Betteranever...

Gigolo

2012-01-02T08:00:00.001-08:00

Lost Memory of Skin by Russell Banks

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I first got turned on to this book when I was listening to NPR one day. I was in my car on my way to work. I recently snuggled on the couch and watched one of those anthropologic shows where Lisa Ling goes to an encampment that housed sex offenders and I was fascinated. By the life. By the people that lived there. The savagery. The absolute denial and disgust that needed to be incorporated to dehumanize a whole population. So I was already interested when I heard this novel was a fictional account of a young man that lived in one of those encampments in Florida. Then I heard this passage:

It takes half an hour to fully charge his monitor battery and during that half hour the Kid feels intimately connected to the millions of other convicted sex offenders young and old and in-between, rapists and child abusers and men who exposed their genitals on a bus, public masturbators, voyeurs and escalator gropers, compulsive seducers of teenage boys, coaches who couldn’t keep their hands off their athletes, men who talked dirty in Internet chat rooms to people they thought were teenage girls and then arranged to met them for sex, fathers and uncles who drunkenly reached out for their teenage daughters as they passed by the sofa, porn addicts and fantasists lost in the misty zone between reality and imagery, no longer able to tell the difference- all of whom at this moment have plugged their electronic shackles to outlets and are sitting in the bedrooms, living rooms, and basements of houses and apartments and mobile homes, in garages, homeless shelters, public parks, in airports, and train stations, in waiting rooms, offices, and the back rooms of fast food restaurants and under causeways and overpasses-as if they were all trembling leaves on the branches large and small of a vast electrical tree that casts it shadow across the entire country.

That was one of my favorite paragraphs of 2011. There is so much conveyed in that paragraph. I can’t tell you that I’m a big fan of sex offenders. I’ve been a victim of rape. I know what it’s like to be afraid to die and then think that you might as well be finished off because there’s nothing worse than what is happening right then. I know what it’s like to let go of and sometimes even hate parts and smells of your own body.

That’s why I chose to work with sex offenders in my twenties. They were kids. I was their resident counselor. I spent nights counting heads and playing gin rummy and cleaning bathrooms. I spent mornings waking them up. I was not able to touch them to wake them up. Some of the counselors kicked their beds and flicked their lights on and off. It is hard to wake a child up out of a lithium induced haze. I remember those boys slowly wading the halls, overweight medicated zombies. The program declared that flicking the light switch on and off and kicking the beds an inhumane way of waking them up. I agreed. I came up with something more creative. Gigolo. That’s right I said, “Gigolo.” I bugged the crap out of them by going into their rooms and singing an elementary school cheer at the top of my lungs:

Gig-o-lo -Jig Jig Alo. Jig a lo Jig Jig A-lo.

Hey Daniel..

Hey What?

Can you Jig?

Jig What?

A-lo

Aight. My hands up high my feet down low and this is the way I Jig –A-Lo

Ideally this is when they did their own special little dance.

The only problem with my method was that this cheer is call and response so sometimes I said Hey Darnell and there was no Hey what? But my technique was pretty genius. It almost always got them up. The boys rolled out of bed pleading, “C’mon... Mama Chula.”

Mama Chula. That’s what they called me. It means cute mama. Not all the kids were sex offenders only the boys on the third floor. The rest of the boys were in their for other offenses, shop lifting or arson or behavioral issues. There were two boys on the second floor, Jory and Michael that used to love it when I woke them up like that. Until one morning.

Hey Jory...

Hey what?”

Can you jig?

Jig what?

Alo!

“Aight” He jumped out of bed. I got excited. Happy that my way was working.

“My hands up high”- he put his hand up high. Michael jumped out of his bed and started dancing. I smirked to myself. I did it. I figured it out. How to wake up a teenager without a bribe.

“My feet down low”-he spread his feet and Michael jumped in front of him

“And this is how I FUCK A HO!” And Michael bent over while Jory bumped and grinded against his butt.

I screamed, “Boundaries!” and walked away. That was my job. To be the boundaries police. Basically I had a thousand mini heart attacks a day. The next morning as I walked past their room a sock flew out into the hallway. It was lined with the cardboard of the toilet paper roll and a latex glove. It was a Fifi.

They were just boys but because they were already in a lock down facility that small act earned them the badge of convicted sex offenders. Landed them on the national registry for sex offenders. Cleared them of being able to live within proximity of a school or park or playground. They were to be discarded, unable to secure decent jobs or wives or housing. Life was gonna give it to them hard.

I’m reading Michael Byers’ essay on Faking Shapely Fiction. This is some of what he says about characterization.

Simply put, a character can be considered convincing in equal measure to his or her volume. Volume is achieved through the accumulation of unaligned attributes-those attributes which do not reinforce one another.

For example, a geometrical rendering of the idea Robert was tall might look like this:

Tall

If we are alert as writers we are aware of these crowding helpers (tall lean lanky awkward), and rather than let Robert stretch to infinite length, as astronauts are said to do as they cross the event horizon of a black hole, we are wise to give him a surprising, unaligned second attribute, for example:

graceful

And if we are especially alert, we will contrive a third attribute which does not align with the first two, possibly:

stupid

Russell Banks perfects this technique in the Lost Memory of Skin:

Due to his obesity, was flattened somewhat, he was nonetheless a conventionally pretty child.-87

Michael Byers also talks about how important it is for the character to be self conscious or self aware to fully ground the character. This can be done by showing the character in self-reflection. Like in this excerpt of Lost Memory…

He shuffled shyly up to the pretty blond girl named Ashley Tarbox at the school dance and asked her to come onto the dance floor with him and jitterbug to Artie Shaw’s “I Get a Kick Out of You.” He knew that he would look ridiculous. So he never did any of those things.-88

Here’s a way you can do this using someone else's observations. Note also how helpful it is to have more active descriptions rather than stagnant. For example he refers to the girl getting too much sun and her hair being layered and how she colors her hair. Therefore adds more action to this description.

Her face is freckled and blotched from too much sun. She has a web of fine lines around her green eyes and a vertical cluster of smoker’s lines above her upper lip. Her thick coppery hair is cropped short, chopped rather than layered and streaked with gray, as if the copper red dye needs to be replenished. She’s her own hairdresser, the Professor observes. She’s full breasted for such a thin woman and wears a loose, black chenille skirt with a dangling ripped hem and a faded T-shirt with I GOT CRABS AT HALEY’S CRAB SHACK printed across the front.-95

Another great gift of this novel was dialogue I thought that Banks nailed the way in which people talk so much so that I forgot I was reading at times.

Here’s an example:

I still take you for a cop.
I take you for a vet. ‘Nam. Noncommissioned officer, E-5, Air cav, probably. Or else BRO. Two tours, early 1970s. Bronze Star and a Purple Heart. I take Trinidad Bob there as a vet too. A blueleg E-2 who never got to E-3. One tour, late 1960s, maybe early 1970-s like you. BRO not in your outfit. Took some shrapnel in the head. Like they say FUBAR. Fucked up in the head.

Notice he doesn’t use dialogue tags and never really states who is speaking so he is trusting the reader to be able to decipher this but also has such a distinct voice for each character that we know whose speaking.

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Runaway from me Baby

2012-01-01T07:37:00.001-08:00

Townie: A Memoir by Andre Dubus III

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

And I always find, yeah, I always find somethin' wrong
You been puttin' up wit' my shit just way too long
I'm so gifted at findin' what I don't like the most
So I think it's time for us to have a toast
Let's have a toast for the douchebags,
Let's have a toast for the assholes,
Let's have a toast for the scumbags,
Every one of them that I know
Let's have a toast to the jerkoffs
That'll never take work off
Baby, I got a plan
Run away fast as you can

R-r-ru-ru-ru-run away
Run away from me, baby

Those are the lyrics to Kanye West’s Runaway. If I had to make a soundtrack to Andre Dubus III’s Townie, this song would definitely be in it. There were things that I really enjoyed about this memoir.

Like it got me out of bed at five am and into my sweats to go running in the morning. I dubbed the month of January ‘Alive at Five.’ I intend on running every morning for an hour and then writing until 8 am when it’s time for me to start getting ready for work.

I was drawn to Townie because I have this thing about New England. I was born in Concord Massachusetts. Then I lived there as a family with my mom and two brothers for a couple of years. Until my mom took off with just me like a thief in the night. It was the last time I remember living like a family. My mom always painted it as a place to be from. Sometimes, most often in the winter, she would get depressed and crawl into bed with me and ask me if I would want to go back to Massachusetts. She wove tales of snow days, and how I could come home in the afternoons from school and she would bake cookies for me, and I would be the most popular girl in school.

It would leave me with a feeling of longing every winter. It begins slowly like a San Francisco Cable car creeping in on Thanksgiving and then is fully enflamed by the end of Christmas. Finally leaving me plump with drunkenness New Years Eve so I could somehow fuck away the dull clots in my spirit. In California I sit exposed, my arms hoarding a box of buttered popcorn, watching snow covered scenes of East Coast sidewalks, false ice frosted windows of storefronts selling books, plush toys, and sophisticated outfits. I paint my nails a deep warm red and don black leather boots, sometimes a scarf to celebrate like those people in the movie were celebrating. I watch commercials that feature fluffy puppies jumping out of shiny boxes donning Santa hats. I drink hot apple cider, and eat all things Yuletide packing on an extra winter layer. I do this wholly, as if I had sliced open my own wrists, ripped out my veins, only to create more room for nutmeg and cardamom. It’s completely masochistic as I’m sure you know that one cannot replace their veins with winter spices!

Townie definitely satiated my winter craving for New England. Andre Dubus III captured the register of the Townies perfectly.

I actually laughed out loud when I read this passage and then repeated it ad nauseam to my partner, “I’m always hawny in the mawnin’”

This is a memoir so I can’t delve too far into critiquing it’s content but it is a story if Andre Dubus III’s upbringing his proclivity toward fighting. Which is something I could definitely relate to with my own upbringing.

“This warm wet evidence of a street rage I’d either forgotten to bring along, or was too drunk to bring along.”

He also spoke honestly about his struggle with writing this novel. Which as a writer I appreciated.

“Or maybe the women were doing the wielding and the cutting. I didn’t know. What I did know is that this novel was dead and I had killed it. I’d been trying too hard to say something- about poverty, about overwhelmed single mothers, about absent fathers and tough neighborhoods and all the trouble that could be found there, but most of all I’d been trying to make the reader feel sorry for the children, especially the teenage boy I’d based solely on me.”

That made up for the fact that he didn’t even pick up writing until he was a young adult submitted one story to five different places and his first acceptance was to Playboy, which paid him a nice lump of money for his first published unagented story. Oye!

To be honest there was something overly sentimental to me about this memoir. I appreciate that in nonfiction one has to dig deep but I don’t want to see the digging I just want to feel the burn and scrape of the cuts. There was a lot of over-explaining of his thoughts and feelings for my taste. I’m more grateful for what this novel has inspired me to do off the page (run run run) as opposed to on the page.

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Something dark

2011-12-23T17:30:00.001-08:00

The Outlaw Album: Stories by Daniel Woodrell

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I love Daniel Woodrell’s creepy dark prose.

“Such questions popping up keep the hurt fresh.”

“They tell me Dad committed suicide for reasons he dreamed up. His mind was too active. He had a round mind and it roamed. He could imagine any king of hurt. He could imagine the many miseries of this world flying over from everywhere to roost between his ears, but he couldn't imagine how to get away.”

“Summer had its fangs out sharp and long that year, sucking the joy from every sunny hour.”

“He was stronger’n Limburger cheese.”

“Coleman Younger was reddish in skin and hair with the temperament that is wed to the hue and girth and grit enough to back it up.”

“For Coleman Younger to speak of me so set a glow in me that whiskey could not match nor doubt extinguish.”

“She’s put her finger right on the button about him, which is embarrassing. It’s so general, his problem, so everywhere among men, that he wants to add a wrinkle to it, some invented misery that makes it seem like he at least had a special sort of problem with love that was all his own. “

“Her look makes her seem like a lady he should’ve met in some other life, one when there was more horn music.”

This collection of stories was all woods and musk and meth and fight and fog. I was especially bitch slapped by the story Uncle about a girl whose uncle was now her baby dependent upon her because after he molested her she beat him into a handicapped existence.

This uncle became a drooling needy baby and she still watched his nasty molester brain watch girls so she decided to end his life by pushing him off the bridge. This whole concept intrigued me. I always thought I had some form of Stockholm syndrome but this was extreme.

“I had a friend who was molested by her step dad that was in a wheelchair.” Is what my girlfriend said after I sighed and put the book down and explained the story to her.

Whoa. That’s gnarly I thought.

