice time, let's eat together; when someone hurts someone or misuses someone, say sorry, okay?; let the ladies be lovely and the men be not-so-distant; let the villians be cleareyedly crazy and obviously wrong; let us live in watermelon sugar. my only complaint is that the prose was never as dense as the first few sentences, which clearly seemed worked over or lucked into. either way, i wished the prose a bit thicker. still wonderful.

Jamie Iredell's Prose. Poems. A Novel: hard-edged hard-edginess of the west. ingesting of drugs and alcohol. what else does one do in the west? climb a mountain, but not well. how could one, all boozed and drugged? those heat-eating landscapes, those long stretches of mountain road, those stupidities among policemen. all that catches up to one, unless it doesn't, which it didn't, for our narrator, who slips out of his destructive life (yet somewhat funloving and awe-filled life (possibly over-reverent of it all - oh, it's beneath things, but it's there)) just in time. saved by the girl. the pictures are pretty, the poems, but it's no novel. it's something else. and that's good.

Patrik Ourednik's Europeana: a compressed history of the twentieth century. with prose slung with heavy death tolls and absurd communities and nations of people, it's hard not to be amused by people, to see the absurdities Ourednik wants us to see. oh, the prose: Ourednik sings to the reader this baffling history painted in enormous strokes. there are no characters, no plot, save for the paradigm shifts in human thinking - and those shifts, well, i'll keep reading all day to get the quick on human thinking. and myself, i kept thinking, He must have done a ton of research for this thin book. the book cycles, repeats, almost restarts, and yet takes you just about as everywhere as you want to be.

winter cold like a dog bite

2010-01-02T11:02:00.002-06:00

winter is long shadows, the day always ending. a greyness dulls me down. and for the realist who feels like a representationalist, nothing happens. there is a cold day. and another. and then another. and so, little happens on the page except that continuing blankness that is winter. i've been thinking a lot about confidence. to write well, i have to be really confident. there's no other way. you have to believe that what you're putting down, whatever it is, is something that needs to be there, has to be communicated, some story unheard, some words unread. but winter, the small warm rooms, that stopped-time, heavy blankets and sweaters, a colder you, it allows for way way way too much thinking. and so rejections pile up and, yeah, my confidence has been a bit shaken the last month or two. which is okay, necessary. i got a rejection on my novel manuscript, not a real personal word in it. i think the manuscript was out for five months or so and i got the rejection new year's eve. not the best day for a rejection, especially one so impersonal (which is basically like saying 'no, badness'). and yet, yet....this the time, that hour, when the day is short and blue with long shadows, the sky is a sickly pale grey, and there are sirens, or too much time alone, or too much time with other people, or there's a man on a bike some sleeting night, asking you for money, pleading, gloveless and hatless in the cold, and when you tell him you have nothing, he scoffs at you, maybe even spits, and you have to think this is fair, and find some way back to the page.

not saying only nice things

2009-11-10T09:35:00.006-06:00

does anyone else have the feeling that one of the main injuries (to writers and readers) and stupidities (by writers and readers) inherent in the world of online literature, both lit mags and books coming from small, independent presses, is a lack of real criticism? almost every blog i read, every review i read of a new book from a small press, praises the work as if ready to canonize it (there are exceptions, but on the whole, this praising happens a lot). my problem with this: these books can't all be great, right? i mean, if we look back through history, there are so so few greats (whatever a "great" might be). yet it seems like every other week a new book is pedestaled up into the cloudy and merciful land of the beauties proven through time. so, unless the work shuts me up and makes me say only niceness and blue skys at it, i sort of want to start saying things, critiquey things, but not real critiques either because i'm not a critic and have no desire to be. my friend had this idea for a website called "Not One Nice Word," and the place would act as a kind of workshop. so so good. i'd like to apply this to stuff already published, stuff out there in the world that has been blindly praised and not really critiqued, but i don't know, it just seems like a terrible move. once i began thinking of this, i began thinking of the books i've read recently i would like to "critique." there are three: Paul Yoon's Once the Shore, Mary Miller's Big World, and Brian Evenson's Last Days. i liked each of these books, but then i kept thinking about the things which didn't work in the books, lines that were facile, plots that were contrived, an absence of emotional resonance (i just said "emotional resonance," fuck). now though, as if i'm about to actually critique one of these things, i don't feel i can or want to, because inherent in the critique is the ostracizing that comes next, right? i mean, everything i've read about each of these books is so completely positive and geared toward the "mind blowing" that i don't really know if i want to engage in something that looks vaguely like a critique rather than a long blurb or plug. this isn't to say that i want to rip on stuff to rip on stuff. the above books are beauties, in there own ways, but also flawed, and the flaws seem to be like air to people, there and taken in but not noticed or cared about. i don't know. everyone talks so much stuff about how writers have to push through, use language new, find that other ground, that other land, some art that wasn't or hadn't been art; i want to say that without real, honest looking-on of such stuff, no pushing, no newness can happen. maybe there'll be something like a critique coming. maybe i'm just reading the wrong websites.

arm-in-arm we are the harmless sociopaths

2009-10-26T22:25:00.001-05:00

arm-in-arm with all the harmless sociopaths

oh no

essays huh

2009-10-25T09:02:00.002-05:00

more and more i have no idea what to talk about on here. i will talk about how i'm not writing much now. haven't written a new story since sometime this late summer early fall. it might be the time where my brain is getting a bunch of stuff into it so that it may spit all the stuff it has gotten out. i'm thinking of making a book of essays. i'm thinking about writing a new essay about "indie" lit, online stories, versus print. i just became an assistant editor at juked. i really love juked so am super happy grateful honored to be a part of it. i think this is the place to say though, that while i love juked, i'm not necessarily involved or care to be involved in the indie lit scene. in the same way, i don't care to be involved in the mainstream lit scene. in fact, i'm pretty sure, more and more, everingly, that i don't want to be in any scene. i'm glad to be editing and want to help juked get some really good stories. other than that, i sort of want to dance on the weekend, run far and hard, write stories, play ping pong, tennis, hike with the dog, teach a class about fiction, eat, water, trees, shifting clouds, cat hair everywhere, our missing cat, our cat who has been missing a week now, the one with the laser eyes a couple posts back, looking for that cat, hounding the neighborhood streets, that's pretty much it. but i don't care to be a proponent of indie lit. seems like other people have that covered. this is all for myself, so i can slipped into juked comfortably with none of my codes about myself compromised.

here are the individual titles of the essays:

Flannery O'Connor's Christian Horror: The Horror of the Self

Joyce's Language of History

"Each Confirms a Prison"

Breaking Up Gass and Gardner: An Introduction to the Great Fiction War

all these written. here are ideas for ones:

The Minimalists are So Hard to See

This South, That South (on the two popular modes of representing the "south" in writing; one coming from a Faulknerian tradition, the other a bit more "modern", not necessarily better)

Authentic, Experimental Indie Lit: We Are So Right, Right?

the idea would be to start in the way back, then move forward through time. probably won't actually do this though. just been thinking of it too much. i'm gone gone.

stole a dead man's boat and returned it, so borrowed

2009-10-19T10:38:00.005-05:00

here is the boat, already rowed across the lake. we found it on the opposite side at a dead man's house. it was heavy, hard to get down to shore, but so worth it. then, on the way back across the lake, to get home, storm whipped up. took us over an hour, too windy, waves too big. ended up about a mile from our docking place, and had to climb a rock wall and then hike back. tied the boat to a tree and came back the next day to return it to the dead man.

emily at waterfall. this was our goal with the boat, a fun little hike to get there too.

me in waterfall, very very cold waterfall. i don't know what i'm doing. this was a good day, until the storm and crossing the lake again. one paddle is not enough.

laser-eye-cat

2009-10-04T10:56:00.004-05:00

graded over eighty papers. was close to becoming mind-slung and robot-mucked. no idea how i graded them. no idea why, except a check in the box on my screen telling me it's money. oh man, i'm tired of money. going to a lake this week. two days off school, four days in the woods. the woods make one more peaceful, noble, spiritual, and human. this is all a lie. i wonder where this lie slipped itself in from. i feel like james fenimore cooper had a lot to do with it. is it even reasonable to say james fenimore cooper anymore?

need to find a way to get into newness. some story is stuck inside me, but i don't know what it is or how to pull it out. distractions, teaching comp, having to grade, all these things don't allow for the mind to listen to other things. wanting to make something new, don't know what or how. i have the phrase "new york city? new york city!" stuck in my ears.

the amount of humor

2009-09-15T22:33:00.002-05:00

do others feel the amount of humor on this blog has fallen. i'm aware of this. i'm not sure how to remedy it. i believe that the amount of humor to be falling everywhere in the world, probably due to swine flu. someone gave my friend an "h1n1 fist-bump" rather than shaking his head. i mean his hand. it would have been funnier if they would have shaken his head, rather than giving the fist bump. but the fist bump is what they did. the person actually said "h1n1 fist bump coming at you." my friend didn't know what "h1n1" was until well after the first bump. i told him it was swine flu. i told him it looked like he had swine flu, so others were probably just being cautious. why is it that artists and writers get more political as they get it older? i believe it's because something in their brains or hearts gets fuzzied. i don't think that's a bad thing, just a thing. just a thing juts a ting. uh. i interviewed for a job teaching comp and at the end of the interview, when it was sort of clear that i had the job, pending transcripts, my interviewer went to shake my hand. i had been nervous and so i stood up to shake, but first i wiped my hand on my jacket, quick-like, saw my interviewer see this, had an awkward shake, and wanted desperately to say that i had sweaty palms because i was nervous. my interviewer walked away, seeming to eye my hand i had wiped and shook with. then i wanted to explain that i didn't always have sweaty palms, i wasn't "weird" like that, but instead i just said in a fake business voice and loud "Thank You For the Opportunity."

do others think this blog needs to be more political? should i be saying things against america or anything. i don't know

calf/achilles

2009-09-15T10:14:00.002-05:00

does anyone know the difference between say a torn calf (gastro or soleous (sp)) and like achilles tendonitis? what are the symptoms? tennis players anyone? is it possible to "play through the pain" with tendonitis in the achilles, and where does that typically occur on the leg for a tennis player/runner? anybody? heh, i just called myself a 'tennis player.'

almost finished with paul yoon's book, that's coming soon.

concerns concerning the flashiness of flash fiction

2009-09-11T10:07:00.004-05:00

here is a thing sean lovelace wrote here. it's a tidy little bit of unessay on the flashiness of shortly stories (i try to always read mr lovelace's stuff because his stuff is good he's a runner plays frisbee golf and his last name either sounds like a b-movie actor or a pornstar). me and flash fiction fought one time and flash fiction won, but then another time, outside was clouded and grey and so was my hair and eye, i nearly made flash fiction die, but he's okay and we drank a lager. here's what sean says about flashcists. haha, okay. i wrote a thing a post or so back about how flash fiction, to me, right now, resembles the popular form of revolution in writing, specifically online writing (the dilettante post). the problem to me isn't that the the form is being heralded and praised/hated and disregarded, but just used far too often. flash fiction and i get along, even far back stuff in time, especially the far off, zen koans and parables and fables, and then baudelaire and hemingway, and so, so many others. and the others of now cutting up the page with these shortlies are many and excellent. the thing is, and i say this is a thing, i make it a thing: no one says how great stories are, no one runs around saying 'i love sonnets' (they would be running, i say), or novels, man, novels are where it's at, or, the villanele, that's the form. but with flash fiction, i actually hear this: how cool flash fiction is as a form, how it needs it's own place, how it's valid and valid. so it gets treated as though it's "new" even though many of the "proponents" know it's not. but the main worry is how big these bits of quick have gotten. i mean, people are saying they hate flash fiction, which is stupid and boring, and then people are defending it, which seems a bit more noble, but somewhat silly-headed: i mean, flash fiction's doing fine on its own. a murky minded observer might think there needs to be a defense, but there are flash fiction anthologies, magazines devoted to flash fiction, and blahbieblah. the flash fiction lives fine, breathes its own air, however brief. the worry is, here, these ff's are a short, very short form. and while there are plenty of crap stories out there, plenty of crap writing, because flash fiction is so short and in such fashion, it's easier to get a lot of crappy flash fiction. flash fiction isn't easy, but it does appear that it's easy; flash fiction isn't new, but it feels that way, especially up on a website: this is the other flash in flash fiction, the part to question a little.

