11 March 2010
I got my copies yesterday. It looks good. The cover is darker than I had thought; on the image they e-mailed me it looks a little sky-blue, a little fairy-blue, but in reality it is predominantly a dark gray-blue, quite menacing. And the lettering of the title has stronger hints of orange or pink than I’d thought, also menacing, also nice. It is actually a great cover. The book feels good, the binding looks good, the pages look good.
So. Distributors might not have it for a few days yet, retailers a few days more, but it definitely exists, you can order it from any of the usual book-ordering places. And you should order it. In particular you should go to your local independent bookstore, ask if they have it in stock, and then, when they say no (they will likely say no), act surprised — say it is the new big thing, the talk of discriminating readers everywhere, and you thought they’d be on top of the trend. Then order it from them. With luck maybe they will order some for the store too.
If you are a reviewer and you want a review copy, e-mail Latasha Watters at The University of Alabama Press: lwatters@uapress.ua.edu. And consider me grateful.
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4 March 2010
A story that I wrote will be published in issue 2 of Big Lucks. I wrote the first draft of this in 2003 — I know because it was the night after I saw The Triplets of Belleville — and I’ve added to it and revised it periodically since then, and finally now it’s in a pretty good state, but in all that time I haven’t been able to think of a decent title for it. Don’t think I haven’t tried. So this nice man named Mark at Big Lucks said we want this thing but can you change the title? (I had put some mediocre working title on it.) And I said if only I could. Then I sat there for a long time at night trying to think of a title. I made a list of words that seemed connected to the story, but none of them was any good.
Finally I decided on a method, a kind of ultimatum method. I went to my favorite anonymous message server. This is a place where you type in something that’s on your mind and hit enter, and then you get to see what the person before you wrote. You don’t know who the person was; the next person to use the site will get to see what you wrote, but you don’t know who that person will be either. My idea was to take the random anonymous message I would receive and use words from it to construct a title for this story. I typed in my message and hit enter. Here’s what I got (which I don’t mind sharing, since sharing doesn’t make it any less anonymous):
He Makes me mad.
He likes to push my buttons.
I like him less and less each day.
I wish we were still friends.
Well, it could be worse. On the other hand, it could be better. “Wish” stands out, but a little thought convinced me that no good title could possible include this word. “Push like Mad”? “Less Makes Less”? “Day Friends”?
Let’s face it, they are not great words to make a title out of, but at least fruitlessly rearranging them was more fun than fruitlessly rearranging words I had thought of myself. Eventually I decided it would be okay to combine two of the words into a single word, and came up with “Day like Pushbuttons.” Which isn’t bad. Doesn’t have anything to do with the content of the story, but has the right feel.
So my story tentatively entitled “Day like Pushbuttons” will appear in Big Lucks. It will be out in May I think.
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15 February 2010
Two things I wrote can now be read in issue 5 of The Bicycle Review. In the same issue are two things written by Thirii Myint, who was my student at Brown a few years ago, possibly while I was writing the very things that now share a web page with her things. It is a small world, this world of writing things.
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11 February 2010
Here’s another one I got at the library: The Hazards of Love, by the Decemberists, which was recommended by Emma about a year ago and which has been in my queue or whatever since then. This is a rock opera in which a woman goes into the forest and finds a wounded fawn, but the fawn turns out to be the (human) adopted son of the forest queen, who has only turned him temporarily into a fawn for safekeeping, and the girl becomes pregnant by the transmogrified fawn, and then the forest queen is angry, and then the girl is abducted by a rake.
I did not know any of this when I first put it on. I thought it was just a normal album. When I realized what was happening I became excited, and immediately after it finished I listened to it a second time with the liner notes in front of me to figure out the story. This second listen was a peak experience that I will forever remember fondly. Since then I’ve had no particular desire to listen to it again, though I’ve done so several times to be thorough.
Is it credible? Can we now go into a store and buy a recording of a fully realized fairy-tale indie-rock opera? Yes, we can; our civilization has produced such an object. Like an Esperanto translation of the Iliad, it fills what would otherwise be a cultural void.
Is it good? It’s pretty good. It has catchy bits and tragic bits, and I like the voice of the forest queen. It seems more like story than a collection of music, which is I think why I don’t care to listen to it again; stories (novels, movies) are things you might return to occasionally, but not things you put on repeat.
