August 24, 2008
It was the distributor. $446.30. I drove it to Boston yesterday and bought some nice wool pants from The Garment District. $14. So 1 new distributor = 31 pairs of nice secondhand pants. They were not hemmed — and so, one assumes, never worn — except that for some reason one leg (but not the other) showed signs of having once been hemmed. So maybe someone, let’s call him Ron, bought a new pair of nice wool pants, and then took them to the tailor to be hemmed, and the tailor hemmed one leg, and then before he could hem the other leg Ron stabbed him in the back with his own shears and then quickly took out the hem on the first leg, perhaps with some idea of covering his tracks. I wonder whether they ever caught him.
Now they are mine. Michelle very kindly hemmed them for me; perhaps I will wear them while teaching business writing.
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August 20, 2008
I got a new job. I will be teaching business writing at the University of Rhode Island. It’s not what you’d call a full-time job, so I might have another new job soon, for a total of two jobs. Now I have a business writing textbook. Opening it at random, I read, “Shampoo frequently, keep hands and nails neatly manicured, use mouthwash and deodorant, and make regular trips to a hair stylist” (John V. Thill & Courtland L. Bovée, Excellence in Business Communication, Eighth Edition, Pearson Prentice Hall, 60).
I use deodorant.
I think I am going to enjoy teaching business writing. I think for my first assignment I will have my students plan a punk rock show. They will have to write business letters to the venue and the fire marshal, and also to the punk rock band.
I also found a new place to live. It’s a small cottage in a field on a hill in West Kingston, Rhode Island. There are flowers and a swing and a pear tree, and a historic grist mill across the street. You can hear the river and so on. No doubt I will smoke a pipe and take up astronomy.
Also, my car broke down. I was driving along the freeway and suddenly the engine stopped. I drifted to the shoulder and called AAA. After twenty minutes a nice man showed up and towed me to a mechanic, and on the way told me all about how great Providence used to be. Now, he says, it isn’t any good at all. He’s probably right. I liked him. Are you supposed to tip tow truck drivers? I didn’t and then felt bad about it. Providence has gone to the dogs. But I don’t need to care much: I’m moving to a small cottage in West Kingston.
All of this happened today.
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August 13, 2008
I sent it to someone in South Korea.
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August 3, 2008
It seems like many of the bookstores that might want to carry something like Birkensnake are hippie anarchist collective bookstores. I don’t have anything against hippie anarchist collective bookstores — I volunteered at one briefly myself — but is a slender volume of weird and somewhat incomprehensible fiction really a hippie/anarchist object? Because it’s hand-bound or something?
At the bookstore where I was a hippie anarchist collectivite, we had a fiction section. It was in the far corner of the store, on the bottom shelf. I noticed that nobody ever went there. Really, I’m pretty sure I never saw a single person looking at that section. Granted, I didn’t work there very often or for very long.
Clearly Donald Trump has no reason to be interested in Birkensnake. It costs four dollars. I am just wondering why certain kinds of apparently apolitical objects are so closely tied to certain politics.
Is it just because it’s cheap? If we made ourselves fancy business cards and wore fancy clothes and went to certain kinds of parties, in mansions for example, and priced Birkensnake seven hundred dollars and put each one in a fancy archival slipcover, would it then be sold in a totally different kind of store and read by totally different people? Would those people like it more or less than the hippie and anarchist people will like it? Does being rich give you access to a wider variety of objects, or, once culture has finished messing with the marketplace, does it just give you access to a different set of objects?
This is the kind of thing that Jesse Ruocco will know.
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July 28, 2008
Available here
Things turned out well. It is not possible to doubt that this is the best magazine — or indeed the best object of any kind — available for four dollars.
Many thanks to everyone who helped — many of them, such as those from whom we stole supplies, without knowing it.
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July 14, 2008
Computer broken. Posting from the damn library. New computer ordered, but delayed by holdup with the credit card. Why do I have the credit card, if every time I need to use it I have to call some 800 number and recite Gunga Din backwards to a machine?