her hair was enormous

2009-09-10T09:54:00.004-05:00

this blog is slowly slogging off. my desire to be a blogger is blogging me up. im'a'all bloggidy bligged. i have no idea what to say about anything anymore. today i spoke to a lady with a great big happy southern accent (i'm doing some writing workshops for people on her campus) and she kept saying "delighted." then i kept saying "delighted." i felt that i too had to have a great big happy talk sound. though i spoke with her on the phone, i understood her hair was enormous. then she said oh my god i nearly hit that car. then she said, i'm driving right now, darling. my brain won't do two things at once, ha, ha. and i said to be careful.

my calf muscle, i don't understand it. maybe it's an achilles thing. i'm tired of having a calf or achilles thing. i might be a hero.

so many things are happening and yet so many of them are completely unrelatable. i shaved off my beard. again. i'm having no wheat in my diet. i finished a story called "In His Mother's House, This Odette," which i think i like. i think i like i think i like i drink a lot i think. but no but hey. life is hard these days going to work living a workingman's life so hard when there's so little money. you know? but not really and i don't know why not really. just not really even at all hard. a tree's trunk is rather hard relatively.

after class i saw a fellow teacher eat a banana. i was like "ha." another fellow teacher asked me how my new sitch was. it took me a minute to understand that he was talking about "my new situation." i told him that now that i understood he was talking about "my new situation" that it was okay.

sat under the only skyscraper in spartanburg and watched that building going up into the night sky, the word Denny's in bright, glowing letters. bought new books:
big world mary miller
stories scott mclanahan
once the shore paul yoon
in a bear's eye yannick murphy
also reading moby dick and ahab gave a speech. i like the paul yoon book.
okay bye

third and first

2009-08-15T11:23:00.004-05:00

i'm thinking about first and third person a lot. the word "organic" is a word that is coming up often when i think about first person. i think i like stuff that is written in first person that feels very "everyday" and the story sort of arises from the voice. for some reason i don't like overly language driven stuff in first person. for some reason that feels more at home to me in third person. this may be because if i read a really language driven piece in first person then i have to imagine this person, who is doing these things, who is doing some talking in the story through dialogue but somehow the talking in dialogue is nothing at all like the language that the narrator is using to tell the story. it bothers me. sometimes, while i really love a lot of lish's and say gary lutz's writing, i have this first person issue. i do not have this same feeling for someone like christine schutt, but that may be because many of the stories in a day, a night, another day, summer are in third person.

i got a fortune cookie this past spring, maybe late winter, that read: you will take a chance in the future and win. i put a lot into my fortune cookies. i have more faith in a fortune cookie than other people, probably. i thought at the time this had to do with publishing or maybe with a job. it turns, i believe now, it was a job and stuff. i quit my post-doc at etsu to move to sc. i didn't have a job until two weeks ago, but i'm making as much as i did at etsu and only have one prep. also, i'm living with emily the fiance and pat the texan.

i'm running six miles easily. i might do a 5k soon and actually try to run well. maybe shoot for 18. my sister asked me if i'd ever do a marathon. i'm not a distance runner, i'm a mid-distance runner. i will never run a marathon, i don't care too. i would like to be able to get up to an easy nine miles and run a good 5k. i don't know.

playing tennis every other day about. some full matches (best of 3 sets) i remember:

6-1, 6-4 (W) very early in the summer, we struggled to play a full match after this because it was above 90 every day and we kept going out at 1 and quitting, tied after two sets. then i couldn't play for a week or so because of calf problem.

7-5, 4-6, 6-3 (W) this one was fun, in the last week or so, with my new babolat. i do remember thinking my opponent was tired in the third and so i got a little lucky there. i hit some big forehands here that i was pleased with. trying to put more on the serve.

7-6, 6-7, 3-6 (L) one of my favorite matches even though i lost just because of the mental effort involved. i thought i could close it out in the second set but ended up losing the tie break. sort of was defeated after that and couldn't get anything going in the third. pat's serve also defeated me, kicking out wide to my backhand on the ad-court.

6-2, 1-6, 6-3 (W) i don't know what happened in this match. i think what happened was pat got pissed off he lost the first set, so he played out of his mind in the second and killed me (serve and volley), and then i got pissed off i lost the second set so badly so i turned it up in the third, really ran around backhands and tried to be aggressive. it was interesting and fun to play.

3-6, 4-6 (L) got my ass killed in this one.

north carolina dmv humid august tennis falling attic staircase stitches

2009-08-12T19:48:00.004-05:00

north carolina dmv has taken 400 of my dollars. i made a mean post about their evilness and deleted it. i felt as though i was in a kafka novel, unable to satisfy the north carolina dmv, unable to determine what exactly had happened for them to make me pay so much money on so many separate occasions, for only one traffic violation, speeding 12 miles over the limit. played a two hour tennis match in 95 degree heat, the courts shadowless, empty of any others, and cicada-droned. pat and i tied one set apiece. we could not play the third set. pull-down attic stairs got stuck, emily tried to unstick them atop a chair, the stairs crashed into the bridge of her nose, between her eyes. never seen so much blood. it spurted. she was knocked from the chair, a gaping hole in her nose. i grabbed a towel and a bag of ice, then quickly put the ice back. then really looked at the cut/hole on the bridge of her nose and declared we must go to the er. i declared many things. you need stiches. holy shit, you're bleeding. we need to go to the er. then we went to the er and the doctor let me see the bone in emily's nose before he stitched her up. amazingly, the hole was stitched up nicely, should only be a small scar. after the er, we ate wendy's frosties and fries at 2 am. she had a headache, a bad one she said. i said this was reasonable.

i recently finished two new stories: "Three Days A Red Wolf" and "Droughtville"; i don't know about the second title. have a third story stuck in my head.

august again

2009-08-08T18:24:00.003-05:00

finally in, in the new house. homing it up some. i don't think we'd been home for more than a week all summer, or it felt that way. went to iowa, where the land is flat and corn-ruined and where it felt like fall. i read a book by robert haas while i was there. i don't read poetry, i don't know why, but a friend recommended it pretty hard and i like "eastern" things and i like haas's version of basho, issa, and buson. so i read Praise and loved it. it fit so so so much a summer into me besides the one i was living. here's an excerpt from a poem called "Songs to Survive the Summer":

...I thought of Wallace Stevens

walking equably to work
and of a morning two Julys ago
on Chestnut Ridge, wandering

down the hill when one
rusty elm leaf, earth-
skin peeling, wafted

by me on the wind.
My body groaned toward fall
and preternaturally

a heron lifted from the pond.
I even thought I heard
the ruffle of wings

three hundred yards below me
rising from the reeds.
Death is the mother of beauty

and that clean-shaven man
smelling of lotion,
lint-free, walking

toward his work, a
pure exclusive music
in his mind.

and this from "The Beginning of September":

In the summer
peaches the color of sunrise

In the fall
plums the color of dusk

there's no way of saying what these poems felt to me reading them in a foreign bedroom in the summer, without airconditioning, curtains blowing, moving from bedroom to a tent the next night, where the wind swept so hard through an oak tree outside that i dreamt of ocean waves all night. i want summer hotter and heavier and like some thirst, to stay just unquenched, because it's always the longing, i think, that's better.

dogzplot and storyglossia

2009-07-13T10:44:00.002-05:00

i'm on the south carolina coast right now. i ate a shrimp sandwich with avocado on it. i drank a lot of bloody marys. i have nothing interesting to say, except that i'm still jobless and no one wants to give me a job, though i'm highly skilled at many things, like being mediocre at tennis, pretty good at watching movies, liking Nature (observing it and appreciating it more than the average person, but probably less than a spiritually profound individual), good with dogs, can walk dogs for money, and cats, which i've done and it's possible, and any type of yard work. my skill set is diverse. i can edit things online for a nominal fee.

okay, i don't know. i'm reading Moby Dick. i'll maybe make a post about that soon, but i don't know. happily: new issues of Dogzplot and Storyglossia with a couple of my things, one short, one long. i'm excited to be in both these places, with good editors and other good writers. i did an interview with Storyglossia and i'll post that soon.

dilettantism - (in an attempt to reconcile the high brow)

2009-06-29T16:52:00.006-05:00

in To Criticize the Critic and Other Writings, in an essay (a lecture) titled "American Literature and Language," eliot makes an attempt not to define American Literature, but to name a few quintessentially American writers. he begins where any beginner might: the names Poe, Whitman, Twain. for whatever reason, eliot believes these three writers all have the trademark of a national literature. they have, he says bravely, pedantically, "strong local flavour combined with unconscious universality." what a nice formulation. of course, eliot quickly leaves these three - along with his nice formulation - in favor of explaining the even-better-group, the revolutionaries, who look to their past, to their "national literature," and reshape the whole thing. in other words, eliot's explaining where his clan comes from. still, the idea of revolution, i think, is what is interesting about the lecture, especially considering the fact that many believe the nation (possibly the world) is experiencing a kind of revolution in literature perpetrated by the online world.

eliot writes "the writers of the past, especially the immediate past, in one's own place and language may be valuable to the young writer simply as something definite to rebel against. He will recognize the common ancestry: but he needn't necessarily like his relatives." he continues, in a slyly self-aggrandizing way, by saying that "from time to time there occurs some revolution, or sudden mutation of form and content in literature. Then, some way of writing which has been practised for a generation or more, is found by a few people to be out of date, and no longer to respond to contemporary modes of thought, feeling, and speech. A new kind of writing appears, to be greeted at first with disdain and derision; we hear that the tradition has been flouted, and that chaos has come. After a time it appears that the new way of writing is not destructive but re-creative." eliot then goes on to mention the names of the revolutionaries, so modestly leaving out himself, and then naming all the canonical writers we now know as "modernists" and "imagists" from america, the one's he's centrally grouped with.

eliot, in a quiet aside, a parenthetical seeming to emphasize the comment's unimportance, also writes that "the most dangerous tendency of American versifiers [and i'll add in prose writers as well] is towards eccentricity and formlessness," which, though eliot leaves this hushed, is obviously the downfall of a socalled revolution. i bring this up because i believe there are many signs of the eliot-revolution happening. the internet has expanded one key type of writing, sometimes called flash fiction, sometimes called a prose poem, sometimes distinguishable, sometimes not. and there's a lot of it out there. some is wonderful and i'll save the time naming names. some online writing, work, things, are not wonderful. and an even greater portion seems stunningly and dully competent. so it seems to me that at the same time a revolution occurs, there's also the inevitable result, the inevitable fallout, which is this group of competents: the dropping in of dilettantes, who copy popular forms of literary rebellion without actually knowing what they're rebelling against; word up words in a sentence so the sentences read just so, sluggishly original, painfully individual, aesthetically arrogant, vapid; create new creations that had already been done in the seventies and eighties; experiment relentlessly for the sake of experimentation, without actually saying much: "a true disciple is impressed by what his master has to say, and consequently by his way of saying it; an imitator - I might say, a borrower - is impressed chiefly by the way the master has said it. If he manages to mimic his master well enough, he may succeed even in disguising from himself the fact that he has nothing to say."

how to avoid being an imitator, a dilettante, that's all, i think, that's all i've been thinking about.

new story story

2009-06-23T15:59:00.002-05:00

i'm in the middle of a move here (fridges suck to move, especially up steps), but the new prick of the spindle is up. i've only had a chance to click on the website and look. it looks neat. the webdesign seems niftier than usual, i mean. i will read some of the stories soon, there are a lot names i know and trust. i know and trust. know and trust. no and husky. i don't know. i'm incredibly tired. um, a guy came with our new used washer and dryer and backed the truck in and we carried the dryer into the house (much lighter than a fridge) and then got it situated and then realized that we put it in the wrong place and couldn't get the washer in so we had to take the dryer out and start again. a lot of that happened. a man with a slight lisp and new york accent sold us a fridge. on his house it said "no smoking. oxygen inside." he insisted i "back the fridge up the ramp," which for some reason i agreed to and which turned out to be a terrible idea.

enormous lake pictures i don't feel like resizing

2009-06-21T10:02:00.010-05:00

the cabin we stayed in, whose grasses were tick infested. i got fifteen ticks, swollen lymph nodes and came back to south carolina needing antibiotics and a tetanus shot.

dog learning to do lake things.

dog trying to push a rock into the lake.

people doing people things.

the heart of the heart of the heart of the heart of the heart of the heart of the heart of the heart of the heart of the heart of the heart of the heart of the heart of the heart of the heart of the heart of

i sat in a cold spring for a minute and my hands curled up and went numb. tried to blow up things with blackcats and m-80s. ate a lot of meat. shoulders got very red and burny. played frisbee golf. watched storms. had detailed discussions of tick location, size, type, removal, etc. other things happened.