As I understand it the Decemberists are a popular band and this is a popular album. Not Beyoncé popular, but popular. So the album would seem to bring us another step closer to a world in which ordinary people spend a substantial part of the day thinking about fairies, and perhaps spell it “faeries,” and are not reluctant to listen to or even perform rock operas featuring these creatures. That’s a world that I’m curious to live in, although of course one has one’s reservations.
Here is a fact about fairy tales: people don’t often tell them anymore. You might read them to your children from books, but that’s different from telling them fresh as you remember them; and if you do tell one from memory it’s probably your memory of the version you read in a book, or that was read to you. That doesn’t mean fairy tales are over. It only means that the role played by fairy tale in The Hazards of Love may be different from the role played by fairy tale in Parsifal. What stories do people tell these days? I would like to listen to a rock opera about Watergate.
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10 February 2010
It’s a snow day today, which is maybe the best kind of day, so I decided to write a review of a CD I got at the library. The CD is Grace, by Jeff Buckley. I was always getting confused between Jeff Buckley and Jeff Beck and Beck and Tim Buckley, and I thought maybe listening to this would be a way to start sorting that out. I know nothing about the guy except I guess he died tragically? Drowned in the Mississippi, AMG says.
Anyway, there’s a picture of him on the front cover holding an old-fashioned microphone and looking sort of oily and insufferable, and another picture of him on the back cover jumping up some stairs, or perhaps (it is a confusing picture) floating down the stairs headfirst like the ghost of Christmas 1994. In the liner notes are further pictures of him, in which he looks like that guy that had a band in high school, and maybe you had a crush on a girl but that girl had a crush on this guy because he had this band, and you felt unworthy disliking him because you were probably just jealous over the girl and besides he was so very gentle and encouraging, but actually you could never really tell what was the value in him.
He begins the album by saying, “Woooo” repeatedly, perhaps building on the ghost theme. Shortly after that he says, “If only you’d come back to me,” and then some other things.
Often the music threatens to become jazzy, and while it would be too much to say I automatically dislike anything that calls itself jazz, I’m talking here about really jazzy jazz, like there might be some rich balding guy with loafers bobbing his head over a piano and everyone is nodding at each other.
It isn’t bad music. It seems like he’s set out to be sublime. So he’s written sublime songs and he has a sublime voice and the production is striving for sublimity, but the only thing he has to say is, “Look at me, I am sublime.”
In the middle of the album he sings a Leonard Cohen song, which is nice, and then some of the songs after that are also nicer I think than the songs at the beginning of the album, although maybe I only think that because the songs at the beginning have broken me down somehow. In any case by the end I am almost sold on him, but then if I start from the beginning again I am immediately unsold. For some reason he makes me think of red cellophane.
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5 February 2010
Turns out cold houses is what all the hip kids have these days.
Actually my house is a tropical paradise compared to some of those mentioned in the article. My thermostat is currently at 46, low enough that the heat hardly ever comes on and high enough that I don’t worry (much) about pipes freezing.
I was particularly impressed with Janet Smith, who apparently lives in sub-zero temperatures on a mountain in Colorado, in a house “typically ten degrees higher” than the temperature outside. But then I saw a picture of her and realized that she was cheating: she has a big moppy dog.
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28 January 2010
Michael Stewart’s story “The Children’s Factory,” first published in Birkensnake 2, has won the Micro Award, which is an annual award for flash fiction (stories of less than 1000 words). Congratulations to Michael, and congratulations to us for having the good sense to publish this excellent story.
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25 January 2010
My sister, Taysa, died in a motorcycle accident in 2002. There are some excellent gothy pictures of her online that I didn’t know about or forgot about until I googled her just now. The first two are just thumbnails that don’t go to full-sized images, but the rest enlarge all right. The “memorial web page” linked there did exist as recently as September, but seems to be gone now. Maybe temporarily.
My brother, Mike, asked me last week about my memories of the morning of her death. By “morning” I mean about 3 A.M. Mike was at our dad’s house in California when the news came, and of course my dad was there too, and a couple of family friends, and so today the most commonly recounted memories of that morning are memories of the things that happened to these people. But I was living in Seattle at the time, and experienced none of it. I haven’t written my own memories down before, mainly because it didn’t occur to me to do so, but also because they are so vague. I think the vagueness is because I was alone: no one shared these events, and I didn’t talk about them until later, and so no stories got formed. But I thought maybe I’d write down what I remember now.