Birkensnake update: I now have nightmares about screen printing. But supposedly the covers are done (I haven’t seen them all myself). I think we’re still waiting for thread to arrive in the mail, for the final act of binding. The truth is I have little control over this phase of the operation.
I also had a nightmare about Greek verbs. A couple of years ago, before I came to Brown, I was teaching myself Greek out of a book; now that I’m done with Brown I’m teaching myself Greek out of a book again. But now, unexpectedly, the verbs haunt me. Particularly λαμβανω, take, receive.
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July 2, 2008
When I say “finished,” I mean I was writing it and I’m not writing it anymore. I sent it to some publishers, but naturally one assumes that will come to nothing. But it seems finished, in the way that things sometimes seem finished; and I feel different now — at least I think I feel different now — than I did before I started it, so it’s also finished in that some change in the way I feel has been completed. Of course maybe I felt this way before and I just forgot. But I already have a new favorite David Bowie album (was Ziggy Stardust, now Hunky Dory), which seems significant.
The main change, which I admit I didn’t expect, seems to be that I have even less idea what I’m doing on a day-to-day basis than I did before. And I’ve never been strong in the knowing-what-I’m doing department. I tend to drift around inside. And it’s as though, in order to write this thing, I had to stop drifting a moment, and somehow fix some part of myself in a finite and durable form; and now that it’s done, all that fixity or concreteness that I had to scrounge to put together two hundred pages of text has gone out of me along with the book, leaving me vaguer and more indefinite than ever. It’s a bit how I imagine Sauron, Dark Lord of Mordor, might have felt after placing the greater part of his power in the One Ring. Is that weird? Does it happen to other people, besides me and Sauron? I always thought (stupidly, it now seems) that learning to write fiction would be a process of increasing certainty.
My working title is The Fixed Stars. That could change. If you’ve been walking around with a really killer book title in your head for a while, but despair of ever writing the book to match the title, please
contact me.
Like I said, maybe someone will publish it, maybe not. The question turns out to be less important to me than I thought it would. I’ll keep the blog abreast.
Maybe the thing to do is take up new hobbies. Stringed instruments? Herbalism? Shooting?
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June 30, 2008
It’s true, I am no longer a graduate student. I am, in the quaint terminology of my degree itself, a magister in artibus elegantibus.
I’ll be teaching science fiction writing to high school students for two weeks at the end of July, then I imagine moving on to janitorial work.
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or something like it. The really plague-like part lasted only a couple of days, during which I thought almost continuously of the solitary-death-by-fever scene in The Sheltering Sky, and hated Paul Bowles, with all my remaining strength, as though it were the existence of that scene that was somehow making me sick. Finally my fever went away, and now I just have this lingering cough, which I hardly mind except when it prevents me from sleeping.
Today I went to the doctor to see if the cough might be made to go away too. Probably a mistake, doctors’ offices being some of the most miserable places around — not as bad as the DMV, but close. I sat in one room for an hour, then another room for another hour, wondering whether I could just bolt, and then the doctor came in and prescribed me codeine. I took a walk in the cemetery across the street from his office and saw a hawk diving at a sparrow or whatnot over by all the Armenian graves. Right after the hawk, I saw a cardinal just for a second. I’m not sure what that means (but it obviously means something).
Here is my list of all the works of fiction that have actually frightened me:
- The Sheltering Sky, by Paul Bowles
- Boy in Darkness, by Mervyn Peake
- “The White People,” by Arthur Machen
- “Not After Midnight,” by Daphne du Maurier
That’s it. “Not After Midnight” is probably the weakest of the bunch, and maybe actually works only in conjunction with other Daphne du Maurier stories — like on its own it wouldn’t have frightened me, but coming on the heels of “Don’t Look Now,” and “The Birds,” and “The Blue Lenses,” it did.
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June 17, 2008
I was doing too many things for a long time, and not writing here. Maybe I’ll write more here now — but slowly, slowly.
I was in New Hampshire for a week with Michelle and my mother. You can see some of Michelle’s pictures here. If it seems like there are more pictures of graveyards than you might expect, that’s because the graveyards of New Hampshire are innumerable. The state is practically carpeted in graveyards.
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