bore fiction

2009-06-09T13:28:00.003-05:00

everyone says everything about so much bore in fiction. who wants a narrative when we have words, right? i'm unsure what to think. there's that ongoing saying by the online community: invention, creativity, newness, please nothing story-like much, please: instead of man and woman, let's have a spiral staircase of chairs, a plastic star sky, an unopened ribcage waiting in some silent sea; or at the least the consciousness of one running through obsessive thoughts, in some lonely house with locked doors, no windows; otherwise a fairy-tale or fable told realistically. so i stress a bit, get lost, confused: i don't write that, and though i enjoy reading that, that, and that, i like writing closer to what i see everyday (i won't say 'closer to what's real', of course). there are good minds out there, but i don't understand, still, ongoingly, why quiet stories, socalled 'realistic' stories, stories with people, with everyday, get pushed about. these are created worlds, just as created as any 'unconventional' thingything. sometimes subtlity gets disremembered purposefully, maybe. this is me convincing myself of myself. i need to get out of this screen into a book again.

this has been partly caused by a pulled calf muscle.

holy shit i'm still six years old and i love this

2009-06-06T19:09:00.002-05:00

the music starts around 3:34. the interview before it is good, but the song is amazing. i think i may need to start taking things more seriously. his description of his music seems correct. 'i guess i sorta lied when i said it's not that bad.'

news

2009-06-04T22:01:00.004-05:00

i watched the news on mute.

we have an anchor named tom crabtree.

it rained a lot today and that took an important place in the broadcast.

there may be flash floods.

tom crabtree's name kept popping up.

they showed a bi-lo parking lot repeatedly, from ground level.

a woman seemed to be describing how she was attacked in the parking lot. they showed her waving to the camera and driving off.

they showed a map of the area with a green blotches for rain. looks like a lot of rain, wow.

our dog ate a book and we yelled at him and then took him outside and he pooped and we felt bad. he was only frustrated.

tom crabtree's name.

our governor is forced to take the stimulus money.

a policeman got a dui. they showed a picture of the county where he got a dui.

someone got arrested. they showed the house and policeman milling around outside.

tom crabtree's name.

someone is stealing atm money. lt. ralph bobo talked about this. he had a very red face.

someone else got arrested. he was smiling in his mugshot.

bmw is optimistic about their future. video of the different parts of the bmw plant. body parts of people working, parts of cars on an assembly line.

tom crabtree's name.

college rankings may be manipulated. something about clemson.

pelzer elementary last day of school. a cat walking down school steps.

40 percent of people in south carolina don't have internent access. mississippi, new hampshire. that's all it said.

commercial.

tom crabtree's name.

new post about life

2009-06-02T09:23:00.002-05:00

i believe my desire to blog is very weak whereas my desire to be outside playing frisbee golf, ultimate frisbee, basketball, walking, running is very high.

i set an old stereo on the curb thinking someone would come and take it. the cd player was broken in it, but the tape deck worked (tape deck) and so did the radio. a few minutes later a sixty year old man walked over. "is that for free?" "yes." "does it work?" "the cd player's broken, but everything else works." "and it's for free?" "it's all yours." he bent over, struggling to pick up the stereo and the speakers. "i'll get the speakers," i told him. "i got it now, just give me a second." a moment later he said "why don't you get the speakers?" walking back to his house with the stereo he said "name's Willy Mo'." Then he said, "you just move in?" I said "yes." "it's a good neighborhood. not like my last neighborhood, where a guy got shot and killed in my frontyard." i agreed it seemed better than that.

then i drove to columbus, ohio and saw many babies. that was intense. everyone goes to bed early now. the babies, they are intense. wow.

then i drove to dayton and got drunk, fucked up my leg playing frisbee, got propositioned by prostitutes, their pimp in the distance in a white suit and white pointy shoes and very slicky hair. found out a friend wrecked a helicopter and lost his job. i don't believe details are appropriate for a blog. two others are taking unemployment. i'm about to be taking unemployment.

finished a novel and posted the first couple pages on fictionaut to a moderate, yet kind, reception.

watched a friend eat an entire "Gambler," which consists of: an eight-egg omlette with cheese, peppers, onions, etc (this, itself, is amazing); two enormous pancakes, not little happy children pancakes, mean fluffy, enormous pancakes; a slab of french toast; four pieces of bacon; hash browns. we made asses of ourselves in this eatery, hungover and laughing.

missed emily for the week. spoke to her on the phone drunkenly passing the phone to numerous people.

there were other things, but i don't remember what now. got back, discovered Greenville is cool and has a good frisbee golf course and good sushi and a vietnamese place (thank you Greenville).

things watched and read

2009-05-18T10:51:00.007-05:00

we watched Wendy and Lucy last night. the movie is based on a story from Jon Raymond's Livability called "Train Choir." as with Old Joy, written by Raymond and then directed by Kelly Reichardt, this movie was better than the actual story, denser, moved a bit quicker, and picked up on interesting things, images, more than Raymond's story. I'm beginning to believe that while Raymond does a good job writing quiet, un-plotted stories, he doesn't have the eye or language to really get into the depths of things. His stories translate to film well because they're a bit skeletal. i'm beginning to believe he should be writing screenplays. someone may have said this already. either way, though, Wendy and Lucy is strong: a quiet character study about a lonely woman who isn't exactly sure where she's going. her '88 Accord breaks down; the last of the dog food for her dog, Lucy, causes her to steal; she gets a hand from a rent-a-cop; a group of teenage boys laugh at her as she sleeps in her car. and in the background, the grinding and crashing of trains through a forest. the images onscreen were what kept the movie fascinating, and the character's desperation tempered with a kind of resolve kept me watching.

Matt Bell's How the Broken Lead the Blind. i emailed Matt to see if i could get one of his chapbooks even though they were sold out. he didn't have any at the time, but he was nice enough, months later, to remember me and send me a book, signed and all. it's an excellent read: the stories move like an electric storm, quick jolts of energy and change, then stillness. i was so, so impressed by the first story, "Ten Scenes From a Movie Called Mercy," which is a sort of film montage wherein the story itself saves a young girl from a killer by time-looping the film. that's the the only giveaway, spoiler thing i'll mention. most of the stories can be found online, like "Player Piano," which i first read in Juked. it's interesting to see the changes Bell made to the book, small edits, line cuts, that made a difference. really, in some remote way, however strange and odd and fun Bell's stories are, they're always about relationships (not necessarily romantic), the small things we do everyday to use, mis-use, abuse, connect, caress: Bell transforms these small moments into the unearthly images of dream; this is a world skewed from our own, reminding one of mysteriousness and strangeness, a world almost begging not to forget these things.

emily had never seen 2001: A Space Odyssey, so we watched that. i believe she was 'blown away' by it. i forgot how calculating Kubrick is. just 'a master of the medium.' so neat to watch again after so many years.

edit: i cut a thing i wrote hear about some of my stories coming out. i don't know why i wrote it or cut it. double edit: i wrote "hear." heh.

two crazy panthers on the prowl maahahahahaha

2009-05-18T10:24:00.003-05:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-_aw17_qxE

it's really disappointing. i wanted to embed the above clip but youtube won't let me, which means my big great big joke post i was going to do is ruined. i really wanted billy bob's enormous smiling chompers on my blog. and i like billy bob i suppose, bad santa is funny, he's good in monster's ball, but this, i mean, this might be unstoppable. i can't embed it, though. aww well. it's so funny. it's not supposed to be funny. i don't know, if it's not funny, i apologize, but i mean, i've watched it at least thirty times in the last week.

the youth

2009-05-13T10:05:00.002-05:00

the kids outside our duplex have accumulated three footballs, one basketball, two super-soakers, a toy car, an inflatable dog, a shoe, numerous rocks, and a log on top of our roof. the police have been to our duplex three times in the last two weeks. twice a ten year old was threatened to be taken to juvie, but was not taken. i'm not sure who's phoning the police. i heard one kid call another kid a bitch. then the kid who was called a bitch called the other kid a mexican.

one of our cats has developed meditative powers and stares at me with such intensity that i now know she is enlightened. it's difficult, living with an enlightened being and not being enlightened oneself. it hurts the self-esteem.

i cut almost four thousand words from this novel yesterday. it was not difficult. it was all very bad and uninteresting writing. i did feel a little sick afterward.

i saw the new star trek, which was fun. i read some things about people thinking it was stupid or has a conservative message or something. i don't know. it's star trek. it's supposed to have explosions and silliness.

back in the sc yo

2009-05-09T09:33:00.003-05:00

johnson city is over. i'm undone with many things: grading; looking for a new job. these are things that will pass. the 'book-i'm-working-on,' i believe it takes shape. i believe the 'book-i'm-working-on' may be close to being a book. the book is summer, which i abandoned over the winter to write winter stories, and now these past few weeks summer pushed me back into the 'book-i'm-working-on.' the characters may be unfleshed and sunk into themselves; there may be too much thinking; there may need to be more things to see: that dead tree, those twin girls, a broken tooth, a broken arm.

i can't work on any of this right now though. right now i have to steam-vac a carpet that had dog diarrhea on it. the dog, he is sick. he is very close to explosive. he will be making a visit to the vet today. i am hoping the vet forgets to ask us to pay for this.

springtime and the promise of an open fist

2009-04-29T15:24:00.003-05:00

thursday evening with emily riding around town until we met jonas, ellie and patrick on the street. a loud bar where we ate pizza and watched orange girls with drunkness talk things at orange boys with sharp hair. an elderly man in a tan suit passed out fliers proclaiming the band on stage, who sang about redemption. into the cool evening and then to a pub where people were paler. friday, outdoor foods grilled up into the air and our stomachs, and free beer. settling evening on the parking lots and industrial buildings and far trees shaking in the wind. planes ranging quietly above. emily braided a soft braid on one side of her hair, wore a simple dress. patrick bloodied his foot while we played basketball in the parking lot. then someone stole his bed, so we crashed at our house, ate food, and opened the windows. saturday and bloody marys and blackened tilapia and in in in the day, blue and high blooming clouds and those shookup trees and trees and trees. lost in neighborhoods looking for a new rental, humid and quiet on porches, yes here it is, it is here now, okay, i'm okay again.

david erlewine has a great thing at Necessary Fiction, here, which i think i'm about a week late on. still, read it. here's his blog, please look out for him, there will be one of his books shortly, i know it.

this happened like this

2009-04-21T16:47:00.004-05:00

i don't know why i don't feel like myself in the presence of other people. i don't know why i say the things i say or why i repeat certain words like competent, interesting, that reminds me, tangentially. sometimes if someone speaks at me with an accent i will begin using a similar accent. sometimes if someone brushes their hair away from their face i will do the same, though no hair is there to be brushed away. last week i showed the film Waking Life by Richard Linklater because i've had to teach this composition class all semester based in different philosophies. so i thought that film would be a good way to 'wrap up' the class. the same day i began showing the movie someone on htmlgiant posted the article written by PKD that is discussed at the end of the film. which is strange, especially considering what the PKD article is about. i don't believe this means anything but i wish it did. then i found myself thinking of 'coincidence' a lot and not believing in it, which is not to say that i believe in anything else.

also: there is a new issue of elimae out with a writing by a good friend, Patrick Whitfill, here. also: another friend far overseas has a story at SLQ, here. i remember the Turtle Creek well. i was drunk once there.

mood: even-tempered, distant, very close to robotic.

weather: sunshiny but cold.

food: a bean burrito with habenero sauce.

drink: Hansen's soda, tangerine lime.

money: federal refund check.

confusion: mild in depth but encompassing most things.

level of tiredness: moderate.

cleanliness of apartment, life, mind: moderate.

afternoon

2009-04-13T09:33:00.003-05:00

i believe i need to stop getting drunk every weekend.

i believe i need to stop eating chile poblano's so much.

we drank margarita's at around two on saturday, went to I Love You, Man, all of us with Nalgene bottles full of whiskey or vodka then snuck into Observe and Report. we ate a mega-sized thing of popcorn in about ten minutes, before the first movie started. i drove my friend's truck home and gave some money to people on the side of the road. i don't think my body can handle 10 hours of drinking anymore. i think it's hurting my running. this is the evidence.

also, this blog will be ending soon. my year in johnson city is nearly over. we had a good run guys. wow guys we had a good run. that was a run we had guys. we made a run guys at it. what a run that was guys wow.

also, i have a new story called "Foreign" coming from Prick of the Spindle. it's a longer story. it'll be in 3.2, which i think comes out in June...