“Yeah it was fucked up. She took care of him and he molested her.”
Whoa. The point is these stories showed me dark things I could not normally dream up. It made me feel tender toward people.

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This Made Me Better

2011-11-07T10:11:00.000-08:00

Blueprints for Building Better Girls: Stories by Elissa Schappell

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I hadn’t read any of Elissa Schappell’s writing before this collection although I did see her deft mom skills at the Tin House summer writer’s workshop when she lured a teenager that was tripping his balls off away from the podium were Steve Almond was in the middle of a reading. She was so stealth so composed. Maybe it doesn’t have much to do with craft but acts like that, that require a certain amount of empathy and prowess also inform me that someone is a good writer.

    I am embarrassed to admit that I spent a lot of my life as a misogynist. I grew up hating anything remotely associated with femininity. I hated pink. I wanted to change my name to an androgynous name. I thought the woman’s suffragist movement was born out of racism. I called myself a Womanist rather than a feminist in the same way Chicanos protest the term ‘Hispanic.’

    My early impressions of women were that they were weak that they forsake themselves and their children for men. My birthmother battled with mental illness and raised me up into my teens as a single mother. This dynamic was complicated and slippery. We shared clothes, she sometimes introduced me as her sister, I answered our phone playing the role of a receptionist, “Chadburn residence may I help you?” She said it was for our own protection. We were two women living alone. At times we were competing. Attention was the reward.

    These are all the reasons why it would have been least likely that I picked up a collection called ‘Blueprints for Building Better Girls.’ But later I received my biggest gift. I had dozens of women rescue me. All different types of women. I was adopted and taken in by a Dutch Indonesian woman, she was a powerful Ad Exec. She wore big clunky jewelry. She had long hair and long skirts and could dance and laugh and cook and she would goof off and stand on a skateboard and we ate dinners at the table. Real dinners, salad main dish water wine coffee. She let me call her mom.

    Then I went for a short while to another woman she was Jewish from Texas a social worker at the county hospital. She had two daughters. One of them battling Anorexia the other a fiercely talented artist. We worked out at the gym together me and this mom. We took walks together. I never had a mom like that. That was willing to sweat with me. When I first met her I’d snuck into their backhouse with boys and booze in the middle of the night. Her husband came out in his underwear annoyed. He got dressed and drove each of us home. I never knew a parent that would do that. Be mad but still drive everyone home. This mom wasn’t much of a cook it was always shriveled up chicken breasts but she supported our academic pursuits like no other. There was reading of papers and an office with a computer and me up all night studying drinking coffee was okay. I never knew I could do that before. Stay up all night studying. It was a luxury.

    I had another mom that could never officially adopt me because she grew pot in the backyard but she was still the one that taught me how to drive a car and over shared about her sex life and if I ever ran out of places to go there was this place on the hill that I knew there was love. She never made me feel not enough.

    There are more, many more, teachers, social workers, friend’s moms that all acted as surrogate mothers to me. There’s a million things I can thank these women for but one in particular is the empathy they built in me the capacity to see and connect with so many different types of women. I think that having these experiences has made me a better writer.

    Elissa Schappell does all this in just one collection of stories. As I read the collection I could see myself spotting what I might have judged to be a certain type of woman somewhere and speculating what her guts were like what her motivations were. Blueprints answers all these questions. I love books that make me want to be a better person. Not like there is a good and bad person but there are times when I loose patience with people. There are times when I’m overly critical. That is all just a fancy way to say, there are times when I’m very afraid and insecure. I don’t like the person I become at these times.

    Like the other night there were these two teenage girls in a meeting and they were laying on each other stroking each others hair slowly gliding their fingertips back and forth up each others arms. It annoyed me. Then I read Blueprints and I remembered that that’s what a lot of teenage girls do. They’re affectionate and that’s sweet. It’s also what I like to think of as my ultimate job. To be loving.

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I LOVE THIS BOOK

2011-10-09T08:04:00.001-07:00

We the Animals: A novel by Justin Torres

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

    I chose Justin Torres’ We The Animals mainly because like the novel I’m working on he stated that his narrative had no linear through-line. That it wasn’t plot driven as much as conflict driven, meaning that you turn the pages because of the constant presence of two opposing desires. He’s said that there is no plot.
    I am dealing with similar delights and challenges. This story is told in first person from the point of view of one of three brothers. The novel begins fast and choppy. The novel itself is really expository not a lot of dialogue but still it is compelling enough. I think his description of having conflict present is true. I’ve had editors tell me in the past that they wanted to chase after the ends of sentences. Torres had me chasing.

For example:     “Manny threw the rock, and then we were running, at the full speed of terror, along the edge of the woods, running, running, running, falling down and catching our breath, with the sound of the shattering glass playing over and over in our minds, the sound permanence, the delightful, shocking sound of damage done.”-89

I’ve also heard that whenever you know where you’re going turn left. Torres turns left.

“What we gotta do is, we gotta figure out a way to reverse gravity, so that we all fall upward, through the clouds and sky, all the way to heaven”-85

    It’s fun. His writing is very sparse. I get the sense that he is used to writing in short form. And in fact I first learned of him this year with the story that he had in the New Yorker then later a story of his appeared in Harpers. I am wondering if initially this novel started as a collection of shorts. Each chapter reads like it could be a standalone short story.
    When he said he didn’t have a linear through-line I sighed with relief because of how acclaimed this particular novel has been lately but when I read it I realized it is totally chronologically in order. So while each chapter can read as a standalone short there is a chronology here that is not currently in my manuscript.
    This is more of a novella than a novel, that consists of nineteen chapters. The book is small 125 pages and he says that a lot of people ask for more, that they want it longer but he replies that they don’t that it’s really complete. I think I got the impression that he is used to writing in the short form because every word on every page is working, doing some sort of job. In terms of process he says that he doesn’t write tons and tons of pages and narrow it down later that he is economical with his language and revises as he writes. That’s definitely reflected in the tone of his work. He uses the exact right words. For example:

    “ribs softly stepping down from her breasts,”-45

    Torres has a magical grasp on language he can slip in and out of slang and his narrators voice is incredibly unique:

    “We aimed to smile like that.”-4
    “what he was doing was this: making us a salad.”-36

    I think that he does a good job of crediting the reader with intelligence. He doesn’t over-explain. In fact I think he leaves a lot of holes intentionally so the reader can partake in the story.
    There was a new development towards the end of the book but I’m not sure I would call it a surprise. It was just the way the story evolved.
I’m really moved by Justin Torres’ authentic voice. A desperation for honesty.

    “God’s scattered all the clean among the dirty. You and me and Joel, we’re nothing more than a fistful of seed that God tossed into the mud and horseshit. We’re on our own.”-84

    The book made me like him. His voice was witty and charming but more than that I felt his hard work. I get scared a lot that I’m not doing things right and after I read this novel I felt like I got permission to “do me.”

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POWER BABY

2011-09-05T07:12:00.001-07:00

The Ask by Sam Lipsyte

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I used to be a phone hostess. Muscle chat. Guys would call me to simulate wrestling over the phone. There’s a fetish for that. It’s really about the oldest aphrodisiac... power.

Every door closer every window opener every exploiter every opportunity maker is about power and Lipsyte has been coined a “gifted critic of power.” Which really just makes me like him as a person. The irony here is that in real life I work in development for a man that developed something called the power analysis. It’s a way to measure power in the political landscape.

I say irony, because The Ask is a satirical novel about a man, Milo Burke who is a development officer at a third tier art school who will be unemployed if he does not secure a major amount of funding from an old college friend turned Tech Mogul.

This novel was too good in so many ways but what stood out for me the most was the humor. Well the humor coupled with traditional storytelling. As a commie and a writer I heard what I would consider the highest compliment bestowed upon Lipsyte, “literary vanguard” Aahhh music! Something to strive for. The revolution will be written about and it will be funny and entertaining and full of foul language!

What I really enjoyed about this novel is that I, as the reader, felt like I was in on an inside joke with the writer. The jokes were being told through the protagonist but still I felt like I was a part of it. Like he was winking at me. In fact this entire novel was like getting an unexpected yet warranted facebook poke (only political and brilliant) it was just fun is what I’m saying. Here are some examples:

It was an odd moment, as though the narrative had somehow forked and we were witnessing two possible outcomes, the intruders subdued at one end of the room, our friend strangled at the other. The story had to decide.-144

And when I read this I nodded my head. I winked back. I felt like we were in on something together. I laughed and it didn’t break the dream. I just thought Yeah let’s go. Take me there. I’ll go to jail for you. I won’t tell anyone.

Then there was this witty piece of dialogue:
“No, I mean, if I were the protagonist of a book or a movie, it would be hard to like me, to identify with me, right?”
“I would never read a book like that , Milo. I can’t think of anyone who would. There’s no reason for it.”-229

Love it! Get it he IS the protagonist of a book! I am reading it! We are a team now Milo and me because I hate this guy that says no one would read it. I think of the little seal on the cover of my book that says New York TImes Book Review Notable Book of the Year and then I think this jack ass doesn’t know what he’s talking about. But I still have some empathy because maybe that was put on paper when it was being written and it was written from Lipsyte’s most critical mind. Maybe he was afraid when he wrote it and that is the voice of his fear.

About two years ago I started noticing books that spoke directly to the reader. Then there were all those fun footnotes that started coming around. I tried to use those things in my own work. A teacher said that it was too gimmicky. That I shouldn’t play like that until after I got the whole Strunk and White down. Well Lipsyte addressed me as a reader and I think I actually spoke out loud. It takes a lot to do that. I mean it’s one thing for me to go lending out fifteen hours of brain space to a writer so we can take a trip somewhere but to actually feed into the dialogue in physical space? That is not something that happens.

And maybe it was me and some of you who took a nap before dinner, lay back on the sofa with a book, the assigned reading, another novel with the old fashioned folk, their stiff speeches and chafed hearts. Maybe some of you, like me, shut your eyes with the book open on your chest, tumbled into another world, near and impossible, homeroom skin beneath the rain damp denim.
-281

Lastly there were a couple of lines here that were just plain funny. He creates new words in a great way and his dialogue is impeccable but it’s the funny that I’m into.

“The few girls you’ve brought home, they seem like nice girls. But you’ve got to learn how to reach the dirty glory in them.”-50 (father/son talk)

“Was it the one where you’re inside the girl and you are pumping her and pumping her and you are so happy but then it turns out it’s not a girl, it’s really one of those super poisonous box jellyfish, and it stings you and you are screaming and screaming and screaming and the sky rains the diarrhea of babies?”-273 (in reference to a dream)

I’ve been thinking a lot about funny lately. I noticed in a workshop recently peppering all the saddest things with jokes and the saddest jokes made me laugh the hardest. For example one student submitted a story in which a woman had a miscarriage and after the writer used some sultry adjective to describe a conversation between her and her boyfriend. The workshop teacher pointed it out and I cracked, “Hey what’s better than break-up sex?” and made a thumbs up. It was so funny because it was so horrible and awful and sad. I think this reviewer puts it best:

It takes fiction, with its subtlety and interiority and sentence rhythms and essential made-upness, to marry the individually uproarious to the systemically tragic in a way that can be laughed at without, finally, also being laughed off.-Lydia Millet New York Time Sunday Book Review March 4, 2010.

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I am a wrecker and maker of wordhouses. Me and my twin have each other’s backs. And we’re coming for your women and children.-Lidia Yuknavitch

2011-08-25T17:46:00.000-07:00

The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I had a miscarriage once. I didn’t know I was pregnant. I was sixteen and sitting in my brother’s room while he and his friends sat around playing video games. I had cramps. Cramps like I had to shit something real bad. I walked down the long hall of the house into a bathroom off of the kitchen. There was no shower in this bathroom. Just a toilet. And pretty soon a toilet with lots of blood. When I got there I already had blood soaked jeans. I sat quietly breathing little hoo hoo hoo owl sounds to myself, clenching and pushing and breathing. I hid in that bathroom all night. Until people were tucked away in their beds. I snuck into the other bathroom. On the other side of the house. The very far away bathroom. That had a shower. I went there and bathed. There was so much pain in that day. The pain of the miscarriage and the pain of nobody noticing my absence. All night alone with me and my pain. It’s what I had always suspected but still feared.

Lidia Yuknavitch has a way of talking about all these secret shame pains and making it okay. You can be a world of contradictions you can have red combat boots, and have all kinds of crazy sex, and get wasted, and swim like an athlete or a kickass mermaid, and have a PhD, and teach literature, and know all sorts of shit like pedagogy and still speak and write in the most accessible language. She wrote Chronology of Water in such a way that it made me open it and fall into a world I once was in or wished I could be in or sort of tinkered around on the periphery of or once was really the ringleader of and then I would close the book and everything was silent and boring and I never wanted another day to go by without her words. So so grateful for all those words. Here’s some of them:

The victories were small. About the size of a child-36

Even angry girls can be moved to tears.-59

I didn’t know yet how wanting to die could be a bloodsong in your body that lives with you your whole life. -72

“Remember you are Israel Boone! You can do anything! When we get home I’ll make you a buckskin shirt!”