To me the notable feature of that morning, and of the week that followed, was the role played by the very boring details of material life. To begin with, there is the matter of my phone and my answering machine. At that time I had an old-fashioned phone, with a cord and everything, and an old-fashioned answering machine, with a tape. (I still have the same phone, but not the answering machine; I have free voicemail now.) I would get calls from telemarketers at all hours, so it was my habit to unplug the phone and turn down the volume on the answering machine all the way before I went to bed. I’m sure I turned the volume that night, but I might have left the phone plugged in. In any case something woke me up at about three. It might have been the phone ringing, or it might have been the clicking and winding of the tape on the answering machine, which was always loud. (Loud enough to wake me up? I think it was the phone ringing. Today every time a phone wakes me up I have a sharp, anxious feeling.)
The point is that I was awake and knew only that someone had called me. I didn’t care much, but
since I was awake anyway I got up and went to the bathroom. When I got back to my room I saw the message light on the answering machine blinking, which surprised me a bit: I’d assumed that the call was a machine, or a mistake, and that there would be no message. I almost went back to bed anyway, but it was a strange enough hour for a phone message that I thought I’d be wondering too much about it to sleep well. So I pressed the button.
It was my dad. Everything he said was worked into the gaps between great rapid sighs, as though he were out of breath or constantly forgetting and reminding himself to breathe. He said, “Taysa’s gone,” and then, “She’s gone.” After that I don’t think there were any more sentences, and possibly no more words, but just disconnected syllables in between the monstrous sighs.
I called him immediately and didn’t get much more, except that I should go at once to Mesa, Arizona, the suburb of Phoenix where Taysa lived.
There were many small and uninteresting problems to be solved. Not difficult ones. How do I book the first flight from Seattle to Phoenix at 3 A.M.? I didn’t have an internet connection. I looked up United Airlines in the yellow pages and called them. They have special rates, “bereavement rates” they are called, for situations such as this. They sell you the ticket at this rate up front but afterwards you have to send them a note from the funeral parlor to show that you have qualified. What do I pack? It is warm in Phoenix. Nice clothes for a funeral? How long will I be gone? How long does it take for a Seattle taxi to pick me up if I call it at that hour? Not long, it turned out. How do I let the people at my new job know that I won’t be coming in that morning? I remembered to write the phone number down on a slip of paper so that I could call them from some phone in Phoenix later in the day. I put this slip of paper in my pocket.
I was not at all confused. I was not sleepy and the situation was in no way surreal. There was some sort of instant adrenaline, maybe actual physical adrenaline or maybe a special emotional adrenaline, that kept me perfectly focused and even efficient. This also happens when I injure myself. I do not scream or curse but just get help in the most direct possible way.
I don’t remember what I ended up packing. The taxi driver wanted to chat, and soon I told him where I was going and why; then for the rest of the twenty-minute drive he talked about the chanelling of incorporeal entites, in particular the Seth Material, about which he was writing many books. I wonder what he thought of me and how often he had driven other people on similar errands. People die unexpectedly and then other people take taxis to the airport early in the morning. It must be a situation familiar to taxi drivers.
I wondered the same thing about the people in the airport. I had the impression, which I think is common in these situations, that while everybody around me was living a normal life in the normal world, I was living a different kind of life in a strangely disjunct world, so that although I could see the world in which they lived I was somehow barred from it, like a ghost. But surely people are wandering around the airport all the time because of sudden deaths. You probably pass them every time you fly. I probably passed others that morning. I sat quietly at the gate and listened to some sort of music on headphones. You see people doing this all the time at airports.
I don’t remember one moment of the flight. I got off the plane somewhere and met some members of my family and then we got on another plane to Phoenix. I remember landing in Phoenix and thinking something along the lines of, “Fuck Phoenix,” which is still more or less my position.
Are these worth the name “memories”? There is no story here, just a few images that happened to stick.