Waveland

2009-04-08T22:57:00.003-05:00

good review in bookforum of F. Barthelme's new one. i will be ordering this soon.

i'm reading The Loser by Thomas Bernhard right now. it might be the best novel i've read all year (year meaning school year), but i'm not finished with it yet.

some wants

2009-04-07T15:37:00.007-05:00

i want to beg to care and not care

i want to touch your face with my face

until our faces stop touching and we say goodbye

i want to undo my heart from yours

because they're knotted angrily

i want winter gone like i want many of the people i know gone

i want no surprises i want intense and painful boredom (ha ha, have a nice day)

i want to feel you like a knife inside me undoing my knottedness in the same way

i want to be on a river every day

i want to be lost at some gas station outside montgomery after being on a river every day

i want the end of a hangover illuminating an afternoon the way the end of hangovers do

i want this to happen in Dallas

i never want a cell phone or pay phone or any other sort of phone in my ear making me hear things i don't want to hear about

instead a wind in my ear is what i want

i want to be someone's enemy, possibly someone who consider themselves to be an artist or the man at so many bars who decides i'm the one he wants to dislike

if this cannot happen, i will make an enemy of you if that is alright

etc etc etc

2009-03-31T16:52:00.005-05:00

Last Days by Brian Evenson - a self-mutilation guidebook. not really. that would've been funny. this book is not funny, or not funny very often. it's amusing sometimes. Evenson's prose is flat, tempered, and full of violence. it's a detective story intertwined with a superficial spiritual component (i say this negatively) that keeps the reader reading and also wanting a bit more. while it's good, i felt the vague quiet annoyance that i feel too often with genre-bent fiction, that it's characters were a bit too characterless. still, it was fun to play in.

Livability by Jon Raymond - i mentioned this one a while ago. Raymond is the author of the stories "Train Choir" (now a movie called Wendy and Lucy) and "Old Joy" (also a movie). i liked the movie Old Joy better than the story. i felt the movie complicated the characters, went deeper into their lives and their disappointments. his stories are affecting, but sometimes i feel they're rough sketches for a larger thing. the small changes in the movie Old Joy added so much to the characterization and the story as a whole that I wondered: why didn't Raymond write it like this? the prose is clean, clear, but a little bland, though this does fit the lives of his somewhat bland and over-ordinary characters living in an over-ordinary world. "The Suckling Pig" is one of the better stories in the collection for its depiction of odd loneliness and foreigness.

As I Lay Dying by Faulkner - reread it for a class i'm teaching. still as cool as ever.

Last Night by James Salter - to me, Salter's gotten to that point in his career where he's crafting sentences so perfectly and knows so well how to a construct a story that there's almost nothing one can do except sit back and be sort of impressed. he's a craftsmen. these stories are stories, exactly like stories, with a nice twist, a compression of language and emotion, a perfect character sketch, etc. he's also a writer of sex, of attraction between the sexes, and that's evident here again. still, it doesn't compare to A Sport and a Pasttime, but that's okay.

i read some other stuff, but that was longer ago now and i don't feel like i could write about it accurately at all. thank you. i'm going to read blake butler's Ever next. thank you.

fictionauting: a critique

2009-03-31T16:49:00.001-05:00

i have been on fictionaut for a couple weeks now. i have some thoughts about it. i want to say these thoughts in some concrete way, i don't know why. i think, mainly, fictionaut is an interesting space. overall i've enjoyed my time on the site and there seems to be a lot of very good, surprising writing.

i will start with things that make me uneasy.

the "favorite" tag has many possible problems, obvious ones:

1. stories become about competition (who can get the most favorites) and that seems strange. favoriting pushes a "standard" or "judgment" thing in very concrete form right to the front of the story, ie, right to the front of the piece of art. art isn't to be experienced like this. what i like about art, when i'm doing well, is that i don't 'judge' right away. i think there is something to be said for 'letting the art happen.'

2. there are logistical problems with the favoriting system. it could lead to Author A favoriting a story of Author B so that Author B comes to Author A's story and favorites it. in this scenario, everyone is masturbating on everyone else's stories.

3. should published stories be allowed to be "published" on fictionaut? i don't know. a nice answer to this might be something like "as long as the story is not in a current issue; it must be archived or in a back issue. " that seems fair. that way, the journal gets its visitors or purchases, etc. while journals' copyrights need to be respected, i do believe in the "art" more than the "journal" itself. while the journal is the vehicle - the tool for getting the art out there - it is the art inside that matters.

4. (personal) it became difficult (for a moment) for me to say "thank you" and "great story" a lot with any authenticity or sincerity even when i like a story. i was feeling worn out. i can make myself be authentically sincere and nice in an email occasionally to a stranger, but fictionaut almost forces me to be authentically sincere to strangers very often, which is not possible. there is also the strangeness of having a bunch of "noise" thrown at a story, reducing it in some way, i don't know how, i haven't thought far enough.

5. upon setting up my account, i thought, i'll read stuff that other people have read (i looked at "views") and then i'll "construct" my "favorites" list so i can have a sort of "complete" looking profile. but this got me wandering, what about stories that don't have as many views? so i began looking at those with less views. then i began wandering, what stories am i missing? i saw there are like 53 pages of people profiles on the site, so i'm probably seeing, what, a tenth of those stories, probably less? accessiblity issues seemed weird there. Fictionaut may need an archiving format.

now i will say the positive things; these positives are not meant to cancel out anything above, they are only either another way to view a thing or, i don't know, me just trying not to look at everything so negatively (the numbers don't correspond, sorry, i'm lazy, they should).

1. i'm not terribly sure it matters whether a story has been published or not. no, i don't think it matters. if it is art, it doesn't matter. if it is a thing that is supposed to be free and viewable and gettable, it doesn't matter. within the rules of publishing, it does matter, but in terms of art, it doesn't matter whether the art is in one journal or another or both.

2. "favoriting" stories/poems is also already happening in the online community, it just doesn't seem as odd because it's coming from individual web sites. people link stories on their blogs and have online zines on their blogs, etc, which is essentially the same as "favoriting." often many people talk about the same story or same book on their blog (for instance, a lot of people have talked nice things about Light Boxes, which we call reviews), so this could be viewed as many people "favoriting" this book. however, these "favorites" don't actually come on the book, as in Fictionaut. what does come on the book, however, are blurbs by other fairly famous writers. this is the same thing Fictionaut does with comments. the comments, i think, are like blurbs. still, all the reservations i have about favoriting are still valid above.

3. the word "competition" is scary in terms of Fictionaut. is Fictionaut using a "competition" based system to "choose" which art is "best"? yes it is. but this is what all journals do anyway, except readers don't get to see the losers, those rejected manuscripts. one of the more interesting things with Fictionaut (and not intended to be interesting in a malicious way) is that readers now get to see the losers, those not faved or commented on, etc.

4. i read this blog post searching for stuff about fictionaut. i like darby larson and what he says about things. his writing i like too. Abjective (the journal he edits) looks amazing and the writing is always staggering, so much so that it makes me feel like i should stop. but then i realize that i'm writing with a completely different set of aesthetic values. this is why i'll never send to Abjective, however much i enjoy it. anyway, he mentions that an aesthetic will arise in Fictionaut and this, in some way, will limit the site, ie, limit the type of writing on the site. i think this is true, but again it's no different than any online journal, with a set of editors, all with particular aesthetic values. darby's aesthetic values for Abjective, for instance, while not easily definable by me right now, do seem very clear to me. so, if Fictionaut begins to move toward a particular aesthetic, i don't see what is wrong this. this is what is supposed to happen. the system becomes self-organizing or else it'll fall apart. the worry is that an inferior aesthetic will dominate or an aesthetic that leaves out too much good writing. the real hope would be that the aesthetic somehow continually changes, slips to other types of stories, etc...

5. the other thing darby writes about is lack of critical analysis. i agree. there is a lack of critical analysis, but it doesn't appear, as of now, that that's what Fictionaut is about. i view fictionaut as an online self-publishing journal edited by writers. it allows writers like me to pick a story i like and favorite it, giving it attention or a comment, publishing it in my profile. so in this way, my profile becomes an aesthetic statement and my own sort of mini-journal, which is interesting. in this way, one can reject a dominant aesthetic if one arises. maybe. also, i have seen some good critical analysis, some really close reading and revision in comments. so there is potential for critical analysis.

that is all. i've spent way to much time writing this and not grading papers and i'm still hungover from two days ago. i feel like i'm taking this all way too seriously.

neo-neorealism.

2009-03-23T19:21:00.003-05:00

so tired of reading negative things that people say about so-called "realism" "traditional" writing or "narrative" driven writing. i've been reading a lot of blogs saying these things. this is my own fault, i know. so fucking tired of the inattentiveness of people calling things "realistic" or "narrative" driven when these texts are just as artificial as so-called surreal, magical realism, etc. fuck. fuck. i'm getting really tired of these hierarchies that are so broad and vague. i'm becoming less impressed with magical realism and surreal things because sometimes it feels like it's all i read online.

here is an article from AO Scott, helping reverse the above trend a little, from fb: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/22/magazine/22neorealism-t.html?_r=1. i have seen Old Joy and Half-Nelson. i would say Old Joy fits more as Neo-neo realism, where Half-Nelson is attempting, like The Wrestler, to be "gritty" or something. other films i think are examples of neo-neo realism are Junebug, Lars and the Real Girl, and probably stuff by David Gordon Green. as a side note, i read Jon Raymond's Livability (has Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy in it) and it's a good book of stories, but it's not great. the stories, in my opinion, are too loose and the language is not interesting enough. i did like what happened in the stories, but prose itself is plain and unsurprising. i feel that the movie Old Joy is better than the story because the film has a more surprising and unique style than the prose of the story.

i will be posting a long critique, with both good and bad things, about fictionaut soon, tonight.

newness

2009-03-20T09:39:00.002-05:00

i've gone from being obsessed with html giant to being obsessed with fictionaut. such a cool space. i have an invite left. does anyone want an invite? kenny? pat, did you get that first one?

andrew wyeth and others

2009-03-16T14:36:00.002-05:00

i don't know anything about painting or sculpting or other arts. i heard about andrew wyeth on the radio this last january. he had just died and they talked about him. i wanted to see his paintings. then i forgot about him. then emily and i went to greenville, sc. the city art museum happened to have an andrew wyeth gallery. i like his later paintings, like this of a wild dog. or this one of man in snow. or this one of a house. some of his earlier paintings, or many of them, seem very very good technically, but a little sentimental or something. i like his later ones and the ones where he lets the painting and brush just go, real loose, almost sloppy. some of the unfinished ones (i think they were unfinished) were really cool, too, and one of a fire.

also, this guy's (bob trotman) stuff was neat. he had made these enormous people carved out of wood, all in business suits, all looking like frankenstein's monster. it was creepy in a good way. i don't think just looking at the sculptures works, the physical space they took up was huge. i liked it.

i have a new thing at elimae. i like the ones called "creature," "working life," and the abrahams story with the long title.