It was a lie. A beautiful, stunningly creative, lifesaving lie.-88

Bennett passing out like a reverse miracle.-117

Me waiting in the dead air like a little lost comma.-137

I am a wrecker and maker of wordhouses. Me and my twin have each other’s backs. And we’re coming for your women and children.-194

You see it is important to understand how damaged people don’t always know how to say yes, or to choose the big thing, even when it is right in front of them. It’s a shame we carry. The shame of wanting something good. The shame of feeling something good. The same of not believing we deserve to stand in the same room in the same way as all those we admire. Big red As on our chests.-199

Thankyouthankyouthankyouthank

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REJECT the SINGLE StoRy

2011-07-05T16:59:00.001-07:00

I've been waiting for this collection

2011-07-02T15:25:00.000-07:00

You Are Free: Stories by Danzy Senna

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I’m Blackapino. Curly hair brown skin. One time my sister, some friends, my sister’s girlfriend, her neighbor and I went to the park in South L.A. We had two white friends with us. The rest of our crew was black but variations of black light, dark, brown. We stood out at this park. Not very many multiracial groups of friends hung out at this part of town. We looked like a Benetton ad. A football game picked up. One of the guys that was at the park wanted to play a certain position. He didn’t get it. He got mad. Him and his gang decided that they were gonna jump us. They said you guys better get the fuck out this park before we beat you up and pull the white girls in the bathroom and rape them and you… (looking at me) whatever the fuck you are we’ll do something to you too!

We piled into the back of my sister’s truck and left. It was sad and scary at the time, still is, but later my sister and I laughed because they got so flustered by my race. My sister looked at me and mocked “and you whatever the fuck you are!”

I tell you this story as an example that although race is not the plot of Danzy Senna’s stories it’s a theme and a strong enough theme for me to go running over to Larchmont to pick up a copy of her newest collection of shorts, You Are Free. I joke with my girlfriend that there is this insider type of communication that exists between us mixed women. A secret head nod or handshake, an eagerness to share hair tips. In fact just before purchasing the book I stopped at the notorious beauty supply store in Larchmont. For those of you who are not aware of this community it is an upper middle class community, the neighborhood that Tracy Ross’ character lives in in Girlfriends. It’s a boutiques and Peets coffee and farmers market type of neighborhood. At the beauty shop there was a small huddle of other biracial women by the divacurls hair products. I was so pleased. I felt like we had all finally arrived. I felt like for this once it was our day. Like when there’s secretary’s day or mother’s day it was bi-racial women in Larchmont day. And when I went to have her sign my book I wanted to say, “I know you and you know me and thank you for articulating all of these little nuances so well.”

It’s probably captured best in her interview with NPR’s Michel Martin when she says these stories begin with an everyday occurrence that take a turn. Meaning it starts out autobiographical and then begins to answer the question ‘What if?’ This allows her to get closer to humanity and also take us on a disturbing journey. At first thought I’m jealous of her life. She has this wonderful gorgeous talented biracial family, she’s a writer her husbands a writer. There’s this one story in her collection What’s the Matter with Helga and Dave? Where the main character and her husband are obsessed with watching The Cosby show and they make all sorts of class based commentaries on the Huxtables, yet Senna and her husband are like the literary Huxtables. The thing is you can’t really get mad, because how many other people of color are there like that in the literary world? I think I can only be grateful. And it absolutely is and is not about race. I mean my heart softens when I see another mixed race person only because of our shared experience our shared knowledge. It’s the same way that my stories really aren’t about growing up in foster care. Each of the stories captures the essence of feeling unloveable about the desperate desire to be special, to be chose, and yet when I meet other people that have lived in foster are or were adopted my heart also softens.

All of these stories are great but by far the most brilliant story in this collection is Triptych, this is a story of a daughter’s grief for her mother. The daughter can not remember the specific details of her mother’s death so Senna rewrites and retells the story several different ways with several different details all in the end spelling out the same story, a story of pain that there aren’t many words for. To tell a story that there aren’t many words for is a very difficult thing. This collection is a gift.
Thank you.

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Danzy Senna on NPR

2011-07-02T14:43:00.001-07:00

Fall in love this summer

2011-07-02T14:16:00.000-07:00

The Hummingbird's Daughter by Luis Alberto Urrea

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Luis Alberto Urrea does a really beautiful thing in this novel. He creates a little brown girl for everyone to love. That is something the world needs that we can not get enough of. He’s a man and he’s so light he can pass for anything white and I’m sure he is mistaken for a guerra all the time and none of these are things for him or anyone to apologize for it’s just that when a writer does this, creates a little brown girl for everyone to love, I trust them I love them back, I feel they know and respect me in a way that I might have assumed wasn’t possible before.

The day before writing this annotation I was in my car crying. I was crying because I had some pain around work. And there was the pain that was connected to facts and the pain that was connected to feelings. Feelings of deceit, of sadness and disappointment. Today in writing this I get to see things in a different light :

“You cannot win your argument with God,”she said. “You are angry-you were orphaned. Your parents died when you were just a boy. You shake your fist at God, and you cry and curse Him every night in your bed. But you cannot win. In the morning, He is still there, waiting for you. All unbelievers are the same.”
“And you always thought it made you different. You always felt unique. Above all the fools who followed God. But everyone who stops believing thinks he is the smartest one. You all compete with each other, not with God. Do you know how a child says ‘I’m not afraid’ when she’s afraid? How a child will tell you how innocent he is no matter if there is a broken window and he stands before you holding rocks? You unbelievers are like that. Sad little boys.”

This is a story about a prophetic little girl, a saint, an indigenous child who was the bastard daughter of a Mexican aristrocat and an Indigenous woman who worked in his household. A Native American with untold powers, that everyone referred to as Hummingbird. This daughter inherited these powers. Her gift for healing and medicine leant itself most to assisting in childbirth.

She learned that women were braver than men. Braver and stronger. She learned that she herself could one day stretch open as wide as a window and it would not kill her. Teresita leaned forward and said her first birth prayer, whispering to the new one who still remembered the stars and the lights, “Your job is to survive.” Connected to the earth, she understood the words. They were terrible and true. 272

And if in every generation this power increases it grew even more with her personal knowledge as with this child she was stubborn and determined and learned to read and write.

She startled her father with her politics always lobbying for the worker. Her uncle that taught her to read and write began a newspaper.

“I love politics, Father,” Teresita exclaimed. “I will write for Uncle Lauro.”
“But,” he sputtered, “what do you know of politics?”
“God gave this land to these people,” she replied. “Other people want this land and are stealing it.”
She drained her coffee cup and put it in the middle of her empty plate.
“Politics,” she said.-350

And so this novel blends the two most imperative principles of my life politics and faith. I set out to organize the Young Communist League in Los Angeles when I was a teenager. There was a lot in the manifesto that preached against organized religion. The woman that mentored me was a Chicana activist. She mentioned church to me one day. I asked her if it was a conflict to believe in God. She said , “No way Jesus was a carpenter, a laborer. If Jesus were around today he’d be here with us. Jesus was a communist.” Similarly the main character Teresita states, “This is how Heaven works. They’re practical. We are always looking for rays of light. For lightning bolts or burning bushes. But God is a worker, like us. He made the world- He didn’t hire poor Indios to build it for him! God has workers hands. Just remember-angels carry no harps. Angels carry hammers.”-94

From a craft perspective Urrea has mastered seamless POV shifts, has put together beautiful words, and created a story ripe with tension and magic.

From a human perspective he has helped answer the challenge I most grapple with. The young woman with her healing powers has now attracted a town full of people that line up and camp outside her front gates to get healed by her. Every morning she goes out on the front steps and greets the villagers she makes a small speech she heals people, she breaks for meals and the restroom and in the early evening goes off to bed. One night the Pope came to her, he did not believe in her powers, he found her sacreligous. He wondered though, how she could rest or sleep with all these people outside. What if they died? She replied:
“Tell me which is worse, Pope Chavez-is it that God cannot cure them all, or that He will not cure them?”
“You should know the answer,” she said. “You should know what it is you really think of God.”
She got up from the seat.
“Then,” she continued, “you should decide why the president of Mexico does not help these people.”
“God likes tools,” she said. “You and I, we are the tools of God. We cannot afford to rust or break. Do you see?”-377

And that simple excerpt reminded me how important it is for me to care for myself because denying myself my basic needs or thinking that I somehow have the capacity to shift outcomes is like saying I am larger than God or this universe or whatever it is you believe moves things forward. If you are in the mood to fall in love with a little brown girl you should read this book. If you are in a bad mood and feel hate or resentment or sadness creeping to the surface, you need to read this book.

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save some money on therapy

2011-07-01T21:10:00.001-07:00

Episode 3: Bucket Writing (I'm A Failed Writer Series) from Yuvi Zalkow on Vimeo.

Click here and help an amazing program

2011-06-28T19:05:00.000-07:00

So what if a cartoon made me cry?

2011-06-25T15:52:00.001-07:00

The Icing on the Cake from StoryCorps on Vimeo.

My hero Studs Terkel tells a story

2011-06-25T15:48:00.001-07:00

The Human Voice from StoryCorps on Vimeo.

they say when one door closes another window opens but the hallway sucks

2011-06-24T15:14:00.001-07:00

The Hallway from The Hallway on Vimeo.

For Father's Day

2011-06-20T08:13:00.001-07:00

Another Brilliant presentation by Yuvi!

2011-06-08T06:51:00.000-07:00

THE TRUTH ABOUT LOVE CAVES

2011-05-30T15:00:00.001-07:00

In the Lake of the Woods by Tim O'Brien

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I have a friend that speaks of a love cave. A place where she is able to hunker down with her lover. Where they could participate in a particularly all encompassing brand of love. The love of vampires. They do not leave the cave. They feast on each other’s blood they piss and shit and fuck in the cave. There is no need for anything else.

    O’Brien’s main character, John Wade takes us there. To this cave. We see his deceit as it is played out in the war, his desperate need for all of his wife, his hunger for political victory.

    Sometimes he hated himself for needing love so badly.-60

There were times when John Wade wanted to open up Kathy’s belly and crawl inside and stay there forever. He wanted to swim through her blood and climb up and down her spine and drink her ovaries and press his gums against the firm red muscle of her heart. He wanted to suture their lives together.-71

Such eyes,, he’d think. He’d want to suck them from their sockets.-71

The unborn child in her heart.-250

O’Brien writes with a rhythm lots of ands and frenzied manic pace when his character is on an upswing of murdering plants with boiling water.

The killing went on for hours. It was thorough and systematic. In the morning sunlight, which shifted from pink to purple, people were shot dead and carved up with knives and raped and sodomized and bayoneted and blown into scraps.-200

    Just as I am intrigued by the love that lies at the bottom of the rabbit hole, the kind you find in the love cave I’m intrigued by Wade’s obsession with his own wife, with magic. This is a dark novel but in the end in a footnote O’Brien speaks directly to me.

On occasion, especially when I’m alone, I find myself wondering if these old tattered memories weren’t lifted from someone else’s life, or from a piece of fiction I once read or once heard about. My own war does not belong to me. In a peculiar way, even at this very instant, the ordeal of John Wade-the long decades of silence and lies and secrecy-all this has a vivid, living clarity that seems far more authentic than my own faraway experience. Maybe that’s what this book is for. To remind me. To give me back my varnished life. -298

The significance of this passage is that I have been toying with this idea of linked shorts I have with my manuscript. After reading this I realized I am still playing it safe with some of my stories. I need to travel to the other side. The side that would truly link the stories would mean navigating the lives of some horrific abusive people in a way that is loving a way that will give me back not just my tarnished body but my tarnished life.

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THE MOST FUN I'VE HAD IN A LONG TIME

2011-05-30T13:56:00.000-07:00

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

One of my professor’s taught me this neat trick on how to reveal information to the reader that the character might not be aware of. I was struggling with the concept of “the big reveal.” I wanted to very slowly expose the reader to information the BLAM! Knock’em with the actual happenings. My professor stopped me. He said it was much better to give the reader everything up front. That readers don’t like it when you’re coy with them. Plus it offers the ingredient that all stories need… tension. He gave the bomb under the table example. I guess there’s this Alfred Hitchcock film where he puts a bomb under the table the audience can see it but the people sitting at the table cannot. So this professor suggested I do things like say, “What Susie didn’t know then was….” Jennifer Egan does this completely masterfully she tells whole stories with information that the characters don’t know yet. Here are just a couple of examples of that.

