17 July 2010
I’ll be reading with three other FC2 writers (Rob Stephenson, Lance Olsen, Margo Berdeshevsky) at Unnameable Books, 600 Vanderbilt Ave, at 7:30 on October 13. Mark your calendar now, you know how October fills up.
Comments (1)17 June 2010
Big Lucks #2 is out, featuring my story (?) “Day Like Pushbuttons”; it can be bought for $6 plus I think $2 shipping.
Are you becoming bored because I have not been posting anything? Instead of being bored, think about this: you know already that a stopped clock is right twice a day, but did you ever consider that a clock that runs backwards is right more than twice a day? The faster it runs backwards, the more often it is right. If it ran backwards infinitely fast, then it would be right an infinite number of times per day. (Of coure, if it ran forward infinitely fast it would also be right an infinite number of times per day.) Surely there is a way to turn this to our advantage.
Comments (0)1 June 2010
Ben Gottlieb has written a lovely review. Also of note in today’s Ben Gottlieb output is his review of Joanna’s latest, Man’s Companions.
The question implied at the beginning of Ben’s review — Where will the peculiar style of The Fixed Stars lead in future works? — is one that I grapple with very actively.
Do you enjoy Ben Gottlieb’s review? Do you want to write your own review? Of course you do. E-mail me.
Comments (0)24 May 2010
A while ago it came up that Michelle did not really know the difference between The Who and Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, and I realized that, while I had some basic idea about what Zeppelin and Floyd sound like (and I think I may own Dark Side of the Moon? or maybe I have just seen it so often that I think I own it), I had definitely never listened to any Who album. So I got Who’s Next from the library. It seems to be some kind of religious music. Not religious like a traditional spiritual, which although ostensibly religious is really just what some people happen to sing, but religious like Christian rock, like it has a deliberate and explicit agenda — like they sat down and asked, “What shall we sing about?” and answered: “Religion.” Of course The Who is not Christian rock. It is maybe self-actualization rock. It goes:
I don’t need to fight
To prove I’m right.
I don’t need to be forgiven.
Also at some point there is something about a note, I mean a musical note. Being a note? Being in harmony? There is a song called “Getting in Tune,” maybe that is where they discuss the note.
The liner notes say the album was originally supposed to be part of a music/film participative spiritual project, wherein the band would play and the audience would come up and do marvellous things, and the band would start playing about what the audience did, and the audience would come up and do even more marvellous things, a kind of feedback loop of marvellousness, and everyone would have their own theme, and finally they would all become one “at the point where the Universal Chord was struck.” And it would all be filmed. It’s not clear whether this was considered a viable plan by anyone except Pete Townshend, even in 1971.
Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin also sound like religion now that I think about it — one of those weird dated religions like Theosophy that are big for a couple of decades but that then suddenly start to seem vaguely autistic. The liner notes of these bands’ CDs, written in the 90s, tend to address questions of who are the best rock musicians ever and what is the best rock album ever and who was the first to use an electronic zither effectively. In doing so they acknowledge implicitly that the history of rock is over; there is no more rock; our role today is to canonize and keep score. It makes me think of a recurring dream I have about an underground city filled with evocative architectures and fantastical experiences; every time I have the dream the city seems emptier and cheaper, like seeing the carnival you went to last night dismantled and put in trucks in the morning and all that’s left is some wax paper and popcorn boxes in mangy grass.
My favorite feature of the CD is a photograph near the end of the liner notes that shows the four band members sitting on a perfectly ordinary lawn in front of a not-quite-ordinary but still sort-of-ordinary house, which the caption identifies as Keith Moon’s house. The sky is kind of drearily overcast. There doesn’t appear to be anyone in the house, but there’s a little girl in a green dress obscurely doing something or other in the middle ground between the band and the house. Here the band looks like just some guys at a house and not like they expect to save the world or whatever.
My second-favorite feature of the CD is how it is scratched because it comes from the library, so that at a couple of key points, when The Who are rocking along and the crusty solipsism is becoming nightmarish for me and I’m starting to feel like nothing will be okay ever again, the rock suddenly changes into bursts of static and intermittent silences, and I am reminded that there is reality.
My third-favorite part of the CD is how I can listen to it and imagine myself as one of the band members, but without any of the band members’ consciousness of themselves and their project — just imagine myself playing loud beaty music with other people who are good at playing that kind of music. The Who does seem to be an extremely competent rock band. Rock is maybe an especially physical kind of music, and by imagining myself physically in their places I can access a certain exhilaration and avoid the rest. It’s particularly exhilarating to imagine being Moon, the drummer, who died in 1978.
Comments (2)20 May 2010
I got back from Denver on Monday but have been too confused to write. Southern Rhode Island is suddenly infested by men in trucks. They have sprung up like weeds in a garden I left unattended for a week. Many roads have been closed because they are full of trucks and of men in and around the trucks doing things to the road or to the trees. From my house I can hear several different truck-based machines, both by day and by night. Today I walked down the road to a trail I know, passing trucks on the way and looking forward to the moment when I would arrive at the trail and pass no more trucks; but when finally I did arrive, there was a truck at the trailhead, and a larger truck visible farther down the trail, and men, and the sounds of machines. I hope all these men will go home soon.