Waltz With Bashir

2009-03-15T10:12:00.002-05:00

we watched this last night in the mall theatre. we were the only people in the theatre, as always, and the mall for whatever reason always seems to snag a new independent film. the animation is terrific. visually, the movie is hard not to look at. it's about the war in Lebanon from the early eighties (i believe i've got the years right) and deals with a man's loss of memory twenty years later. he was in the war, he knows, but he can't remember what he did. there are many sort of typical "war movie" scenes, ie, when the men aren't fighting, they're partying on the beach with their guns. this is almost expected; it has to be there. it can't be horror the whole way through. still, the movie is mostly very original, even dealing with war. what's most interesting to me, however, are how the past scenes of war are woven in with a present time narrative of our main character trying to regain his memory. we learn, quite quickly, that he's repressing his memory. we begin to see his psychology, along with the psychology of many of the soldiers (now former soldiers) around him. this is what i was most impressed with by the film, it's meditation on the unstable nature of memory (nothing new) along with how that unstable nature is influenced by a person's psychological make-up. the animation, then, done in a dream-like and exaggerated manner, fits with the notion of an unstable past. the film is moving, hard to look at at times, even though it's animated, and makes a move toward the end which i saw coming but which was powerful enough anyway. there are other trailers and scenes out there.

some online writing i've been liking

2009-03-06T08:37:00.008-06:00

this short by sean lovelace over at juked.

this story by matt bell, which probably everyone knows about, at storyglossia.

these poems by j. marcus weekley at prick of the spindle.

this thing by david erlewine at 971 menu. incidentally, 971 is now taking all lengths of stories. hooray. greg, i may send you something this summer if that's okay, if i have a thing to send. i won't be sad if you say no, don't worry. it won't mess up our friendship. i will feel a little hurt, understandably. you will feel, i hope, slightly guilty. we may stop visiting each others websites as much. i might turn to meditation, seeking to calm my pain. you may, understandably, renege your rejection and ask me to send again, the guilt too much. i may, confusedly, stop crying and say, Wha? really?

this thing at elimae by Nathan Neely.

and i almost really love this story by Larry Shapiro at anderbo, but i don't quite. though i did enjoy reading it, by the end i felt cheated or something. or perhaps maybe by the middle i began thinking, No, do something else, please do something else. it lacked surprise, but still, the read was nice and for whatever reason i couldn't stop, so that's something. also, it's longer than most of the stories listed here and strangely is the only 'traditional' story of the group (whenever i use 'traditional' or 'kafka-esque' or 'avant-garde' i think i'm using these terms in the broadest sense instead of attemping to really define what i'm saying in two or three paragraphs (though i believe i have done this in the past, giving my definition of 'avant-garde' and 'representationalism,' at least in terms of so-called 'minimalism'). there's a lot of stuff going on right now about the word 'experimental.' some not liking that word because it's too vague, broad, non-specific and sometimes limiting, etc. 'experimental' is set up as the opposite of 'traditional,' i think. but oddly, no one i've read lately seems to have a problem with the word 'traditional' (not that i've seen anyway) or for that matter 'linear' or even for that matter something like 'plot-driven,' which all seem equally vague and limiting to me, if you think about it; ie, 'plot-driven' stuff to me often seems more 'character-driven,' etc. my worry is terms like 'experimental' or 'avant-garde' are seen as not-good because they are non-specific, loose, limiting, but then no one seems to care when something is called 'traditional' or something. so, it feels like a 'slippery-slope;' if you're going to give up 'experimental' then you also have to give up 'traditional.' i'm fine with that. i think i like that, but there has to be awareness of both sides of the terminology. also, the discussion or dislike of 'experimental' shows maybe a bias toward this type of work (whatever it may be), where it is viewed as 'better' and not deserving of limitation in the same way 'traditional' work can be.) sorry for the digression, anderbo-story.

this 'kafka-esque' (ha ha) thing by Thomas Cooper at annalemma.

travelogue

2009-03-05T15:55:00.003-06:00

i hiked up buffalo mountain today, going up the eastern side first, then descending on the south-western part. i hadn't been up all the way since fall, when emily and i hiked with pat, then later with corey, then later with my sister and adam. the trails were wet and muddy, snow still camped in the shadows of trees, but it was warm, sun out, and i sweated a lot. i wanted to walk my mind clear. at the top, on one side there's a view of the city below, distant and pretend as a toy, and on the other side more mountains, cast in a haze of blue shadow. i brought up Basho's The Narrow Road to the Deep North. i read about him wanting to become a weather-beaten skeleton. that sounded good. then i hiked down. the streams rushed due to all the melting snow, and in one, i slipped on some ice and crashed into the water. somehow my ankle came out of it sore, but that ankle's always sore. i'm tired, dirty, and smell bad in a good way.

i think i'm failing on my blog, therefore in life/snowstorm

2009-03-03T12:04:00.005-06:00

this may only be a perception. i haven't posted for some time. i feel as far away from my blog as i am from the moon. like something magical and massive has left me and is slowly passing me by. i may be failing in any number of interpersonal relationships as well.

also, i've been making very bad decisions. on sunday evening, i drove through a snowstorm, a drive which normally takes two hours. it took four hours. i saw cars and children abandoned on the side of the road. the children were eating snow, trying to survive. they had spears and deer carcass. they had become cunning. at one point, it was impossible to see more than twenty feet, it was snowing so hard. everyone going up the mountains had pulled over, except me and a semi and a few other cars, all following the semi. the semi was a beacon of hope to many cars that night, i believe. the news said one inch in asheville; it was more like four or five - i don't feel my decision to drive was wholly my fault, though i may be deluding myself.

when i got into the tennessee mountains, where the traffic always thins out, my car and three other cars headed up the first big mountain hill, going twenty miles an hour, fishtailing on the snow. sadly and frighteningly, the semi was gone. there was no salt down on the roads and no snow plows had been through. we made it up the mountain, then when we reached the peak, to start the descent, two of the cars just stopped and turned on their emergency blinkers. i felt the stopped cars waving at me like, Good luck, you're gonna die. i felt myself look metaphorically at the other car next to me like, Well, fuck it, let's do it and die together stupidly. his/her car went first then i went. i tapped my breaks the whole way down. it seemed to take forever. i kept thinking, I'm going to swerve off the road and die. i will be found at the bottom of a gorge, dead in my car with a tree branch gouged through my stomach and a policeman will say, Moron, to his friend, who will say, Let him be, Scott, he's dead after all. i really did think things like this. then i would think, Focus on driving or you're going to die.

i fishtailed down the mountain, but i was only going like ten miles an hour, so i didn't plummet off a mountain edge, happily. emily was calling hospitals along 26 looking for me. i learned two things: 1) driving in a snowstorm is hard work, don't do it, turn around or stop, you will lose parts of your life anyway due to stress, and 2) a cell phone would have been helpful. i may need to get a cell phone no matter how much i hate them. my neck hurt afterward and still hurts today. this has been a completely factual re-telling.

there are some interesting things happening on html giant. i think some people disliked the post, but i thought it was rather interesting and i had sort of been feeling the same way.

i have a hundred papers on my desk, hooray

2009-02-23T18:32:00.002-06:00

and the economy, i mean, i look around and see the economy, out drinking, not doing what it should be doing, a sluggish little economy. bastard. the economy, whew. saw it spending money on strippers the other day and i'm like, okay, we all need a little time off, but financially speaking, not the wisest there. i don't know. i'm going to be grading papers for a while. goodbye.

today i heard a guy yelling into his cell phone

2009-02-16T09:37:00.006-06:00

i was walking to class today. it was sunny, cold, windy out, and there was a guy sitting in his car screaming, You haven't changed. You're not capable of change. If you changed, I don't know what I'd do. then he took his cell phone and banged it on his steering wheel three times. by this point, i had stopped walking and was pretending to look at a tree so that i could hear him. after banging the cell phone on the steering wheel, he said in a calmer voice, You still there?

i saw The Wrestler. it's as good as everyone says. the story isn't necessarily new, but it's effective and Rourke's performance really is terrific. also, bruce springstreen knows how to write affecting songs for movies. good job bruce springsteen.

i had a pork poblano this weekend that was amazing. i'll probably now want to go to this restaurant to eat for several weeks in a row, at least once a week, possibly twice week, until i get tired of eating pork poblanos.

one of our cats is really into The Empire Strikes Back.

Shane Jones' Light Boxes

2009-02-12T19:06:00.002-06:00

i read this yesterday in a couple of hours. it's 167 pages, a squat book with much white space, and a good textual design that reminds me of Barthelme's Snow White. though it's 167 pages, it's probably around 20 K words. the story is a fantasy/fairy-tale type thing, though that doesn't really do it justice. it's a dark fairy-tale, and the imagination on each page is both striking and subtle. the prose is clear, precise, and rarely goes for more than it can acheive. though on some occassions, i did wonder why some lines weren't cut. some things, dialogue especially, felt out of place or forced or something - in general, these were small things, easy to let slide. the story is about February, that grey and gloomfilled month, which has descended on a particular town for over year. children have disappeared. flight is no longer possible. and sunlight, like warmth, is gone. the townspeople decide to wage war against February. they are led by Thaddeous and Selah and their daughter, Bianca. what unravels is a not a fight against cold, but a struggle against sadness and loss. there's even a fun metafictive element. i won't reveal more. i really liked the book. it's moving, sometimes sad, sometimes dark, but possibly the thing i liked most about the book was its warmness. the warmness i think comes from two things: the author's imaginative world is so complete unto itself that it feels nice to live inside that world for a short time; the second thing is that the characters, while only roughly sketched in that fairy tale way, are characters you want to see win. even the dark character, the bringer of sadness, February himself, you feel sympathy for. and of course, in the end, Light Boxes has nothing to do with a fairy tale world.

jon raymond will oldham old joy wendy and lucy

2009-02-09T21:18:00.002-06:00

i saw Old Joy it seems like a couple years ago. maybe it was only a year ago, i don't remember. it has Will Oldham in it and i saw primarily because i listen to his music all the time, so i wanted to see him in a movie. the film was very quiet. two men, friends in some past, meet again and go camping for a weekend. there is nothing left between them. they have trouble talking about anything openly or spontaneously. one is sort of a liberal, domestic type, the other played by Will Oldham is a kind of hippie-loafer. there's an odd moment of physical contact when they get to some hot springs they've been hiking toward. the moment is awkward and strange, but not without real connection. then it's gone. apparently this was a story by Jon Raymond, from his book Livability. i never knew this. i just bought his book of stories. and now emily just told me there is an excellent-looking new movie, also based on one of Raymond's stories, called Wendy and Lucy, which also has Will Oldham in it. these quiet films, with a lot of nature/city play are always ones i feel 'closest' to and always ones i seem to watch with care.

mild-paranoia and book purchase

2009-02-09T10:13:00.007-06:00

Light Boxes by Shane Jones

Last Days by Brian Evenson

The Loser by Thomas Bernhard

Ever by Blake Butler

A Day, A Night, Another Day, Summer by Christine Schutt (google book)

The Way Through Doors by Jesse Ball

also: a good writing by Greg Napp on elimae.

i didn't have enough money to really buy these books, but i don't care. i wanted new things to read. i'm excited about all of them.

i'm beginning to believe the swedish lad i pass on the way to school who wears addidas outfits everyday does so in jest.

the teacher who teaches next to my classroom, i believe, stands next to my door and listens when he lets class out early.

three pot-bellied men with enormous voices walk down my street far too often to be anything other than 'troublemakers.'

i have decided that i will snap a photograph of the swedish-addidas lad, then when he asks what the hell i think i'm doing, say, Just snapping me a photograph of that beautiful mountain, friend.

i think there has to be a way to write and not care. i don't think you can write and care about getting published. in the same way you can't write and think about what you're doing. you have to be able to write and just let it happen. this, amazingly, takes 'years of practice.' but my feelings about stories is that they have to be effortless, or seem to be effortless. anything that's overly written bothers me right now. i have hard time reading some things because the sentences seem over-crafted, like each word is a stone that had to be sanded and remade. that's a terrible use of figurative language.

february Hobart

2009-02-08T09:36:00.002-06:00

is live. there are good writings over there. thanks to matt bell for putting together a very cool issue. i really like the picture with my story. it makes me laugh every time i look at it.

i no longer have a fever.

i have not had coffee in over a week.

i've lost between 7 and 10 pounds.

i washed all my clothes and sheets so that i won't reinfect myself. i'm not sure this is even possible or necessary.

i woke up on friday night sweating so much that i had soaked the sheets through a shirt i was wearing. i think that's when the fever 'broke.'

interestingly, amoxicillin only costs four us dollars.

decongestants really do have a purpose.

i'm still having a 'hard time' remembering things. like emily played a song last weekend and i said, That sounds a little like Elliot Smith. and she said, It is Elliot Smith. that happened to me all week. i think it's evidence that the fever killed parts of my brain.

weird fever

2009-02-02T20:52:00.003-06:00

today i got home from teaching to sleep because i was having a fever. someone gave me sickness. my students come up to me and say things like, I'm sick today. i have to tell them to stop doing this. so i got home after class at 12 or so and went to sleep. i had a fever of 101, not too bad, but i felt bad. anyway, i went to sleep. then i heard loud pounding. i woke up, i don't know how long i had been asleep. i was very confused when i woke up. the room was yellow? that made me worried. why was the room yellow? the banging sound went on. i went to my front door, which leads to a hallway where there is a main door, an entrance to the duplex where i live. a man was standing there. i was very confused. he was standing not at my door, just in the hallway, which was yellow-tinted. You can come in whenever, I said. he stared at me. I mean, I'll just leave the door open, I said. Then you can come in and do whatever needs done. I think I have a leak. I'm not feeling well, so just come in. he stared at me. i went and sat down on my bed, leaving my door open. after a few minutes, i realized i shouldn't have left my door open because my cat could get out. i went to the front door again and asked the man if he had seen a black cat. No, he said. he held a hammer; i had not seen it before. he started banging away on the front door to the duplex. So you don't want in my apartment? I said. he said no. a few minutes after that, i got on a bunch of clothes and went out in the snow and yelled for my cat. i found him an hour later hiding under the sink. the hammering was scaring him. then i went to sleep again.