Egan

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Circe, The Video

2011-05-26T06:46:00.000-07:00

Circe, The Video

826LA GOOD TIMES: My First Visit

2011-05-23T20:57:00.000-07:00

The most amazing thing about Monday nights!

826LA GOOD TIMES: My First Visit: "We are Sara and Celeste. We are both in 4th grade in the same classroom at Sierra Madre school. We are at 826la because last week Celeste'..."

www.RaptureHatch.com | Jesus Needs New PR

2011-05-20T17:03:00.000-07:00

www.RaptureHatch.com | Jesus Needs New PR

a neat little thing

2011-05-17T08:12:00.001-07:00

How big corporations get out of paying taxes

2011-05-16T06:43:00.001-07:00

[Source: OnlineMBA.com]

Something I'm working on

2011-05-07T14:55:00.001-07:00

The best damn tax training you ever had

View more presentations from Melissa Chadburn

ONE OF THOSE STORIES YOU DON't NORMALLY HEAR ABOUT

2011-05-05T12:59:00.000-07:00

Hero Dog Honored For Saving Family From Fire: MyFoxLA.com

wowowoow

2011-05-04T07:43:00.001-07:00

Scott Weaver's Rolling through the Bay from Learning Studio on Vimeo.

Click here for the amazing wild story of Gary Faulkner

2011-05-02T17:20:00.000-07:00

A strange thing happened the other day. I was in a 12-step meeting and the word "American" creeped in. People started saying "I look like a regular American woman but I'm not." Or I just want to be an American guy." It thought why the underlying patriotism? What were people watching on T.V. or listening to on the radio before they got here.

Then late last night the news of bin Laden came. That he was caught and murdered. I immediately thought of Gary Faulkner. I read this outrageous article in GQ magazine last year about a man who dedicated his life to hunting Osama bin Laden. I wondered what he is doing now.

It reminded me of this man that had Down Syndrome that was obsessed with the song Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. One summer I worked at Tower Records and he would come in everyday looking for the soundtrack for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. There wasn't one. You actually couldn't say the words "Chitty chitty bang bang" around him because he would get so excited he would giggle until he wet his pants. One time I made a soundtrack for him. I watched the movie and then recorded the songs by holding my ghetto blaster up to the TV and recording them on a blank tape. I gave it to him. You think he would be happy but he was just confused. This was his mission everyday. What would he do now?

I wonder what Gary Faulkner is doing today.

My friend Yuvi does a really brilliant piece on desks

2011-05-01T21:13:00.001-07:00

Desk Envy from Yuvi Zalkow on Vimeo.

If you click here you can read a silly story I wrote

2011-04-30T15:37:00.001-07:00

There's HOPE for MEEEE!!!!

2011-04-30T07:35:00.001-07:00

If heavy metal were a feeling

2011-04-25T17:53:00.001-07:00

My Life in Heavy Metal by Steve Almond

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

When I am doing something tough and competitive like submitting my writing to contests or running up mountains or completing this ridiculously tragic account of my submission process, called my submission tracker than I’m a hip hop girl. I’m all 50 cent and Kanye West and I listen to stuff that would make me wear my game face and do tough things and I holler out random shit “I got ninety-nine problems but a bitch ain’t one.”
Initially I thought Steve Almond’s ‘My Life in Heavy Metal’ was his memoir but it’s not. If heavy metal were a feeling and an adjective, like describe your most heavy metal moment meant to describe your most kick-ass parentally unacceptable moment of your life, than ‘My Life in Heavy Metal’ is a series of shorts that captures this moment. His stories were both hilarious and sexy which actually don’t really contradict one another. His writing was fun and smart.
    “I saw twenty heads banging in unison, like angry mops. These were kids lousy with the bad hormones of adolescence, humiliated by the poverty of their prospects, and this was their dance, their chance to be part of some larger phallic brotherhood; the notes lashed their rib cages, called out to their beautiful, furious wishes.”-3
    I went to a lecture of Almond’s once on the Lyric Register and I thought he was talking about cadence but he is not he is talking about compression of sensual and psychological detail. It wasn’t until recently that I learned I do not fight fair. I become incredibly articulate when I’m fighting. I do that because my hip hop beast goes on overdrive within me and I think I need to shut down my opponent. It works. I shut my opponent down. My most beloved partner moves quietly shut down for hours sometimes days. I hate it. It’s the worst thing ever. I do not feel like I win at all. I have a friend who is a writer. She writes experimental fiction and captures some very complex ideas in her stories. She has the word “Ineffable” tattooed on her shoulder. Yet when she fights she uses really simple language. She says, “You’re hurting my feelings.” or “I don’t like that.”
    Almond writes, “Many young writers believe that if they throw enough beauty at the page, the result will be truth. In fact, just the opposite is true. The effort to express complex emotional truths with precision is what leads language to rise into beauty.”
    He’s right, and I have found if you follow this advice- to be precise and simple in your language at the most important times- that not only could your writing improve but your life in general may improve as well.
    “But you see, I was drawn to the beach, the ocean’s foamy brink, which smelled of salt and sex and reckless chances.” -65

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Evolution

2011-04-09T09:01:00.001-07:00

Chamber.350.org from Hans Hansen on Vimeo.

Another Fun Book!

2011-04-03T11:54:00.001-07:00

An Invisible Sign of My Own by Aimee Bender

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This novel makes numbers fun and creative and magical. I read this novel and laughed and felt terror and did all the things that good novels do. It’s an incredibly fast read. Then I got really geeky and started finding ways to make numbers fun again and I came across this place called the Institute for Figuring. Which is rad and well... The Institute For Figuring is an organization dedicated to the poetic and aesthetic dimensions of science, mathematics and the technical arts.

These women crocheted a coral reef and did this huge installation and they made math neat. Just like Aimee Bender makes math neat and numbers neat in this novel. But also it speaks to the delicate balance of things. The things we do to make things feel just right. For me it was to live sock free. I did not like the confines of a sock. My toes felt stifled. I needed to wiggle them. I lived sock free all through junior High school so.... around age thirteen. What else, well I sucked my thumb till I was eight. But I think we all have funny little strange quirks that we do to make the world feel right to us. I used to look to the clock to make decisions like waking up and reading. I broke up time very figuratively. I would not get out of bed if it was say 6:23 It had to be a multiple of 5 so I would get out at 6:25 or 6:30 but not something so strange as 6:22. Like that. In addition to capturing the magic that comprises the fragile balance of her character’s days her prose is beautiful.

“I used to think death might be hidden somewhere on our bodies. Tucked behind the pupil like a coin, slid beneath the thumbnail, ribbon-wrapped around a wrist bone. A sharp, dark sliver; a loose , pale pellet. Each person different. Each lifespan set. On the day of your death it melts out through your entire body, a warm, broken bath bead.”-74

“my lungs grew sharp with air and want.”-79

“I quit because winning is lonely.”-80

“It’s dark and quiet, two people in the house, lying flat, only two left now, two until one, and they both fall asleep again with their fingers clustered together on his throat like a plain pink jewelry.”-100

“I am waiting, and my hope is eighty airplanes, poised on the runway, ready for takeoff; please, please, please. And then he smiles. No, he says.”-220

FUCK FUCK FUCK... yeah

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music boxes and rain

2011-03-24T17:07:00.003-07:00

The Girl in the Flammable Skirt by Aimee Bender

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I had a teacher in college that wrote speculative fiction she suggested that in writing speculative fiction you just change one thing and keep everything else realistic, but to keep in mind all the changes that come with changing that one thing. Like if the world were flat rather than round than perhaps we would not travel by boat… etc.

Aimee Bender does a brilliant job and changing the one thing. I found her stories refreshing and fun. Her work was reminiscent of Martin Amis and Salvador Plascencia. She writes of a man who experienced evolution backwards, a narcissist that picks up on a man that doesn’t fuck her, a woman whose husband returns from the war without lips, a woman that receives a gift not intended for her, a woman who gives birth to her mother while he husband’s stomach (not the organ but the torso region) disappears, a librarian who loses her father and has sex with most of the male patrons of the library, a drunk mermaid, a girl that wants to have sex with anther girl’s belly button, a girl with a hand made of fire and another girl with a hand made of ice.

You get the point. The sky’s the limit. I’ve been reading a lot of short stories lately. In fact this collection of shorts reminds me of another short I read. A short story written by Charles Baxter, Gryphon, the title of his short story collection. The story was about an incredible substitute teacher, a woman that came in and changed the rules of math and told stories about Gryphon’s (A.K.A. Griphon’s) the creature with the body of a lion and head and wings of an eagle. She spoke of the Gryphon as if it were real.
The way that relates to this collection of stories is that it makes me excited in the way that magical babysitter or substitute teacher made me excited when I was younger. When I was a little girl I believed that if when it rained I left out a small music box and some bread crumbs and built a sort of pool slide from the music box to a little saucer that tiny elves would come. That is what I believed. That’s probably where and when and how all this story telling started so I am happy to be able to go to The Girl in The Flammable Skirt and be met with so much fun. Not to mention the prose… amazing.

“The last day I saw him human, he was ad about the world. That was not unusual. He was always sad about the world. It was a large reason why I loved him. We’d sit together and be sad and think about being sad and sometimes discuss sadness.”
-The Rememberer

“I want to be breathless and weak, crumpled by the entrance of another person inside my soul. I want to be violated by insight.”
-Call My Name

“everything is private inside my mouth.”
-FUGUE

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I LOVE ME PANCAKES!

2011-03-22T18:02:00.001-07:00

心よりお悔やみ申し上げます

2011-03-18T12:21:00.000-07:00

kokoro yori okuyami moushiagemasu
From the heart I give you my condolences

When I was a little girl a paper koi kite hung in our kitchen.
I loved it. I didn’t know why. It turns out we got it one year in Okinawa for on my brother’s birthday. I’m not sure who his mother was. Perhaps it was even my mom. They say my father adopted him but I find that hard to imagine. My papa was a rollin’ stone. It’s a Japanese tradition to fly a kite on the day of your son’s birth. Our kite just sat thumb tacked to the kitchen wall in our apartment in Westwood, CA. I wanted to fly it so bad.

I’m so sorry for your loss’ Japan. Thank you for bringing:
magical rice candy with disappearing paper wrapping
carb free seaweed snacks to our Trader Joe’s soccer moms
thank you for the Udon and fish so sleek and fresh no one can find a better metaphor than pussy or butter
thank you for the art of tea the art of Geisha
a thousand different brands of patience
thank you for making me want to be my best self, like a smart chiseled porcelain doll version of me
thank you for diligence and serenity and quiet
thank you for celebrating the black in me
with fashionable big hair and padded underwear and make-up that says, “kiss the heart on my mouth”

thank you for delicacy and precision

I remember hearing a radio show once about a woman that was testing to be an astronaut. One of the attributes they look for in astronauts is resilience.
In the U.S. when they want to test a perspective applicant’s resilience they have all of them sit in a room and then offer lunch off schedule, or have them all share a broken toilet, or call you late at night.
In Japan they give you the “thousand cranes test”. They have the prospective applicants make a thousand cranes out of origami and then they inspect the cranes to see if they were the same in precision and scope.

I never got that gene, the precision. Put me in a room with hundreds of strangers and serve me lunch late ,or never, no problem but do not ask me to cut a straight line. I can not. Which is what I admire so much in others.

an idea worth spreading

2011-03-14T21:33:00.003-07:00

Get IT!

2011-03-13T17:34:00.001-07:00

Electric Literature no. 3 by Electric Literature

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Hate it or love it the underdog's on top
And I'm gonna shine homie until my heart stop

Go 'head envy me
I'm raps MVP
And I ain't goin' nowhere so you can get to know me

That’s it. That’s my secret. 50 cent. It’s my theme song. For when I submit my work. My other secret isn’t so much of a secret. I read a lot. I read right before I sit down to write. If I find a really great story or journal I read it over and over again. It makes me bring what I call my “A game” It’s funny I don’t know sports but whenever I talk about my writing I like to use sports analogies. A friend and I use them with each other. The most unlikeliest of people to say “Oh that one was a hail mary.” Or “Three pointer!” After each submission.
I enjoyed this journal so much I bought two copies one for my kindle and one PDF version. I have been immersing myself in short stories lately. Studying the short form
My favorite stories were Aimee Bender’s Red Ribbon and Matt Sumell’s Little Things. Matt Sumell’s story gave me tons of hope. Primarily hope for the slush pile. Hope that people still read it because he did not have any representation and also hope that there are other wonderful brilliant talented writers in that pile keeping all of us new booties good company.
Another thing I loved about this issue was that Electric Literature did this fun project where they made one sentence animated films based on the stories in it. Here’s an example. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZ-YpQmVs...
Their mission is “to use new media and innovative distribution to return the short story to a place of prominence in popular culture.”
They are a quarterly anthology of five top-notch short stories, delivered in every viable medium. Basically I love what they are doing I am into it. It is fun it is exciting and it makes me look forward to going to my mailbox.
There are four stories that I go back to over and over again before I write. 1) is Joyce Carol Oates’ I.D. that appeared in the March 2010 issue of the New Yorker
2) is Charles Baxter’s The Next Building I Plan to Bomb which appeared in his latest collection of short stories 3) is Rob Roberge’s Border Radio that appears in his latest collection of short stories Working Backwards From the Worst Moment of My Life and now 4) is Matt Sumell’s Little Things.
That’s a big fucken’ deal that means that these stories make me want to bring my A-Game they make me puff up and listen to 50 cent and write and review my muthafuckin’ ass off! For that I’m forever grateful.