The reading in Denver seemed to go well. I did not read about crates, but instead about a festival and a pool of blood. After that I spent a week with various people I like, and capped the week by urinating on the highest point in the state of Nebraska.
Coming back is a little bit like picking up a book I stopped reading a year ago. I don’t really remember what is happening here. Maybe I should have left myself notes?
The well in front of my house was dug up at some point while I was away so that an underground leak could be fixed, and now there is a large patch of bare earth all around it in the middle of a grassy field. I imagine trucks were involved in this change. Finding these trucks and bare earth unexpectedly around my house makes me feel unwelcome in my own life.
Comments (0)6 May 2010
Ashley Crawford interviewed me about The Fixed Stars for 21·C Magazine. I am in good company in this issue; there are also interviews with other writers, many of whom are famous.
21·C seems like a good idea, and you can read more about it and its history in the current issue’s editorial. If your interests lie anywhere in the neighborhood of J. G. Ballard and Philip K. Dick you should probably bookmark it.
Comments (2)3 May 2010
I’ll be reading at the University of Denver on May 10 (that’s in a week) at 6:30. Will you be there? I hope so. I might read something about crates and the means of their transport. The reading will be in “Sturm Hall 453.”
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Elizabeth Hall interviewed Joanna and Chemlawn and me for Black Clock. My contribution is obviously the least interesting part of this interview.
We’re still looking for the perfect story to finish off Issue 3. Do you have this story? It might be about orthodontics? Or it might be about Vladislav the Grammarian? Please send it at once.
Comments (0)23 April 2010
I was standing at this computer table thing they have at the URI library – it’s hard to explain what this is exactly, but it doesn’t matter – and the guy across from me suddenly looked up, made a kind of “Ah!” sound as though he’d recognized me, and then started nodding and beaming. I was quite sure I had never seen him before. “I like this,” he said, fingering his chin to indicate my beard. “You look like a god.”
Today I put some seeds in the earth. It rained late in the afternoon, and then when it stopped, almost at sunset, the air was yellow for about half an hour. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the air that yellow before. I once saw the air extraordinarily pink on a certain evening in Philadelphia. But never yellow.
For a long time, in my youth, I think I was almost entirely unaware of seasons. Partly this was because I lived in California, where the seasons are not as distinct as they are in Rhode Island, and partly … I don’t know why. I just didn’t keep track. Some days were cold and rainy, some days were hot and I didn’t have to go to school, and once in a while it snowed. I understood that there was a pattern to these different kinds of days, but if you asked me what season it was I would have to look out the window or maybe at a calendar to answer.
These days, on the other hand, I feel like I am not even the same person in different seasons.
For some reason I decided to make a list of every book I’ve ever read. The rules are, 1) I have to have definitely finished the book (so Ulysses is out), and 2) I have to retain at least some inkling of what’s in it (so most everything I read for classes in college is out). In some cases, like the Oz books or Roger Zelazny’s Amber books, I don’t really remember which ones I’ve read and which I haven’t, so I just listed them all in one catch-all entry. Similarly with writers of short stories that are always getting grouped and regrouped in new editions; for instance, I just have “Poe, E. A., various stories.” I’m not listing things I read when I was really a child – there’s no “various Clifford the Big Red Dog books” entry – and I’m not listing the many gamebooks I used to read, except for J. H. Brennan’s GrailQuest books, which I still have and which are responsible for maybe 15% of my daily interior monologue.
Listing these books has been a strangely thrilling experience. I currently have something like 400. I’m sure there are many missing, but of course I don’t know how many. Every few hours I think of one that I’d forgotten, and write it down. Today I remembered The Circus of Doctor Lao, which is a great book in many ways. I am hoping that this list will help resolve those occasions where I suddenly think of two random words I read in some book in 1992 and can’t rest until I remember what book it was.
If you don’t already know, one of the many documents available on the Internet is a list of every book Art Garfunkel has read since 1968.
Comments (0)13 April 2010
Suddenly about a week or so ago I stopped liking the Internet. I still look at it pretty often, but now the longer I look at it the more boring and repulsive it seems. I don’t understand this change in my feelings. I used to love the Internet. For a long time I loved it. Is there something wrong with me? I even found and bookmarked many wonderful new sites, thinking that maybe I had developed in new directions and needed new parts of the Internet. But already I cannot be bothered to look at any of these new sites.
I also started waking up several hours earlier than usual for no obvious reason. Maybe it has to do with spring, but this was a sudden and dramatic change. I don’t know if it is related to the change in my feelings about the Internet.
What’s more, I am now five inches shorter and speak with an Australian accent. No, that’s not true. But it almost feels like it, now that I wake up early in the morning and don’t like the Internet.
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