stop-alienating-goal/good independent publishing houses

2009-01-31T09:25:00.005-06:00

i need to stop writing alienating and sarcastic posts so often (i guess what i mean is: awp was fun when i went). this is a goal of mine for a while. in order to achieve that a little, i'm writing a post now about the independent book publishers that i like or that i would like to try to get a book with in some future. i am not including university presses in this list:

dzanc books: i have Roy Kesey's All Over from this press. i want to read more from this place.

featherproof books: the website design is good here and i feel like my own stuff could possibly 'fit' here. i have no way of substantiating this because i have not read a book from this place, but they do have 'free online' books which is really nice of them and nice for their readers. there are good titles here, like Boring Boring Boring Boring (their might be another Boring in there) and This Will Go Down On Your Permanent Record. i have not read anything yet.

calamari press: this place is publishing Blake Butler's Ever. i've read a lot of Blake Butler's stuff online and i like it a lot. i'm going to order this book soon. i've heard about the press many times, but i don't remember right now what other authors are on it. probably many good ones.

melville house: i have read two books by tao lin (BED and EEEEE EEE EEEE), which are both books i liked a lot, and one by Stephen Dixon, called Meyer, which is good and feels like the interior design is better. they also do a thing where they take half-forgotten novellas and publish them as individual books. i like this novella idea a lot. i think novella's should be more 'popular,' considering our short 'attention spans.' i would read a 100 page novella any day over a five-hundred page novel.

milkweed editions: i have one called Montana, 1948 from them, but have not read it. it's a more traditional feeling press to me. i have read like the first twenty or so pages of Montana, 1948 and it almost reads like non-fiction. i don't know, emily liked the 'story' of it.

open city books: i have two books from them, one by Sam Lypsite called Venus Drive and another by Sam Braumbaugh called Goodbye, Goodness. the Sam Lypsite book of stories is fun, but i have not been able to get past the first twenty or so page of the other one.
coffee house press:

FC2: this is an 'experimental' press. i would never send my stuff to them, but i still like them a lot and respect what they're doing, even if i don't particularly agree with the aesthetic or whatever. i have several of Stephen Graham Jones books. i think i've mentioned Demon Theory on here before (that's through MacAdam Cage, another good press), but he writes all kinds of stuff. his sentences remind me of Pynchon and his 'images' or 'scenes' remind me a lot of Pynchon, too. but he does it in a more condensed way, which i appreciate. also, Brian Evenson's book of stories The Wavering Knife was very good from this press; it felt like updated and crazier and less-neat/contrived Poe.

Graywolf Press: i have a book of stories by Benjamin Percy called Refresh, Refresh. i think both Graywolf and FC2, while independent, are bigger than some of these other presses. that's just a feeling i have, not substantiated in any way. the Percy stories are good. i feel he is an updated Richard Ford, like Rock Springs got updated some, maybe. i also think his stories are almost too perfect, too neat, but again, that's a difference of taste, probably.

lets do a freewrite and get back into our writing space okay

2009-01-29T16:26:00.004-06:00

i'm not going to awp

i'm not a real writer i don't think

i think what happens at awp is real writers 'get together' and talk about writing and conference with each other

they do writing 'exercises' i think

then they get drunk

we can conference with each other then get drunk alone

hey, write something that's really wild, you know

some of your guys's stuff is out there, i mean, it's really interesting, but it's out there

let's empower each other to keep at it

if somebody really nails a piece, i think it's okay to tell them, you know, you really nailed that one

that one was the field goal that one it all, man

let's share the rough stuff

it's all about the emotion you know

wow bro i've really changed alot but that's just life ya know

2009-01-28T07:35:00.005-06:00

my car has a ball-joint 'problem' and leaks oil

i am now lactose intolerant

two of our cats have tapeworm, we have not seen the worms yet

one of our cats has a urinary tract infection, he pees alot

another one of our cats has a serious drinking problem

i bought some new hot sauce and 'can't wait' to use it

oh man

well i guess everyone has their things in life they have to deal with, right?

literary links writing update near-contagious depression

2009-01-24T11:52:00.000-06:00

in the fall, i sent out queries to agents, seeing what sort of response i would get, not taking it seriously too much. i got rejected within two weeks by almost all of them. so i decided to send the manuscript to one independent publishing place to see what kind of response i would get. that was like four months ago and i got the rejection today. it was personalized, i guess because it has to be, and was nice enough. it said nice things about the collection. but that doesn't matter. i am now retiring all the stories that were in that collection except maybe two. that collection was called Marathon, Ohio. the collection, the book, the stories except two, are retired. a couple of the stories in that collection are linked on the right. i don't know if i will take those links down yet or not (my blog would look sadder and more depressed), i haven't decided. but i'm retiring them. *retired officially.*

since november, i've written five new stories: "Foreign," "In Japan," "Sympathy," "Dana's Sister," and a new one i just finished, called, i think, "House Guests," though i don't like that title much. these will compose a new collection, which will be called i think the title of this blog. i will also include a short thing coming out in Hobart soon. these will 'take the world by storm.' it's a good idea to stay friends with me or try to become my friend. i'm already thinking about what i'm going to say in my letterman interview. i'm also pleased, because by the time this book peaks at 1 million sales, Conan will have the new late night slot and i'll be able to display my humor, sarcasm, and cynicism, yet also a deep sense of compassionate detachment on his show.

i wrote most of a novel this summer, called Meridian. i've looked back over it and i don't think it is tight enough. it feels good for maybe the first sixty pages, then it gets too sloppy or lazy. it is currently 150 pages. i would like to get it down to eighty or ninety and have it be a novella and include it in this new collection. the collection would be around two hundred pages, near 50 k. all the stories in this new collection, as opposed to the one now in retirement, are more sarcastic, cartoony, and mean. they are also better, i think, but that has no objective reality, it's just a feeling i have. nothing in the outside world has confirmed this, the outside world being people who publish things. the true nature of this post is to express great concern, depression, and self-pity. these things will be cleaned away by the time letterman and conan want to do their shows.

here are some good links i've come across lately that have to do with writing. i will put these over on the right soon:

interview with Joy Williams.

essay by John Barth about minimalism. thank you greg.

article by Gary Lutz on the sentence in The Believer. the only thing i dislike about the article is that he doesn't mention william gass. if you're going to talk about the sentence, you have to talk about william gass. you have to at least mention him. while lutz's article is really good and i agree with most of it, he never addresses the problem of having great, honed, and narcotic sentences but also leaving the reader a little cold, emotionless. the names brought up in the article seem to be the typical names. gass is the best sentence writer, and the best writer about the sentence there is. his opening to Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans kills this article a little. it's still worth reading though.

wait, wait. yes.

article by Kenneth Harshbarger about New Orleans book fair.

Doubt

2009-01-19T09:28:00.002-06:00

i don't know how to write about this movie except in complete cliches because it is that good. i typically feel sick when i hear someone say 'that's the best movie i've seen in forever' or some similarly cliched phrase, but this is what i've felt and feel about Doubt. this may be because i was raised Catholic, played the role of alter boy dressed in robes and watched Father Michael as the pastor draped the Priestly vestments. the vestments are placed on the priest in order, starting with the amice, ending with the surplice and sometimes biretta. the vestments are beautifully ornamented and opulent robes. during mass, i held the heavy gold-plated bible, my back to the congregation, as Father Michael opened the book to the page he wanted, held his hands up, and then read the gospel. i brought the cruets of water and wine for the priest so that he could pour them into the chalice. i watched as Father Michael put the eucharist away in the tabernacle at the end of the mass. but along with these things, which all altar boys do, i saw other things. Father Michael ran five miles every morning before the first mass. he came into the church sweating and smelling. i saw him and the deacon laughing, joking with one another, then becoming priests again when a lay person walked by. i was invited into Father Michael's small house near St. Peters, which was like any other house. at one point, i think, i wanted to be a priest. i no longer go to church, am no longer catholic, but still have a deep respect for Catholicism, when it is tolerant and sane (which, in my experience, it can be).

possibly a spoiler in here, though i've left out big things:

Doubt is a movie that never lets the audience see directly into the mind of it's characters. we never get to see what Father Flynn really thinks or really has done. we never get to hear a voice-over from Sister James. and though we seem to have Sister Aloysius understood, we do not. thus, it is fitting that the movie begins with one altar boy. we are that altar boy for the rest of the movie, watching things happen in the church that the lay people do not see: where the vestments are kept; what a priest eats; what the nuns do in spare time. but, like an altar boy, we never get into the mind of the characters - we simply observe, and this is what makes Doubt one of the finest films i've seen in a long, long time. it makes us create along with it.

the film is essentially a power-struggle between Father Flynn and Sister Aloysius. Sister James is caught up in this struggle. she reports to Sister Aloysius some suspicious behavior between a student named Donald Miller (a black boy) and Father Flynn. immediately Sister Aloysius believes there is something sinister happening. this is the question the film wants us to ask: as an observer who is priveliged, who gets to see more than a lay person, but does not get to see everything, do we believe that Father Flynn is innocent? or do we believe that Father Flynn has committed some vile act, most likely sexual assualt? Meryl Streep plays the conservative, rigid, and sometimes cruel, sometimes compassionate Sister Aloysius so well it hurts to watch her. Philip Seymour Hoffman plays the more progressive, kind (and possibly gay) Father Flynn not like he is a priest, but like he is flawed person who also is a man of God. Amy Adams's Sister James is an innocent, but also is developing into a strong nun, and she does well alongside Hoffman and Streep. there are three scenes in the film that are so strong i was surprised they were all in the same movie.

all that said, this isn't a movie where anything happens. in fact, almost nothing happens. so, if you like a movie with stuff happening, don't see it. this is about characters. it is about the struggle between doubt and certainty, and it a beautifully conceived and beautifully shot movie. also, if you're looking for a religious message, you will not get one: it is an utterly human movie. i will not give away more.

this is serious

2009-01-14T14:53:00.003-06:00

edit: minimalism

2009-01-14T09:07:00.004-06:00

i am having to do a lot of things for teaching, which is why i have not posted, responded to emails, or finished any stories this week. i'm teaching an online class which is sort of making me dead with all the preparation and getting everything linked and stuff. this comes at a good time then: here is a sort of response/further-development of the minimalism post i made. i like this because i think it clears up a lot about what i was saying about 'avant-garde' and then also helps to better explain the difference between 'representational' writing and realism. this comes from Greg Napp, editor of the very cool online site 971 Menu. coming up i'm going to make a post about the online literary places i visit with maybe like a short critique or review and 971 is included. here's Greg's post:

Representational work knows it's representational. Realistic work doesn't, or won't admit it. It goes to all sorts of lengths to hide the fact. Many devices are developed in order to get around or between the realistic rules.

Representational work realizes that it doesn't make a shit whether the organ is made of cats or pipes. In fact, it's funny if the thing represented (organ) is made of something like cats.

Realistic work can only make cat-organs if someone is insane or dreaming,or, oddly enough, a wizard or prophet.

(sidebar: this is why i can't get into serious discussions about mainstream science fiction or fantasy--people try to argue that it's representational when it's clearly just fantasy realism--your zombie movies..hmm, i can only imagine fairly low-grade discussions about most of those, but I'm no aficionado--sorry we never got to talk about them more (which doesn't mean I want to do so, except over beers)--as I said,
sidebar).

Both your representational and your avant-garde minimalism are their own meaning. The Barth essay, which largely characterizes minimalism by its economy of expression, seems to overlook the fact that realistic work tends to look for meaning outside of itself (or to provide meaning to the world outside of itself). Unfortunately, what it generally finds (and provides), no matter how many tropes it dispenses with, is more tropes, more myths, and so the search seems a bit funny, in a tragic way.

What you're calling representational(-ism) is its own meaning--or its meaning arises out of the play between the signifier and the signified.

The upshot is this:

Realism uses signifiers as if they were scientific instruments, treating them as though they were intrinsically linked by concrete rules to their signifieds, at least within the context of the individual work, in order to manipulate signs (meanings).

Representational-ism admits (or ignores--you can see that realism can never ignore it, only deny it) the fact of its representational nature, after the author's having internalized the notion that there is no intrinsic (and certainly not 1:1) link between word and object/concept, by deploying its signifiers in such a way as to create an emptied sign.

In Southern Gothic, we can talk about what a house represents, what a kitchen represents, but this, oddly enough, makes it a realistic story, and not a representational one in the sense I think you mean. You mean it re-presents the house, or presents it again, I take it. The realistic work treats the signifier "house") as if it were the signified (building in which I live), and the realistically-circumscribed author sees the world as signified by the work or sees the work as signified by the world, depending on the direction he's thinking at the moment--this is where we get life imitating art imitating life, because the practice creates a sign that is essentially a feedback loop--the sign 'house'/the building I live in becomes a form feeding on itself.