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'America Is NOT Broke': Michael Moore Speaks in Madison, WI -- March 5, ...

2011-03-09T18:58:00.000-08:00

Good Read for the Lonely

2011-03-08T18:17:00.000-08:00

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I learned something today. Southern Gothic. I read Carson McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and am delighted by it. I’m even more delighted by the writer herself. Her extraordinary face. She looks like To Kill A Mockingbird’s narrator Scout looks in my mind. Although I’m sure Scout is probably Harper Lee but still that face with it’s ovalness and her droopie eyes and a cigarette and a hair cut that reminds me of a plastic bowl.
So when I looked her up online I came across this new genre of writing, well new to me. According to Wikipedia: “Southern Gothic is a subgenre of gothic fiction unique to American literature that takes place exclusively in the American South. It resembles its parent genre in that it relies on supernatural, ironic, or unusual events to guide the plot. It is unlike its parent genre in that it uses these tools not solely for the sake of suspense, but to explore social issues and reveal the cultural character of the American South.”
As Flannery O'Connor remarked, "anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic."[1
I took a writing class where the instructor talked about writing in the lyric register. He defined the lyric register as the being marked by a compression of sensual and psychological detail. I interpreted it to mean that perfect signature pitch. This is all relevant because Carson McCullers moved to New York when she was accepted to Julliard School of Music as a pianist. She never went because she lost the money that was set aside for her to attend. The protagonist in The Heart…., Mick a sassy young girl , dreamed of owning a piano and writing symphonies. She would explain walking alone at night and hearing music, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony for example, and getting it stuck in her mind. Then going home and writing it down. It reminded me of a radio show I heard once on Synesthesia, the ability to see sound in color.
Sometimes I suffer from what I call a general malaise. It’s not a full blown depression. Just a malaise. The anecdote for this feeling of blah… is contrary action. To do something even if I don’t want to. Take a shower, go to the gym, get dressed up. The lyric register of this novel was a malaise that set itself over an entire town. One thing McCullers does that I admire was her neutrality. This reminded me of Studs Terkel’s interviewing style. There is something about this level of honesty that is more effective than taking a slant. She had black, white, deaf mute, and Marxist characters of varied classes and backgrounds. To have them all together in a novel is even more progressive than modern day television. There was talk last week of television shows utilizing “behavior placement” rather than product placement. One person that called in suggested that they would like to see more diverse friendships reflected on television. It seemed so archaic to be talking about this now. The caller emphasized that they didn’t mean just one token friend of color but a truly mixed group of people hanging out.
In Richard Wright’s review of the novel he stated, “There are times when Miss McCullers deliberately suppresses the naturally dramatic in order to linger over and accentuate the more obscure, oblique and elusive emotions.” He also said that you can not read this novel without wondering about the author. She wrote this novel when she was only twenty two. All of Carson McCullers's fiction, from ''The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter'' (1940) through ''The Member of the Wedding'' (1946), ''The Ballad of the Sad Cafe'' (1951) and ''Clock Without Hands'' (1961), is concerned, at heart, with a single theme: the loneliness of isolated individuals and their painful yearning to connect. McCullers's compassion for her disenfranchised characters -- an awkward teenage girl, a deaf-mute, a crossed-eyed recluse -- had roots in her own short, painful life. Rheumatic fever and a series of strokes left her a virtual invalid in her early 30's, and her two marriages to Reeves McCullers, a failed writer who shared her taste for alcohol, would devolve into spectacular acrimony and dysfunction. They cheated on one another with same sex lovers.
“What Miss McCullers's heroes hunger for most of all is love, which has the power to heal and redeem. Love for them is something incalculable and wild, frequently bearing little relationship to the nature of the beloved. It tends to arrive unexpectedly and violently, but it also tends to skitter away just as precipitously, leaving them hurt, damaged and often bitter.” — Michiko Kakutani

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Haha it's Me!

2011-03-08T08:50:00.001-08:00

COME OUT AND PLAY!

2011-02-24T17:17:00.001-08:00

WISDOM!

2011-02-23T08:11:00.001-08:00

HAPPY ACCIDENTS

2011-02-19T12:45:00.001-08:00

The Empty Family: Stories by Colm Tóibín

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

    I know a teacher who is bright and colorful and distinct. She lives in Mexico and travels back to Culver City CA twice a year to teach at this low residency MFA program. She spoke with a stutter sometimes and I think this may cause her to slow down and build patience with words. This may help hone her craft because sometimes she held out her hand and touched her thumb and index finger like she was holding an invisible pair of castanets in the air. I thought she was catching sounds. She gave the most precious promise. She said she would help you find your voice. I only had her once. Very briefly for a workshop. Today I realize how important that is to have an authentic signature tone and voice. How lucky I was to have her indicate with excitement in the margins , “Right here! This is your voice!”
    Colm Toibin does this, has a voice. I’m sure it is our nature to try to find what other writers are like the ones we like. What other novels are similar. Like on Amazon when you order a novel and it gives you five other suggestions. My first inclination was to look at other Irish writers, I’ve only read one that I know of, James Joyce. I read the Dubliners in an advanced placement class in high school. I have to say there was something distinctly morose in both this novel and Joyce’s work. But Toibin still had his own signature voice that is unlike any other. I think the melancholy after taste might also be Irish.
    Perhaps it is what he calls an ‘inwardness’. In this interview with booksluthe states, “Almost not having a language that my parents used or my grandparents used is easier for me. I can get a tone. I’m not talking about a neutral tone, as much as a tone in which many many things are just not being said. And it’s an inwardness.”
    In this same interview his sex scenes were sort of criticized. I guess for being scarce. That in Brooklyn, which I hadn’t read, I guess sex occurred but it wasn’t really acknowledged. In his defense he says, “And then you have to remember something else. I don’t think I saw anyone naked until I put my mind to the subject, aged around 20. I was at a boy’s boarding school. We had locks on the doors to the showers. You changed in your own cubicle. You had your own cubicle. You spent your time making sure all your clothes were on. I know Americans go around naked all the time.”
    I found this alarming because in The Empty Family I thought there were so many lovely terribly intimate scenes. The type of scenes that required a lot of patience and empathy.   For example
“He found himself inhaling and releasing breath as a way of nourishing that space, and he breathed in hard for a second at the thought that nourishing it like this was maybe all he would ever be able to do with it.”

“There was a taste from his breath I had never encountered before. It was the taste of garlic. And even now, should I smell someone’s breath, it carries an erotic charge with it, a sense of pure easy pleasure, beautiful lips and tongues and teeth and the promise of soft warm skin and sex.”

I also read what I thought to be some of the most erotic sex scenes.

“As I put my dick inside him as fully as I could and began as slowly as possible to fuck him trying to keep going until he seemed to be both hurt and happy at the same time.”

This reminded me most of James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room

But this time when I touched him something happened in him and in me which made this touch different from any touch either of us had ever known. (1.1.18)

Perhaps it was because he looked so innocent lying there, with such perfect trust; perhaps it was because he was so much smaller than me; my own body suddenly seemed gross and crushing and the desire which was rising in me seemed monstrous. But, above all, I was suddenly afraid. It was borne in me: But Joey is a boy. (1.1.19)

In the end though Toibin preserved this unique voice. The story I was most enrapt with was the final story in the series a tragic love story of two Pakistani men living and working in Barcelona. I sat up late mildly sick with a fever sweating and shivering until I had finished reading it. When I read this explanation in his earlier bookslut interview I realized why I was so captured by this voice with these stories.

    “Some of the impulse for this [book] is entirely political. I’m not sure how much. I wouldn’t like to put a percentage on it. But certainly, there were times in the last 15 years where I felt alone in Ireland in my views on immigration. Even with friends who would have views on it, I would say, “You’re talking rubbish.” I believed -- and I know this is an unsustainable belief -- in an open door policy. We had to have an open door policy when Poland joined the EU. We had absolutely no choice. And the Poles arrived in droves. And they added to our society in every possible way. They were good-looking. They were polite. They were hard-working. When you saw them on the street, it lifted my heart. And I felt the same about the Nigerians and the Chinese. And I felt that we had to change our attitudes towards them entirely. And part of the feeling for this was from having spent time in Canada and having watched in recent years the way in which Canada has dealt with what they called the “new Canadians.” Every city in the world has its areas and zones and… there were two streets in Dublin that were being made into a local mythology. And I also watched the way the Pakistanis moved into Barcelona and added life to one of the most rundown, sad parts of the city center…”

Because of their timeliness and their purpose. It’s rare that we get to do what we love and give to a greater purpose at the same time. It’s what I call a happy accident.

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americans

2011-02-19T12:27:00.000-08:00

I suppose what I’m talking about, at its most insulting level, is the difference between a peach as bought in a market in the Spanish Pyrenees in high August filled with acids and sugars and every taste you could imagine and a peach that looks just as good that you buy in an American supermarket. You know there’s no taste off your peaches. I’m sorry to tell you this. There’s a surface level of American life where there’s so much charm and luxury attached to it that, if you’re Irish especially, you long for somebody to say, “Oh fuck I’ve got that.” You long just for some rage to come up from it. Or wit. But more than that, you long for a darkness to emerge from it. So there’s a game going on between light and darkness.-Colm Toibin

TIME OUT FOR LOVE! SIGN THIS PETITION!

2011-02-18T10:17:00.001-08:00

Petitions by Change.org|Start a Petition »

Author Insides - Melissa Chadburn

2011-02-14T07:46:00.000-08:00

Author Insides - Melissa Chadburn

Nice shorts

2011-02-04T16:17:00.001-08:00

Gryphon: New and Selected Stories by Charles Baxter

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I’ve sort of been stalking Charles Baxter for two years now. I wrote my thesis in college based on one of his essays in Burning Down the House, on how to utilize stillness in fiction.
He had a way of pontificating on both politics and fiction, two of my favorite things. Very loosely put his theory was that people don’t slow down enough in their writing because they are afraid of death.
    I followed him to AWP. I stayed in an old co-worker’s apartment in Logan’s Square. At the time I lived on American Spirits menthol cigarettes and coffee and she lived on 2 liter bottles of diet pepsi. Just to give you a sense of how different we were.
    I bought a second copy of Burning Down the House just for him to sign because the other one I owned was all written on with copious notes and dabbled with coffee spills. I said, “I wrote my thesis on your essay on Stillness in Fiction.” I did not say, “I purchased my ticket to AWP and flew to Chicago and have been staying with a chronic diet Pepsi drinker just for this moment.”
I was scared. I guess if I wasn’t scared I could’ve said a lot of things. I could’ve said, “I have a gun tucked into the waistband of my underpants and if you don’t come with me upstairs and tell me all your secrets I will be forced to use it.
    Then knowing that literary fiction writers are empathetic, if he looked at me strangely I would continue, “Not on you. On me. I will reach into my underwear waistband and shoot off my right foot. Right here.”
    But I didn’t say that. It wasn’t true. If John Updike’s stories and Joyce Carol Oates’ stories had gotten together and had a short story collection baby it would be Charles Baxter’s Gryphon. And yes it is white and male but don’t let that stop you because it’s damn good.
From it I plucked many writerly gems. Just because I lay them out here does not mean you can skip reading this collection.
    There was the ‘What no one else knows..”
Which is a great way to preface an admission, a tidbit about the character that is different or unexpected or a way to give back story.
“He turned around and walked through the garage, past a pile of snow tires and two rusted out bicycles. I followed him, thinking of my boys this morning at their scout meeting, and of my wife, out shopping or maybe home by now and wondering vaguely where I was. I was supposed to be getting groceries. Here I was in this garage. She would look at the clock, do something else, then look back at the clock.” -137
-Smart a great way to travel into the mind, thoughts, and actions of another character.
“In the story that would end here.... But this story has a ways to go...” I read this and threw an attaboy signal to Charles Baxter (being that’ve I’ve been stalking him for two years I will herein after refer to Mr. Baxter as Chuck).
“A moment later he is gone from the spot where he stood. No doubt he has returned to his job at the bank, and that is where we must leave him.”-237
Nice, I really enjoyed this trick. There were times when I felt like a story was finished but I knew I had to answer some readers questions this seemed like a very cordial way to end things.
I could go on and on but I’d like to now leave you the reader with two of Chuck’s witticisms that will hopefully make reading this review in it’s entirety well worth it.
“He wakes on Saturday morning and makes quiet closed door love to his wife.” -239
“Like a little big thing -a micro rape.”-284.