More details. Rental cars, hotel rooms, police, funeral homes. We had to find places to eat. We bought many copies of the newspaper with the accident report; I don’t know what happened to them. What to do with all the things in her apartment? Find a suitable store, buy boxes and tape. What to do with her two white mice? I don’t remember. It fell to me to call all the local people in her cell phone whose names sounded familiar to one of us — that is to say, her friends, as close as we could guess — and tell these people what had happened and the date and time of the memorial service. After I had called half a dozen I realized that none of them were going to pick up their phones and I would have to leave messages. Many of them came to the service and I have never seen any of them again.
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21 January 2010
I happened to talk to Joanna just now, and she said she was (still) watching many Lady Gaga videos, so I thought I would watch these videos again myself. Here are Bad Romance and Paparazzi; they are good, particularly if you want to look at many exotic images very quickly with no possibility of understanding why. There is something frightening to me about these videos. Of course there are many good reasons why they should be frightening: the grotesque and uncanny moments are too numerous and too obvious to mention. But there is a particular kind of frightening that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I thought it over while stir-frying, and then I had it: it is the devil.
I used to spend a certain amount of time looking at tarot cards. I never was interested in divination, because who cares about what’s going to happen; but I found them useful as expressions of ideas or movements or states of mind that we don’t have easy words for. Here is the devil from the Rider-Waite-Smith deck. 
This deck was made by and for occultists in the twentieth century, and is perhaps not absolutely the best, but it tends to be obvious with the symbolism and so is easy to read. There are many other decks.
Now, about the devil. Do not by any means consider me an expert, but to me he is about rich creation (fecundity, procreation, aggressive creation), perhaps uncontrolled or overreaching. He is not a bad card, necessarily, but troubling. Compare him to the magician. 
The magician is also a creative type: he channels the energy of the heavens. He receives this energy via his wand (you can see it is pointing towards the heavens) and then articulates it into the substance of the material world (all the junk on the table in front of him). The devil, you will note, also has a wand of sorts, but his wand is a flaming torch, and he holds it in his left hand, and it is pointed down, towards the earth. The things the devil creates do not come from the heavens. They come from below; perhaps they come from people.
Is it bad that things can be created by people instead of by the heavens? I’ve always had difficulty with that. The people on the card are in chains, but maybe that is the ordinary condition of people. The card after the devil is the tower (this time from the Marseilles deck). 
That’s what happens to the creative works of people. Well, maybe it can be rebuilt.
Do you see the fear in the devil card? It’s not that he’s trying to get you; it has to do with the way you like him, the part of you that likes him most. I don’t know any more than that. I wonder if I am in a devil phase and will soon suffer the fate of the tower. Or I wonder whether the civilization around me is in this phase, perhaps since the sixties … or since the twenties … or since the Industrial Revolution. Maybe these phases last a long time. Anyway it is frightening, and the fear tastes the same to me as the fear in Lady Gaga.
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13 January 2010
Sometimes you show someone a story — this happens in workshops, or submitting to publishers, or just in life — and they say, “The characters in this story are flat,” or, “This story seems to have been written by someone whose native language is not English,” and then they seem to consider that the end of the discussion.
Here’s why this is weird. The first thing to ask about a story is whether you like it. The first thing is not to go down some list of characteristics a putatively good story is supposed to have and look for ways in which the story in front of you does or doesn’t measure up. Sometimes good stories are built around flat characters. Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson are flat characters, but many people love to read stories about them. I read them often myself. Sometimes good stories are written in bizarre broken English. Amos Tutuola comes to mind; The Palm-Wine Drinkard is great, partly because of its bizarre broken English. You read it and you know it’s great. Then, if you like, you ask why. That’s the correct order.
It’s not that any story of mine has received this treatment recently (although they certainly have, often); I’m not thinking of any particular incident. But I was reading some mainstream literary magazines, I won’t say which ones, and marvelling at how carefully crafted and how boring the stories were. Carefully crafted, boring stories come from paying attention to the characteristics a good story ought to have and then writing towards those characteristics instead of taking care that your story is, first and foremost, actually good.
I am sorry this is so vague. It’s just something that came to mind, a strange misconception that I often think about.
Henry James said that what makes a story good is its quality of “life.” He had a whole critical apparatus based on this notion of “life.” What the hell did he mean? I’m sure I don’t know any better than anyone else. But if Henry James wasn’t willing to get any more specific than “life,” I’m not sure the rest of us should either.
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