In a representational postmodern piece, "house" can signify anything and anything can signify house. The chickens had had their long houses clipped, so they couldn't make it over the fence. I drank my house dry.

The link is broken, the connections ground away. The house sign, comprised of the signifier "house" and the concept of the place in which I live, is now empty--it is a form without content other than its formfulness, form-ness or its formation/formulation whatever. When you read it, it crackles at you, because you're getting not a conduit from some reaction in the author's mind (best case--worst case, some long-ago reaction borrowed by this author and served to you cold), you're getting THE reaction (chemical-like). This is your avant-garde, it seems to me.

What you've here labeled representational(-ism), I think, takes this emptied sign and feeds it back into the realism machine. This is where the minimalism comes in. It seems more complex than a simple matter of economy. The minimalist, it seems to me at the moment, intentionally avoids feeding the loop. Economy helps, but there's no reason work can't be verbose, even downright discursive, and still work outside the signs. I think the quality of the economy is more telling than the quantity.

Example:
She turned suddenly, sensing the man behind her.
VS
She turned. The man was there.

The economy here is not in words, but something else. The first one, in its melodramatic fashion, plays into any number of tropes and is scarred. The second less so--it gives the feedback loop a pass, for the most part, short-circuits it, even. I'm not saying the second one is all that great, but it would stand a far better chance of surviving a CW workshop.

So that's my take on what you're calling representational minimalism VS realism. (I've no quibbles with your terminology--just making sure throughout to keep what you said in front of me (don't want to get confused with a more general definition of representation).)

I'm pretty sure I've left some loose ends, but I'm tired and don't feel like rereading for the fifth time. I'm also sure that I'm overlooking any number of things. I've also gotten some things wrong, no doubt. Best case, I just resaid things already better said. Straighten me out, won't you?

two kinds of minimalism

2009-01-05T15:14:00.008-06:00

in a very general way, i think there are two kinds of so-called minimalism. i don't think they have names, so i'll call them 'representational' and 'avant-garde'. the second one, i think, comes from the work of Gordon Lish and those influenced by him. the first one seems more like 'realism,' but it is not really realism, it just seems that way.

1. 'avant-garde' minimalism: concerned with language, so that the content of the story is the language of the story. or, another way of saying it, it is the language of the story which draws attention to itself, to how words do things and how sentences get put together. therefore, in these type of stories, sometimes sentences are very strange, purposefully. the author is writing a 'thing' here, or 'making art' in an 'avant-garde' way. because the language of the thing draws attention to itself, or is 'primary,' plot or stuff happening is secondary, or nonexistent. the reader is not drawn into 'plot', but into language. this is basically William Gass, but with the label of minimalism slapped onto it. i consider this to be 'high' art or something. (edit: probably a kind of formalism).

i consider these authors, mostly recent, to be: Gordon Lish, Diane Williams, Lydia Davis, Gary Lutz, Sam Lipsyte (a little), early (Lish edited) Carver. there are some online people who maybe do similar things, who could be considered 'avant-garde' minimalists, and i would say Kim Chinquee, Tao Lin, Deb Olin Unferth are these people, among others. i think this is a big trend in some online venues. possibles are: Amy Hempel (more plotty) and Ben Marcus. it seems important to say that these types of stories are often shorter than ten pages, and even more times, are shorter than 1,000 words, making them very good for online things.

here are a couple examples of what i'm talking about:

Diane Williams

Gary Lutz

here also is a brief snippet of interview with Lutz, rehashing the same thing Gass (i think) once said about film.

i think it's clear from that brief thing of the Lutz interview that more 'plot-driven' writing, like a love between step-siblings, is frowned upon.

2. 'representational' minimalism: concerned with characters. psychological and emotional depth looked for in the best of these stories. plot is there, but is secondary (sort of) to the emotional development of the characters. language is both representational and more quietly a form of content, in that it 'represents' a bleak and doomed kind of everydayness (the avant-garde minimalists, i would argue, do not address this because their content (ie, their language) cannot make the reader feel this bleak type of thing). what makes these minimalists 'representational' and not 'realistic' is hard to describe, but i think it's about how characters are made, move and develop on the page in a world just slightly off, more amplified, and more lost or strange and a little more 'cartoony', than our own.

i consider these writers to be Joy Williams, Frederick Barthelme, Ann Beattie, Amy Hempel (again, sort of), later Carver, Jane Bowles (i won't go back further), Nicholson Baker, Mary Robison, Michael Knight - i would not consider Alice Munro or authors like that to fit here. i'm not sure who online practitioners of this might be. i think this might be a dying thing, where 'avant-garde' takes over. there is a Barthelme story and Knight story over on the right for examples of this. an interesting tactic, i think, of some of these types of stories is 'fantasy fulfillment,' in which the story allows room for a fantasy of small scale to happen, as in Driver. these people are/were doing new things, too, but i think they get a little cast out or shadowed by more blantantly 'avant-garde' writing.

3. i like both kinds of writing, though i prefer the second group. Joy Williams a lot. what i think annoys me is that the second group is perceived as more traditional and therefore, somehow, less artistic or creative or something (as in Lutz interview). i don't think i have anything else to say except that i dislike such a perception.

i'm probably going to stop posting such long things for a while and do shorter posts.

a day when i finish a story

2009-01-04T09:55:00.005-06:00

6:45 emily goes to work. i say, Turn off the light.

9:45 i get up, bathroom, shower.

9:50 make coffee.

10:00 take dog out while coffee is going. dog pees but doesn't poop and i tell him, slightly annoyed because i don't want to take him out later, Dude, you need to poop, my friend. he looks up at me blankly and wags his tail.

10: 10 go back inside, drink one cup of coffee fast. check my four emails. look at clock and see it is after 10 and tell myself i will get up earlier tomorrow. i go in bedroom and set alarm for 8:30.

10:20 open word file of story i'm going to finish. minimize word file. read literary blogs and get internet literary news. maybe look and see how a basketball team is doing. get another cup of coffee.

10:30 go to bathroom, with coffee. come back out and think that enough time has passed for me to check email again. maximize word file for story i'm going to write last scene for. see that it is now after 10:30 and now i'm really going to get some serious writing done. finish coffee

10: 40 read the first couple paragraphs of the story. get a really good idea for a blog post. go check my blog. check statcounter. see that i have a new 'international' hit. start post, but tell myself i can only start it and save, that i have to finish it later because i have to finish the story first.

10:50 read opening of story again. wonder what emily will think of the first couple paragraphs. try to pretend that i have never read the story before and read it like that. think that she will basically be blown away by it. tell myself i'm just joking but know that i'm sort of serious. think about how rick barthelme might read the opening. think that he'll be pleased and possibly drinking a diet coke. open some older stories and try to read them like i have never read them before, pretending i am either emily or rick barthelme.

11:00 think about what we have to eat for lunch. think that i could probably make one more cup of coffee because i feel that the first two cups might be wearing off a little. go to end of story. write a paragraph, delete some sentences, re-write it. do this for about an hour. decide that it's pretty much finished.

12:00 eat some chex mix/chips with tomatillo salsa/muffin. think that i need to eat a high fiber vegetable at some point in the day.

12:15 play ping-pong for about twenty minutes. pet the cats.

12:25 make a sandwich, consisting of bagel, turkey, cheese, and feel a little depressed about everything.

12:50 don't know what to do. think that my stories are terrible. think that my novel, that i stopped working on because i was writing a lot of stories, is terrible. realize that the coffee has fully worn off. get a little sleepy.

1:15 question my existence. wonder if i should go to help people in a foreign country. wonder if i would've been better living with basho. look out the window, see the trees without leaves, and feel like basho. really want to wander around.

1:45 take dog out.

2:00 tell myself that i will go on a run at 3. wonder what we'll have for dinner. read a book, some chapters or a couple stories.

3:00 get sleepy. decide that i can't run now, that i have to wait. tell myself to close my eyes and just take a short nap.

4:30 wake up. see that it's near dark out. hear emily's car pulling up alongside the house. get computer out, open some stuff, and make it look like i've been working.

5:00 say that i've just finished a story, would she mind reading it while i go on a run? force the computer on her in a subtle way, by saying that she really needs to look at this hilarious video.

5:10 emily asks my why i'm not going on a run. tell her it's a little too cold and dark out. sort of wander around the house, petting cats or eating something. when she makes a noise like hmm, say, What part are you at? if she laughs, say, What part are you at? she asks me to please leave her alone.

5:15 sit down next to her and pretend to read a book, but sort of look over at the computer to see which page she's on and try to gauge her facial reactions.

5:20 try very hard to be quiet and not say anything.

5:25 get annoyed that the phone rang.

5:30 emily says she's finished and that she liked it, she thought it was good. ask what was good? get a sort of vague answer. ask what she thought about a certain character. was he convincing? yes. was his psychology, you know, complex and everything? yeah, i saw that. good, i was going for that. ask what she thought about the prose. she says, Well, what about it? it was clear. clear's good, i say. was it, you know, interesting? yeah, i was interested. say, quickly and annoyedly that she isn't being critical enough and that if she doesn't want to be critical then that's fine. rolls her eyes.

6:00 ask her what she wants for dinner. she doesn't care. ask her what she really thinks of the story.

6:15 ask her what she really thinks of the story.

6:30 pick up dinner. eat some food. get full. say that i was just hungry, my bad for being annoyed or forceful or sort of a dick. she says that that's okay, do i want to play ping-pong? i say sure. i say, can i ask you just one more question about like the descriptions?

low-media with mid-level-emotional-content post

2009-01-03T10:56:00.003-06:00

we went to a place called edisto island in south carolina. i got almost nothing done there, but i ate a lot of good food and saw people i hadn't seen for a while and that was good. the natural progression of all things is for them to get further away, i think, and to become apart, and then to return. this is evidenced by rivers and probably, i think, by moths. this is why moth balls are necessary in certain climates. i have other things to say but i don't know the words for them yet. all things written on this blog should be viewed as mildly sarcastic in an attempt to combat deeper feelings of lostness sometimes. but right now i feel full of coffee and pleased because none of the cats crapped on the floor, or if they did the lady who looked after them did a fine job. thank you lady.

i (or we) received the following material possessions, some of which might be helpful to the soul:

Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre
Chilly Scenes of Winter by Ann Beattie
East Bay Grease by Eric Miles Williamson (on a rec from Stephen Graham Jones, an excellent writer who I haven't linked to yet - if you like horror, you should read Demon Theory).
The Brothers by Frederick Barthelme (a hardback, signed copy from a used bookstore).
a Nintendo Wii, with Mario Kart
three sweaters

story with pictures

2008-12-23T11:12:00.006-06:00

a friend of mine used to make these, but with good prints. i'm not a photographer. click on the pictures to read the text.

christmas bowling indie lit interview juked john wang

2008-12-22T21:03:00.006-06:00

there is no one in my house right now, except for the dog, and six cats. they are sort of boring me. when i drive down streets right now i put on the saddest and quietest music i can think of (bon iver right now) and watch the other people doing things. i have nowhere to be and nothing to do, therefore heavy traffic is not bothering me. emily is gone to various places in Texas, i hope she doesn't get lost. yesterday i put bookmarks for an author i like (stephen graham jones) in a barnes and noble. today i went back and the bookmarks were gone. nothing i do right now leaves any mark, except for about an hour. i want to leave a thing that will last longer than that, that someone will look at and think, Thanks, or, Yes, or, No, or, Asshole. the appropriate soundtrack for my current mood is the sound of a fan or something like a dripping, leaky sink. the following video represents the appropriate gift for a poet:

christmas bowling indie lit poet from alan rossi on Vimeo.

also: i am reading Breaking and Entering by Joy Williams. i am wishing it was summer.

also: there is an interview with good friend John Wang (Juked) on Matt Bell's website. click on the title of this post to get to it.

authentic

2008-12-21T12:57:00.004-06:00

these are three chile rellenos i made. the little ones were spicier. the inside had a queso blanco, and grilled onion with tomatoes and cayenne and cumin. there was a ranchero sauce to put on top. pat and emily and i ate them and then played ping-pong. the next day i ate a bunch of them and had to drive emily to the airport the next day after that. i felt unpleasant during that drive.

life's hard, real hard

2008-12-16T13:54:00.001-06:00

we live with a lot of animals (in monotone without emotion) from alan rossi on Vimeo.

yates williams williams gass more please

2008-12-10T17:06:00.004-06:00

a friend of mine (http://patrick.hub-bub.com/) talked about wanting fiction to read for his blog. so i want to post what i'm reading because all i read is fiction, except for online poems.