Smart too smart.

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Had to post this today!

2011-02-02T08:40:00.003-08:00

Guernica / Loose Morals

2011-02-01T18:17:00.000-08:00

Guernica / Loose Morals

the totally hip video book reviewer

2011-01-29T07:58:00.001-08:00

I had a friend send me this. She said it made her think of me. It made me very happy

2011-01-28T08:48:00.001-08:00

clip of Take Your Picture with a Puma from Jennifer Levonian on Vimeo.

click here to read a really cool review of neighborhoods

2011-01-19T10:11:00.000-08:00

I didn't just add this because I'm in it I really like reading about other people's hoods.

Short story writers... read closely

2011-01-17T11:32:00.000-08:00

Working Backwards from Worst by Rob Roberge

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

If you ask Rob Roberge which he prefers, performing in one of his punk bands or reading before an audience he might look down at the ground then back at you quizzically and repeat, “Prefer?”
You might then feel regret about your question because anyone can see that anything that draws too much attention to this brand of person can be slightly excruciating.
By this brand of person,I mean an isolated genius that is touched with insanity in a way that still works for him until it doesn’t but then later it does again.
Or you just might feel discomfort because there is a pause and pauses are uncomfortable for most people. He’ll wipe it away when he explains, “Well probably reading because I know I’m good at it.”
Right then you will know it’s true for a guy as self-deprecating and modest as Roberge to say he is good at something he must be damn good at it. After hearing him read you find it’s true.
In reading his collection of shorts Working Backwards... that’s all I could think, damn he’s good. Roberge has really mastered the craft of the short story. I read and re-read them going back to them before I sit down to write. Deconstructing them. There is a whole class to be taught on them. I mean I like my stories like I like my music kind of grimy and dirty but smart too. The way he is able to loop his stories around, take you on a ride and then plop you right back in that La-Z-Boy he started you in is fascinating. I get all heady and geek-out and start marking up his stories and then I remember the simplicity of it all. I go back to before the MFA before Freytag just remember how to tell a good story and have conflict. Every story has to have some conflict. This is what I’ve learned from Rob. Suddenly I feel really lucky to have access to that great story telling brain. And he’s not selfish with it either, he doesn’t guard his brain like a secret, in fact he’s pretty generous with it. Just read his stories; it’s all there, everything you need to know about how to write a short story. Forget what you’ve learned. For example how many times have you heard show don’t tell? Well this is Roberge telling and it is brilliant :

The exterminator:
Bites his nails.
Suffers from insomnia.
Hates driving a van that’s made to look like a giant rodent.
Has not always been an exterminator.
Has a daughter he’s never seen.
Can’t stand to be alone.
Is not fond of others.
Has a Beagle named Fausto.
Smokes two packs of cigarettes a day.
Goes to AA meetings sometimes.
Knows a man who glazes hams for a living, a man he used to drink with.
Misses drinking more than his daughter.
Is not bothered by not seeing his daughter.
Is bothered that it doesn’t bother him.
Is standing in snowfall.
Then he goes back to the exposition of what the exterminator is doing. Then later he tells again. Only I guess it’s not really telling it’s more of a cross between telling and showing it’s shelling or thowing...

The exterminator will:
In a moment, go inside and ask for a jump.
Go to the office.
Dump the rat and glue strip off to be cremated.
Log his hours....

you get the point.

In another one of his stories, Love and Hope and Sex and Dreams

His character is spitting on a little ant highway and then prophecies:

Tomorrow, I will get two phone calls.
Then he goes into what will take place in the calls which really tells the reader everything they need to know about this character. Actually the gorgeous sentence before all this tells the reader everything they need to know, “I fear a longing that doesn’t include me.”

Whoa. Just whoa.

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A LIFECHANGING QUICKIE!

2011-01-09T08:18:00.001-08:00

The Birdwisher by Anna Joy Springer

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Birdwisher
by Anna Joy Springer

I have a slip of paper above my writing desk with these words:

“I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn’t shake us awake like a blow to the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So it can make us happy? Good God, we’d be just as happy if we had no books at all…A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”-Franz Kafka

Springer’s The Birdwisher did just this. I mean at very first superficial glance it might read as some zany YA mystery. The mystery of missing birds to be solved by a pigeon detective. I did not expect to feel heartbreak and worry. You know I am passionate about a character when I begin to worry about them. The protagonist, Gwen Swalloh, a young girl who hires this pigeon detective to solve her mystery of the missing birds reminds me of me and so many other girls.

I used to sit at home and wait until I heard my mother’s footsteps coming up the walkway. I used to have these long confessional letters written out to my mom. Revealing everything. I wanted her to know I wasn’t a virgin. I wanted her to know I was failing in school. I didn’t want her to know I smoked cigarettes because I didn’t want her to take that away from me. In a way this was one of the ways I started writing. Through carefully crafted lies. Did you know that each American household tells an average of three lies a day? I’m just sayin’. So anyway I would wait to hear my mothers footsteps, place my “runaway letter” on the table and start for the door with a backpack in hand. I acted surprised when I saw her.

    “Where are you going?”
    “Nowhere.”

Then with my head down we walked back to our apartment. Gwen Swalloh reminded me of these letters she has an eloquent letter and a social studies writing assignment herself and I thought, oh this is the quiet girl’s cry for help.

I suddenly felt connected with every woman writer and reader out there. We were all little girls crying for help drawing attention to ourselves in the most indiscreet way possible. But when someone asks “When did you start writing?” and you say “I wrote a play when I was 24.” or “My first short story got published in whatsitwhosits in ’98.” I don’t believe you. Even when you say “I wrote some really bad poetry after a break up in high school.” I don’t believe you. I think that when you first wanted to get the fuck away from wherever you were at the moment and did something contrary, ate your food on the floor like a cat, pretended you were sick, built a fort out of chairs and some sheets, wrote Santa Claus a very long letter asking for all that you knew from somewhere was impossible but for that moment suspended disbelief and asked for a dad and a unicorn anyway. That my companeras is when you began writing.
    The Birdwisher takes me back to that place of suspended disbelief and there’s something very tragic about the side of it that is Gwen’s reality and there’s something so enchanting about being reunited with the land of no limits.

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PERFECT RAINY DAY BOOK

2011-01-06T07:07:00.001-08:00

Crossings by Leonard Chang

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Crossings
by Leonard Chang

He did it again. Three days tops. That’s how long it took me to read this novel. This is not pretty words. It is clear, concise and enrapts the reader. At the end of the day with all the rules and suggestions it is probably most important that the writer knows how to tell a good story. There’s this ongoing MFA debate, aside from people alleging that low residency MFA programs are these cash cows for Universities that at the end of the day deliver little to no promise, there is also the inference as to whether or not an MFA actually can improve or harm someone’s writing. Sometimes even after having an MFA, my uncle’s advice of K.I.S.S. “Keep It Simple Stupid” might come more in handy.
Chang proves this with his steady paced novel that is ripe with conflict. In addition to feeling like a guilty pleasure and being a perfect rainy day book, Leonard tackles some heavy subject matter.
    Up until now, when people referred to Chang as a “Korean writer” I was reminded of Basquiat, when they referred to him as a “black painter” and he replied “Oh no I use other colors than just black.” Meaning I’ve read the Allen Choice novels and although Allen Choice was Korean his character was primarily an American that lived in the bay area. That is to say, it appeared that rock climbing and philosophy influenced him more than his Korean culture. In this novel Chang looks at the lives of Korean immigrants and the underground human trafficking and prostitution trade in San Francisco.
    Although, Leonard Chang is Korean he still exemplifies the art of writing “the other”. He depicts his female character’s experience of being raped and forced into prostitution so well, catching every detail. I was most impressed with one quiet scared moment when his character Unhe rested her lips on her naked knees. That simple observation was brilliant. I have self-soothed myself like this many times. The rape scenes also reminded me that sometimes I harness too much empathy for “the other” in my work. Chang really went to town on his male characters. He made the bad guys fully bad. Sometimes I reign in my bad guys. But truly in life there is nothing more putrid than the thought of somebody touching me unsolicitly. Let him be all the way putrid. From personal knowledge, it can be unsettling writing about ones own culture and still feel as if you are writing “the other.” Researching your own community. It can be very sensitive. Then you remind yourself you are in the magical world of fiction where nothing exists except for what you put on the page.
    When I was in my twenties I decided I wanted to make money. Lots of money. So I began working for a financial firm. I studied with my coworkers and then after a battery of tests those of us that passed were all offered a job. About half of my coworkers were Korean. We worked in Century city and lived in K-town so we would carpool together. On pay day to unwind we would sometimes go to a club called Le Prive. I think it is now called something else. The first time I walked in I discovered a whole new world. My friend whispered, “This place is run by the Korean mafia.” I don’t know if that was true.
    The customers paid a flat rate for a table. The table came with a bottle of Crown Royal, a bottle of juice, and anju (food you eat while drinking, usually fruit). Our table was usually about 200 dollars so we went with a crowd of ten people. When you walked in you had to go through a metal detector. The place was clouded with smoke from the smoke machines and the ceiling and banisters were lined with gargoyles that had long sharp laser red eyes that darted across the crowded dance floor. Women and men “freaked” themselves and each other holding glow-in-the dark light sticks. The two things that struck me the most:

the dancing: even though there was a lot of testosterone in the room when people heard a song they liked they danced. and they danced hard and provocatively. the korean men would not hesitate to dance with each other.
booking: if a man wanted company he could raise a lit candle in the air and the waiter would rush the next unaccompanied woman to his table. She was not obliged to do anything but sit and have small talk, perhaps have a drink if she wished.

    This novel took me right back to those nights at Prive. It ended in a similar way. If you drank too much at a Kclub you could call a Korean taxi service, usually a large white van. The service would pick you up and take you home free of charge. That is to say, I felt like I went down some scary dark alleys but at the end of the day I was ushered home safely.

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1st review for 2011

2011-01-02T17:55:00.001-08:00

Underworld by Don DeLillo

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It’s not about baseball. Thank god its not about baseball. Because it’s a tome. That’s to say it’s huge. 800 pages. I don’t particularly like baseball. It’s linked shorts. At least I treated it like linked shorts and in summary I would say that I picked it up and put it down a lot and it took a long time to read it. It’s fucking brilliant and stunning but you, the reader is unsure at times whether it is brilliant or insane. As a writer this novel proves to be a great example of dialogue and description. I can’t cite all the incredible dialogue in this novel, or I would bore you, even though it’s good. really really good. There was a contest once. Write an entire short story in dialogue just dialogue. I think they allowed dialogue tags but that was it. Tags are like “-she said” or “-she howled” whatever I’m not teaching here I’m reviewing. Anywho I wish I read this novel before I entered that contest. Here is just a small example of DeLillo’s dialogue:
“Hey Bobby.”
“I’m busy over here.”
“Hey Bobby.”
“I’m busy over here.”
“Hey Bobby. There’s something we want to tell you.”
“I told you, okay, I’m busy.”
“JuJu wants to tell you. Hey Bobby. Listen.”
“Go way, all right?”
“Hey Bobby.”
“Fuck out of here.”
“Hey Bobby.”
“You see I’m working over here?”
“Hey Bobby. Juju wants to tell you this one thing.”
“What.”
“Hey Bobby.”
“All right. What.”
“This one thing.”
“All right. What.”
“Shit in your fist and squeeze it,” Nick said.