Collected Stories of Richard Yates. I don't even know if it's called this, but it has both Eleven Kinds of Loneliness and Liars in Love, as well as uncollected stories. i like his clear, simple style. his sentences aren't 'adorned' but they are clear and, i don't even know how to talk about this. you just have to read Richard Yates' stories.

Taking Care and Breaking and Entering by Joy Williams. i like the stories in Honored Guest a lot, except maybe two. i liked parts of The Quick and the Dead, but it seemed more prose-y and affected. i've wanted to read Breaking and Entering for a long time, just because the book sounds like something i want to do. these two people live in other people's houses on the beach when the other people are gone. i like being in other people's houses. i like house sitting. i don't like stealing, i just like being in some other place i don't know anything about. it reminds me of that Carver story, whose name i can't remember.

Finding a Form by William Gass. maybe it's Habitations of the Word i want to re-read. one of his. the one with "Representation and the War for Reality" in it. i'll have to look. i think his essays are better than his books, except for In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and Omensetter's Luck. parts of Cartesian Sonata are fun to read. Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife is an interesting object. i'm either not smart enough for The Tunnel or something.

i will then try to read one Diane Williams book and try not to stop writing altogether.

His rock music station

2008-12-09T22:32:00.003-06:00

between Johnson City and Spartanburg, i listen to the radio. i'm tired of a lot of my cd's and usually, when it's late when i'm driving, there is jazz on npr, so i'll listen to that, there's also a good reggae-type station, and sometimes there's the BBC news, which i pretty much listen to the for the accents. sometimes i turn my lights on and off through the mountains. one time i saw a dog-like creature, possibly a fox, but bigger. it was dragging a carcass off the highway. then sometimes i listen to a station called His Radio. as in Jesus' Radio or God's Radio. i listen to this, thinking that if i ever see one of the people who do His Radio, i will capture them, then i will slowly torture them by blind-folding them, numbing parts of their body and telling them that i'm cutting off chunks of their flesh. then i will fry those chunks in a delicious tasting olive oil and garlic pan-saute, tossing that with linguine and a bit of white wine and squeeze of lemon, flashing all that in the pan, and serving it with intense laxative and secular music on, so that while they eat their seared flesh, they will say (thinking of God), 'Jesus, you sick bastard. God, no, no, not another bite. No, it tastes so good. Why did he have to make it taste so good, God? This is nothing like His Radio, why? AHHH.' Then later, 'oh my God, I'm pooping my own self out. He put laxative in it. Why? No, it's coming, no, hot, it feels hot.' Then i'll let them go home and tell them it was just chicken or pork.

Sometimes I listen to His Radio and think: Do people really believe that God likes cheesey rock/pop music? For the sake of argument, if these lyrics are praise:

Ever since the world around you shattered
You've been looking everywhere for something more
Sometimes you feel like you're life doesn't matter
But it does, I tell you it does, oh yeah

Then God is in his early thirties, has a nicely trimmed beard, wears Ambercrombie, tans once a week, thinks David Blaine is pretty cool, likes upscale bars, has more than two fragrance candles in his house for dates, has a torquise Fender Stratcaster, dislikes cats, and doesn't really 'understand' David Lynch.

edit: i realize that somehow capitalization rules have gone wrong in this post. also, i don't really listen to His Radio, no, seriously, i don't, leave me alone.

medium-size city

2008-12-08T10:52:00.004-06:00

the best thing (see calming) to do in winter at night is to drive around a medium-sized city listening to either Lee Morgan's Candy or Cannonball Aderely and Miles Davis' Something Else. this sort of jazz is only appropriate for late fall, winter, in a medium-sized city, where the entire city is driveable, including downtown and dirty or wealthy outskirts, in three hours time, so that the album can be got through at least twice. the city should have a bluish hue to it (the lights of the city tinted blue) and there should be patches of snow on sidewalks and medians. this concludes music week.

indie lit for christmas

2008-12-06T10:32:00.003-06:00

here are some new or recent indie lit books i would buy if i could:

Nick Antosca's Midnight Picnic

Blake Butler's Ever

Matt Bell's How the Broken Lead the Blind

Sam Pink's Yum Yum I Can't Wait to Die

Kim Chinquee's Oh, Baby

i'll post the links to these things later. i have things to do. i have to prepare for christmas. i have to do this because i have make it match or be better than thanksgiving week, in which i: got a speeding ticket, started a grease fire in the kitchen, bought a ping-pong table, ran over a median at three in the morning, played Fifa '98 for nintendo 64, ate at a twenty-dollar buffett, in which everyone wore suits and my girlfriend and i wore diapers, and my german shepherd, Rexus, developed the ability to communicate with me using his eyebrows. yes, german shepherds have eyebrows.

buy one of these books, supporting indie lit, which supports reading in general (but better, more sophisticated, avante-garde reading), which will (more-so than a mainstream book or a book over two-hundred pages) make you a better, more giving, compassionate, and possibly, spiritual human being. that's what happened to me anyway when i started reading these people.

'highly creative'

2008-12-05T08:15:00.004-06:00

i started a blog because i live alone in an apartment in a larger house and don't really talk to anyone, except my students, my office mates for a couple minutes. so, this is my way of talking, i think. i live alone in an apartment because i got a 'real' job teaching college, but the girl i was living with also got a 'real' job in another state and so we decided we'd try to like 'commute' our relationship (a two hour drive) so we could maybe have some money. i regret this decision, in some ways, and in other ways being lonely has made me extremely productive and creative. 'highly creative period' right now.

i'm going to post some beatles music to end music week.

htmlgiant is really fun to read. according to statcounter, i think there are maybe six or seven people who read this blog, you should all go there now. there's a lot of arguing on htmlgiant about literature and different websites and it's all surprisingly petty. i'm really entertained by it. it also makes me not want to ever comment on anyone else's blog or get 'involved' with internet lit too much. meaning i will probably close this blog when my year in tennessee is over.

anyway, if you follow the post titled ‘How to Get Linked on HTML Giant’: A 2 Step Primer, read the comments there, and then follow some of the next posts dealing with similar subjects (deleting authors from web archives, the indie in-crowd, etc) it's entertaining. i'm bad at linking things, so this is linked above in the title of the post and here: http://htmlgiant.com/?paged=2. scroll down a bit for that first post that gets things going. i want to say: i don't know nor have i talked to any of these people ever, maybe because I very rarely submit to online places (not out of malice, i just write longer, possibly more print friendly things, though it's not like i have a load of print pubs) (edit: i have talked to Matt Bell, who's mentioned in some post as having a chapbook, which i'm going to order - he was very cool and recently took a story of mine for Hobart's online thing), but I do read some of these people and I like a lot of their stories. i think it's odd that the apparatus (this weird internet space) causes/allows for stuff like this, which seems petty. that said, htmlgiant also is doing really neat and worthwhile things. so, i still think it is 'dumb and good' at the same time.

the Keys

2008-12-03T22:32:00.003-06:00

music week continues. buy now. hilarity ensues. hilarity now. i once saw these guys in a dayton bar in 2001. there were maybe ten people at the bar, maybe a few more came in later, some of the people were playing pool. i was probably one of the people playing pool. i went with a friend, i didn't even know the name of the band. when they started playing, i stopped playing pool. they were so good. they were so good that when i heard them a few years later i remembered them. i like the progression they've made with Attack and Release.

Ukulele

2008-12-02T08:17:00.003-06:00

i've wanted a ukulele for a long time, ever since i saw a cartoon-guy playing one in Waking Life. and no, i don't really care if you think Waking Life is cloying or a sophomoric, poor film. if you don't like Richard Linklater, in fact, you're probably cloying and a sophomoric, poor film. Jens Lekman:

i like when he says 'ah.'

MUSIC WEEK

2008-12-01T08:38:00.004-06:00

the grandaddy.

also: i have a new story coming out in Hobart's February web issue. link when it gets up.

this vs. that

2008-11-25T08:59:00.013-06:00

I want to post about the apparent discrepancy of taste in the section titled "Other people's books."

The list has mainly stuff by so-called 'minimalists' or worse 'realists,' though I don't think they are either of these things. These are the writers I read a lot and have some kind affinity with, though I'm not sure why. I just like them. I think it has something to do with clarity of vision (image) and language - I'm drawn to this. I also like some big, monstrous books, that are sort of confusing, but that I find beautiful or worthwhile anyway. Suttree, I think, is McCarthy's best. The thickness of language, getting lost in that book is fun. Same with Omensetter's Luck by William Gass. Those are what I call 'big language books,' where the language of the text is what makes the book, where language actually becomes content (though, I'm not sure you can't say this same thing about the 'minimalists', it's just more obvious with these big-language books).

Here's a thing: there's this on-going debate between these different types of writers. Between say, the minimalists, the more post-modern guys (say, Ben Marcus, Gass, Barth, Foster Wallace) and maybe the regionalists, Southern Gothic, like McCarthy or William Gay. The Minimalists got yelled at in the 80's, though they sort of dominated the 80's. It was dumb for people to bitch about them; I think we all get this, in retrospect, but the problem that's come out of it is that somehow 'minimalism' is not as good, not as beautiful, or worthwhile, or (frighteningly), not as creative or inventive as the big Tomes. That's sad. I mean, it's really narrow-minded. I think for both experimental, surreal, avant-garde stuff to work, there has to be a solid base of some kind of representational stuff (not commercial shit, but good, 'literary' representational stories). This is another problem though: people conflate realism and representation. This is wrongheaded - William Gass (of whom I'm a sort of never-ending fan) even wrote a retarded essay on representation called "Representation and the War for Reality." Most of the (good) minimalists aren't trying to mimic reality though; their aesthetic is not one of mimesis as Gass would have his readers believe, and that's sort of sad, because it shows that Gass never really took the time to try to understand these works. Also, someone says somewhere that the experiments, those inventing big, obvious and new things make the world safe for the representational writers. This, also, is simply a retarded way of seeing the literary world, as it makes a hierarchy of things - See, experimental lit is the outcast, yet the protector, honorable crusader for all Writing everywhere, making the world safe for it. I think it's more a give and take thing - all the different groups feed each other, test each other. Representational authors push things in the same way that avant-garde or experimental writers push things, they just do it in (often) quieter ways. This is a symptom of our culture, I think. If it's not big and loud, we don't think it's anything great. Likewise for avant-garde/experimental films. Therefore, Spike Jonze, Charlie Kaufmann, David Lynch; while no one knows of Phil Morrison or Goran Dukic, though at least Terrence Malick is well-known even if his (early) films are rather quiet.

Note: I'll probably edit this post some. I don't mean to confuse avant-garde or experimental or other terms, I'm just sort of grouping those terms together for ease of, what, explanation, I guess.

2008-11-20T10:32:00.003-06:00

if you switch the s and the p in the word "blogspot" up in the url, you will go to:
BIBLECOLLEGEONLINE.COM. wow. i don't condone such a site nor do i read bibles.

i taught Beattie, Carver, and Rick Barthelme today. earlier in the week i taught Pynchon and Donald Barthelme. it was hard teaching the 'minimalists' because they're so quiet. with Pynchon and those guys you can interpret and find meaning and explain things away - they're good for teaching is what i'm saying. with Carver and folk, it's harder to teach, i think because what's there is there, and you either get it or not. i don't know. i wasn't going to talk about teaching on here, but now i am.

also: i said i was going to post on some things, like creative writing programs and online and print stuff, etc, and i probably will, sometime. i think the general thing i have to say about it is 'incestuous.' that's how it's always been though, going back to the modernists. people publish their friends. i think that's pretty okay, both in the print and online world. more soon.

a fire drill made me find this

2008-11-17T14:34:00.005-06:00

a fire drill made me leave my building and find the following note on the ground:

hey baby,
whats up? not much here just sittin in algebra bein bored its about 12:40...im leavin at 1:00 i'm not supposed to leave till 1:30 but i didnt take a shower oranything this mornin i just got up went home seen that Chris was still there went in got my backpack and walked back out out i love you so much baby im so happy and i hope you are too i just wanted to write you a note i thought it would be cute [indecipherable language/symbol] but i'm not sure what else to say except i love you more than life itself and i hope youre havin a good day and can't wait to see you at like 7:00 or so but I LOVE YOU! bye baby

really, without the punctuation, it's quite good. now i'm going to write a fiction story based on this note:

She wrote him a note. Then she died.

i feel mean. that is all.