Ha! Fucking amazing. All the way through the punctuation, the drawing out, the repetition. That is real dialogue. Then there’s the incredible analogies or metaphors or similes whichever you want to call it. For the sake of this review they will be referred to as ‘descriptions’

    “The hand going to his midsection to mean he’s already eaten or peanuts give him cramps or his mother told him not to fill up on trashy food that will ruin his dinner.”-20

    meditative pissing
    little nagging needs
    urgent sexual throb of the dishwasher
    a living rebuke to the tactics of moderation
small ingrown toenail rage, a puny frustration
she was all ovals and loops, like the Palmer handwriting method-586

This was the one that really got me, that sent me reeling off the page and into the banks of my memories. He was writing here of what happened after the “shot that was heard around the world.” Which was on October 3, 1951 when the New York Giants played the Brooklyn Dodgers and in the ninth inning, Ralph Brancha pitched to Bobby Thompson who hit the ball into the stands for a three-run homer, beating the Dodgers 5-4 and capturing the National League pennant. Anywho the quote is:

“They are tearing up letters they’ve been carrying around for years pressed into their wallets, the residue of love affairs and college friendships, it is happy garbage now, the fans’ intimate wish to be connected to the event, unendably, in the form of pocket litter, personal waste, a thing that carries a shadow identity-rolls of toilet tissue unboltingly lyrically in streamers.”-45

This made me think of my own ‘happy garbage’ how I used to carry around a letter that was sent to me by a friend when I was living in a group home in Pacific Palisades. He was a friend of my brother’s and had accidentally or purposefully fallen in love with me. I took his friendship to heart. I recalled a night on my birthday when we laid side by side in the dark. Him talking about his own mother’s death and me my wild crazy mother and both of us talking tears secretly rolling down our cheeks. We never told anyone about how sweet or private our night was. Nor did we tell anyone that nothing naughty happened. No touching just talking. He was big and puerto rican and overly pierced and his laugh was awkward but something told me that with all of his giant features and dooffiness he did really love me. That something was a letter he sent me. As a teenager I was constantly in fear of being forgotten. Out of sight out of mind. Remember when you thought the world would end if you were grounded? Living in a group home was like being grounded my entire adolescence. This friend, he wrote me a letter telling me he thought of me often, that I was loved. He made a special effort to go to my high school which was on the other side of town and do graffiti. Let me know he was thinking about me. I kept that letter folded in my wallet long after that time. Till it was thin paper ripped in the creases. little flakes of white rolling off. He died. I have no idea how or why. He was young. He liked doing speed. He always had a problem with asthma. He would wheeze around cats or feather stuffed comforters.
Actually he was in a constant state of wheezing. He hated my cigarette smoking but he had no problem with doing crystal or smoking weed. Who knows. But this passage made me think of that happy garbage I kept in my wallet. Made me think of sitting with a boy from New York looking out at some mountains in Bel Air and telling him how I was imagining myself lying on my side and tumbling down it. How it looked so easy. I asked if he would go with me. He said yes.

In a way DeLillo accomplished what he stated here in his epilogue not just for himself but for me the reader/writer/sniper. In what could have been the most beautiful passage I’ve read in 2010 he said:

you try to imagine the word on the screen becoming a thing in the world, taking all its meanings, its sense of serenities and contentments out into the streets somehow, its whisper of reconciliation, a word extending itself ever outward, the tone of agreement or treaty, the tone of repose, the sense of mollifying silence, the tone of hail and farewell, a word that carries the sunlit ardour of an object deep in drenching noon, the argument of binding touch, but it's only a sequence of pulses on a dullish screen and all it can do is make you pensive -- a word that spreads a longing through the raw sprawl of the city and out across the dreaming bourns and orchards to the solitary hills.
Peace.

View all my reviews

River Life... click here to see people that live in the river

2010-12-28T09:01:00.000-08:00

    She stood where the bridge leads into Glendale Blvd., the main vein that runs through Atwater. The east side of the vein houses young hipster parents that go to Bikram yoga and drink a green milky beverage called “Pirates Chai” over at the cafe. The west side of the vein markets at the discount bulk store “Costco” and eats dinner at Sizzler.
     She ducked her head in the window, her stringy dark hair bowing down to swoop against her neck the ends almost tucking themselves neatly back into her shirt collar, “Hey you gotta ‘nother blanket for my friend Danny?”
Danny had a cane and a sign that said he was a Vet. We looked down, “No we don’t have any more blankets. But we got toiletries and some hot food.” Danny hopped his way over to the car window. “I’ll take anything.”
     The street is lined with nail shops, latin food, a dance school, a children’s crafting station. The local wine shop arranges food trucks to serve tapas. There’s medicinal marijuana storefronts and a quaint bookstore. This is Atwater Village, where me and my girlfriend and at least another couple that live along the L.A. River lay kissing into the night.
    The L.A. River isn’t really a river but rather an aqueduct. There are little pockets on the sides. One of these pockets is lined with potted flowers. I went running with a friend here who was depressed because of a man. We saw the potted plants and clothes hanging to dry and called the couple that lived there the lovers. My friend wanted so badly to be like these lovers. She didn’t care that they were homeless she wanted someone to love her like that. With all of their nothing. I ran down to them, “Hello? Anyone there?” A tiny man climbed out.
“Hey you want some sweaters and a meal?”
He took it and jumped back into his hole.
That’s a good spot the runaway in me thought.
What you don’t know is that as a teenager I came to this river with my brother and his friends. We did graffiti. We joked the water was so tainted whoever got wet would come out with an extra eyeball growing on their calves. My brother died from the disease of “More”. In the end it was more heroin.
    I have a pit bull. She loves really hard but bucks around like a bull in a pin when she needs to move her legs. When I got her I took her here. I felt defeated. Walking along the river I saw one of my brother’s old pieces. Nothing gets buffed because no one wants to walk in the water to paint over it. I looked at the dog and realized it’s more complicated than that. We were both beaten as kids, both misunderstood. We just want to run free.

SHAMe

2010-11-22T10:25:00.000-08:00

I watched this great Ted Talk yesterday and started thinking about shame.

My people come from what is often referred to by banks as LDC’s (least developed countries), little brown tropical countries, drenched with religious fanatics, stalks of sugar like magic wands picked for five cents an hour sold for 3.00 a box. My people come from generational recycled 40 oz. bottles of beer and shit and cigarettes smoked backwards (the lit end in your mouth), and cassava, and ube, pickled chicken fetus’, and piss, and mah jong, gambling lots of gambling and child sex workers boys and girls. Untold numbers of pretty pretty boys. My people are light bulb eaters, bed-of-nail walkers, fire eaters, every day is a circus in their jungles, alive with naked intent. By the time we got here we would be happy at any swap meet, all of us hollowed out like empty mango shells. My people rested naked sandwiches on the arms of chairs, and always had an open saucer with half melted butter, a block of Velveeta cheese in the freezer, an open rice cooker. Every kitchen with brown and white diamond checkered floors lined with ants, and every top drawer with little boxes of broken chalk to try to fight the ants and roaches, my people have big rubber fly swatters, and eat with their teeth floating in glasses of water at the dinner table. My people live their lives tending to things. And if you told them the city was cruel with budget cuts they would scoff at you and your American budget cuts. They lived half their lives in city dumps. Here the trash bins behind restaurants are caged and locked to keep homeless out. “Why do they lock it up?” we ask. “So the homeless don’t eat the trash.” “Oh.”
    But it still makes no sense. Is food-trash only for throwing away? My people think it’s our greatest responsibility to be good ancestors. My people drink coffee for dinner. Kills the appetite. Little empty bellies always round.     I guess because of that I fall in love with small terse women I see from a distance. Like this morning in yoga the woman next to me rolled on her side, I noticed she had skin the color of antique lace a perfect porcelain bob and freckles. I thought about how beautiful she was and for that brief pose I loved her for being so pretty.
    My brother Ken was effeminate a sort of ma vie en rose... He painted his nails and wore my moms dresses but still when it came to running and sports he was uncatchable.
The world was filled with things he was not supposed wear. But it seemed that’s all he cared about were the not-supposed -tos.
    I wanted to start this story by saying I have a secret to life that I know you don’t know. Mostly to induce the excitement of a revealed thing. The secret is this that there is only one surefire way to get to authenticity and that is grief. The story I am about to tell you, well when this happened if I was a building two of my windows would have broken. Another lesson I learned from this was what a crock of shit it is what my family said about being good ancestors. The final lesson in all of this is something we all know but like to forget some of the time, it’s that death is non negotiable, as much as we would like to think that it is.
    As Ken got older he got leaner, even more feminine long wavy hair but there were elements of the uncomplicated boy in his eyes and smile. He developed an oral fixation, like a puppy only happy with things in his mouth. As he got older his step mom would walk around the house and call him bakla He said if he wanted to be called a fag he would just go back to school. She read his diary. All she really had to do was listen to his music or look at his well manicured nails. He got kicked out of their small house in Maryland and started making money dancing as a stripper. I guess this is ironic. You’ll find out why. He got AIDS. Up until then he had been a living rebuke to maintaining moderation. I started stripping so I get money quick to go see him. See the irony?
    It was raining I was coming home from getting dumped by my girlfriend in Chinatown to Oakland. I didn’t know then that relationships take time and are filled with conversations about nothing. I had been stripping for three months. On the way home I got robbed at the ATM. I still had some cash in my bag. Not much. My knees, hips, thighs, were bruised. Everything ached. Including my head. I was probably hung over. I couldn't get naked without being drunk.
On the way I saw this guy get on the train with a black shirt and neon pink writing that said, “feminism is the radical notion that women are people.” I immediately thought he wore that shirt hoping to get laid. Walking down the street were two mod korean girls one wearing plastic black glasses frames without lenses her lips a perfect matte red. At the BART station a girl got out of a car. Her boyfriend in the driver’s seat. She was wearing too short shorts. She did a hair flip. A real full hair flip. Two teenage guys were jostling each other by the turnstile “Hey man, for-real smell my fingers!” He shoves his index and middle finger up against his friend’s nose. His friend bats the hand away. “ I ‘aint gonna smell your fingers, Nigga”
    There were ads everywhere; for hair dye and Queen Helene make-up products, and beer, and Cognac, and Newports. It made me feel there were people out there in the world of product development and merchandising who understood the nature of my little nagging needs. I passed a motel with a weekly rate and remembered all those hard nights with my girlfriend I would quietly slip out of bed, get dressed, and comb the streets looking for somewhere anywhere I was appreciated.
    I saw a prostitute she gazed at me and it was one of those gazes that was like a trap. I knew if I gazed back too long she would’ve taken it at some sort of transaction. Like when you stare back at someone at a bar and they ask you if they could give you a drink. Before people do these things they survey their options their eyes rest on people that might be a yes. Because everyone hates rejection, even a prostitute. Actually I read in an article recently that sex workers probably under go the most rejection. So I wonder what makes me look like a possible yes. I found it to be a dissliment (part compliment part diss) like if a smoker asks me if I have a light. I’m ashamed I still look like a smoker, but am glad that I still have a chance at passing and stealing peoples secrets. Do I look like a pro-connoseiur? Ultimately, I felt annoyed with how personally I took everything.
    I saw a guy I knew and he was wearing one of those knit hats with fake dreads attached to them. He’s a white guy. I wondered what he was thinking. Was he serious or just joking? Do people think they could get away with that? I decided I couldn’t pull off a conversation without addressing the hat so I acted like I didn’t see him and kept on walking.
    I had to stop at the bank. It was getting bright out and I was still a little hung over. My mind was patchy. At the ATM a woman with an oversized T-shirt with colorful writing on it, (I think it said “Lake Tahoe”). and jeans came up to me. She had a check. She said she just got paid with a check and doesn’t have a bank account can she endorse it to me and I give her the cash for it. I think I saw her talking to someone else and knew it was a scam but for an instant it made sense. I looked at her face. She had a car waiting for her with a man and some kids. All I knew was that I had enough cash in my bag to go see my brother and the rest was to be deposited and it was over. All the dancing and shaking my butt and gyrating on poles. It really did have a beginning middle and end and this was the end. I gave her the cash and immediately regretted it.   The light bulb switched on. IT WASNT TRUE! I didn’t know what to do but my instincts made me believe we were all here for a connection. That people want to connect. For some reason I thought this woman was interested in our similarities. So even though I looked like a stone butch dyke with short platnum blonde hair and a wallet with a chain connected tucked in my back pocket I ran after her and said “But I got kids at home!” She just got in her car and rode off.
    When I got home the house was disheveled. No one else was there. I lived with a foster brother and sister but they were both in love constantly. My sister's jewelry box was missing. My television was missing. When I got to my room all of my stripping and sex-affiliated accoutrements were slung about, latex clothing, corsets, a couple of strap-on dildos. It turned out we had been robbed, but at the first moment I saw my room I felt like it was personal. There was just one tiny thread holding me together. I had three hundred bucks in my bag. Enough money for me to get to D.C. The whole reason I started dancing in the first place. To see my Ken. He was dying of AIDS. I called him to tell him I was coming. As I sat on the line listening to the rings I thought of two things: 1) I love the way it sounds on the radio or old TV shows when they mock phone calls. It goes baliiiing balliiiiiiing blliiiing for the phone and then there is a muffled voice on the other end of the line wah wah wah wah... and 2) the silence of the wait reminded me of walking into a church. Finally his roommate picked up. He informed me my Ken had died a month before. I cracked. I sat on the kitchen floor and cried a howling relentless could no longer breathe sort of cry. I put my hands in my hair, holding in my brains. I whimpered. I asked the air, "Why?" I banged on the floor. I scratched my face. But better than all that I surrendered. I ran out of ideas. I was always so resourceful and so full of ideas and could always look decent doing it. But today I know that that desperate moment on that kitchen floor on 53rd and San Pablo saved my life. That small moment when I saw my room for the first time after being robbed I felt so exposed so full of shame. In the moment I found out my brother died I played everything back. Everything I had done to get the crumpled money that was in my bag. Lot's of bad choices ran through my mind like a photo montage in a bad movie. Me doing a girl on girl show without protection on stage, me desperately eyeing every customer in the club and quickly getting undressed after dressing to see if I could seduce that one last guy out of twenty bucks, me bartering with guys over the price of a lap dance (which is apparently prostitution), me losing my girlfriend, me drunk everyday by 3:00 pm with cum stained dresses, having those tiny little liquor bottles fall out of my bag on the muni. When I look back at pictures of me then I was chubby with a giant septum piercing and the look on my face was always "get the fuck away from me!" I don't know how I ever made a dime. Anyhow there's still a piercing that happens in my heart and my throat. I still fear the gynecologists office more than doing taxes. It's like the end of a really codependent relationship when you say you have lost parts of yourself you couldn't get back.
    I cried after my first dance. It was like something in me shifted that I could never get back. But I shouldn't have. You shouldn't. The shame that I had all these years has never served me. It's only in telling you to let go of any that you might have acquired that I truly believe to let go of my own. So thank you. I love you.

CIVIC DUTY-click link to sign letter telling fresno to reopen their polls

2010-10-29T18:31:00.000-07:00

I am a union organizer, that means I sit around in cafeterias and try to get people to care about stuff that they take for granted a lot and answer people’s angry questions about where all their dues money goes and can’t I bring them better food than just pizza? Or sometimes I yell at bosses and tell them so what if Johnny was late 73 times this month he was late 75 times last month so that shows improvement so you shouldn’t punish him. And then Johnny gets canned. Johnny looks at me sad like I failed him but he doesn’t cry or yell at me or anything. He just walks out the door and down the street and he looks sad. He doesn’t look back. I think he walks to his car with his head down trying to keep a steady pace so people don’t see him crying and not till he gets in his car does he safely rest his head on the steering wheel and cry and maybe even hit it a couple of times. This time of year my main duty is to GOTV. That’s my industry talk for “Get Out The Vote” which is also industry speak for going to places where we endorse a candidate or need to drum up support and knock on doors. This year that place is Fresno.

           On the way up here I stopped at a gas station and there was a girl drinking soda out of a mini-keg sized container. I sat watching her thinking how wrong that was how there was probably a week’s worth of calories in that container. Then I remembered this was her turf and I was the visitor. Back on the highway I looked over and saw to the right a lit-up pyramid made of dirt with a row of dirt bikes poised on the edge headed down.   Above this hung a billboard with blown up photo of an infant’s head and it said, “My lungs have been working since I was 7 1/2 weeks old.” And I thought it was strange because infants don’t talk like that. Then I realized it was an anti-abortion billboard, and for whatever reason seeing that billboard made me feel much more significant than I did before. Like changing my fate along this highway was worth advertising dollars.
    This morning in a community center with cold donuts and coffee without milk before hitting the doors our candidate gave us a pep talk. She said, “Bring God with you. Because, no matter what form you worship him you will need him. Let him walk first. You will find struggle and challenges and take him there with you. When people give you a hard time or when you start to feel down take a moment and turn to him for guidance.”
    I left the community center with that in mind and when I reached the projects I was greeted by a little companion. A small white terrier with brown spots. He followed ten paces behind me. The first door I knocked on the woman spoke to me through the screen. “You speaka Spanish?” She asked. I responded in Spanish that I was a volunteer for Cynthia Sterling and there would be early voting this year and she could go to the poles on Saturday instead of waiting until Tuesday. She said, “Okay.” in perfectly accentless English and opened the screen door to take my door-hanger.   She was wearing a white T-shirt that said “I HEART BEER” and at that point it was clear to me she spoke English because it wasn’t the sort of T-shirt that you get as a weird thrift store hand me down like when I was a kid and wore those “Camp Hiawatha” seventies T-shirts even though I never stepped foot near a summer camp.   She just really did love beer and not Cerveza. She had a black eye and a doo-rag wrapped around her head and she was rubbing her forehead like perhaps she had a little too much MGD love last night. I imagined that if I were a kid and lived in these affordable housing complexes I wouldn’t have the same stigma as other kids in housing projects. I don’t even think I would have had the stigma I got from living in apartments. Some of these homes were two stories and there were gardners trimming the lawn. In fact the only real giveaway outside of the housing authority office in the front parking lot that made a working class statement about this particular housing project was it’s sameness. Why do public funded projects always have to have this cookie cutter aesthetic? Don’t the people that work on these projects know the damage this does to a kid’s psyche?

    While knocking on doors I learned that mostly working people, or actually poor people, don’t want to be found. They don’t want people to see them where they live. I knocked on many doors that had no doorbell, I talked through many black metal screens, I heard people’s TV blaring while they did not answer the door. I answered to many angry chihuahuas. The little guy that was helping me out trailing behind me didn’t want to be acknowledged either. He escorted me to five different doors but the minute I bent down on one knee and coooed at him he started barking and ran away. There were some places that looked long deserted but weren’t. Like this one:

I liked the little sign in the window up above. See what it says? Children’s Hair Cut. Kind’a spooky.

I did find some old fashioned people that still felt that all you needed with you in life was the right set of words. There were a few people that were in fact happy to see me. “You go tell them to vote. Don’t let them make any excuses now baby!”

“Uhuh That’s right. When you’re out here today you gotta get these lazy people to vote baby girl.”

When I got back to my car I contemplated all the last names and wondered if there was any relation... “Hendrix, Whittaker, Freeman.” I stopped and further contemplated that last one Freeman ....Free Man. Hmmmmm....

Hospitals and Gangs: click here to read a rad labor victory

2010-09-06T12:51:00.000-07:00

As a union organizer at a local hospital I have plenty to say about Labor Day and the state of the labor movement in America but first I wanna share a victory.
Check out the above article on the crappy carwash owners.
ht

Now speaking of hospitals: Someone said hospitals are a microcosm of the communities they’re located in. It seems to be true. There are gangs at my hospital. Housekeeper gangs, filipino nurse gangs, there are drug dealers at my hospital. They used to run drugs through the materials management chute, a vacuum chute that runs through the hospital that is supposed to be used to deliver supplies to the floors it looks like one of those ATM’s they have on the east coast where you’re money flies through to your car window in a clear capsule. Then of course there’s the regular stuff that happens in hospitals people dying people having babies. But people seem to work at hospitals a really long time 25- 30 years so people have relationships and affairs with each other and take breaks together and go shopping together. These people have spent 80 percent of their lives together. This seemed even truer to me today when I was walking to my car and I saw a guy on his break sitting in a chair in the corner of the parking lot peering out over the wall, smoking a cigarette, his bottle of Corona perched up on the ledge. He looked like he lived there. I felt like I was leaving an apartment building.
On the car ride home there was an interview with Waylon Jennings. It’s country music week on NPR. Before he died he wrote an autobiography. I guess country music writers used to do a lot of meth in those days to keep up with each other because they were cranking these songs out so fast. I heard a country song “Husbands and Wives.” I liked it. It was sad but the writing was great.

Also I got a story printed in an online journal please check it out!
http://www.5923quarterly.net/issue1/idaho.html

Click here to read a review of Unconditional Love

2010-08-27T08:27:00.000-07:00

Although, I don't agree with that review. The only qualifier for love to be unconditional is that it's free. That doesn't mean it will last forever. I think he is confusing the two. And the only reason why I'm saying this is because I have had love with conditions before. I have lost love because I was not detached enough or achieved enough. I have felt like I had to maintain a certain GPA in order to maintain love, or a certain level of cleanliness or consideration. Now this isn't just romantic love but parental love as well. I have also lost love because I have not maintained most people's primary condition; I have not loved them back.

There’s this greek dessert, a drink made of pureed beans, the glass rimmed with powdered sugar. You take a sip and then you say “Papou” and white sugar dust flies across the table. “Papou” or grandpa in greek.
I referred to this grandfather I had in an earlier post I wrote about longing. http://betteranever.blogspot.com/2009/11/longing.html
The gist is he was in a constant state of joy because he was in a constant state of being in love. He fell in love several times a day.
A week ago I was on my knees. I asked god to show me unconditional love. I felt like I hadn’t seen this type of love in a very long time. Just then my phone rang. Papou died. I went to his funeral expecting it to be like other funerals of other foster relatives of mine. I would sit in the back, separate. I would be a spectator. That wasn’t true. I was a part of. And there in the pews of the temple I saw nothing but love. People that survived disease together, parents that had lost their kids to adolescence and regained them after they started their own families, tiny babies and new generations of grandparents. Then there were the stories of Papou. His capacity to be loyal and full of love but maintain his own autonomy. He would go to Akron every Saturday. Akron i what you might consider to be a “junk store” he would go in search of “original creations.” There, to his wife’s dismay, he would pick up an ugly elephant shaped cookie jar hold it to the light and pronounce, “Now that is an original creation.” Then he would take it home and place it in the living room. He also put stamps everywhere on an envelope except for the far right hand corner. If you told him that they belonged in the far right corner he would argue, “Who says?” The point is he was true to himself so he had tons of love leftover to give.

Then yesterday I got a call from a friend who was in the hospital. She was there as an inpatient for a week. I didn’t bother to ask her any questions. I just rushed over to see her. By the time I got there she was on the phone with the doctor. It turns out she was afraid she was going to be diagnosed with Lymphoma. She quietly plotted out her death over the course of the week, she pictured herself bald, she pictured her husband living alone and him being messy and confused, she grieved her life. The doctor said they had safely ruled out Lymphoma and were now likely considering “cat scratch fever.” She hung up the phone her hand shaking she looked at her husband and said “I don’t have cancer.” He held her as she cried, relieved... in shock. When she caught her breath she looked at him again he smoothed away her loose strands of hair and she said “You’re stuck with me.” He said “Of course I wouldn’t have it any other way.” So that’s what unconditional love looks like, I thought.

Someone needs to keep better track of their underpants

2010-08-23T15:37:00.000-07:00

I’ve been thinking about needs lately. A friend of mine said that she knew someone that was amazing in relationships until things got real then the other person’s needs felt like a brillo pad grazing against the inside of their skin. I found that interesting that some people react to needs like that while I love needs. I would eat needs all day long for dessert if I could. I love other people’s needs, rather. I myself try not to have any. Just offer me a small corner in your house. No blankets necessary, you can feed me little bits of bread or whatever you have is fine. I thought about how this needless habit of mine started. My mother’s side of the family comes from a third world country. They pick their plates up to their mouths and scoop all the food in making a ladle out of the palms of their hands. They suck chicken bones till their neat and clean with no meat on them. If I ate with them I usually had to help in preparing the food but I was youngest so I got to eat first as well. Lots of naked brown legs lined up and the more food I heaped on my plate the more I got commended, “Oh no wonder she is so tall! Oh what a good eater!” and “Yes she likes her Lola’s cooking the best, not wasteful like her cousin!” I remember this because of the short while in junior high I was a vegetarian and my Lola took it as a personal insult. Later with my foster family I remember one night in particular when my foster dad was a little tipsy. All eight of us were in the kitchen and again I heaped food onto my plate and sat down and started to pour food into my mouth. Only this time I was adopted and I was the oldest. My foster dad called me selfish for neglecting to serve my younger siblings first. I froze mid shovel. I was embarrassed that was when I first started killing my needs. I also have to say that over the years I have come to learn that if it has to do with a feeling or some sort of acknowledgment coming from another person it may not be so much a need but a want. Like a want disguised as a need. I don’t know what I mean by all this but just thought I’d put it down.

The Women -Book Review

2010-08-23T06:27:00.000-07:00

The Women by T.C. Boyle

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I read this novel at a really strange time. I was listening to the radio and they were talking about loneliness among other things. But there was something really interesting said about loneliness, that there was a prevalence of loneliness today. They were not defining loneliness as being single or living by oneself. They were talking about loneliness in terms of how often people connect and relate to other people. According to the radio there are many people that are married or “coupled” or live with other people that are lonely.
I think it was this same show that spoke about a study involving “oxytocin” The hormone best known for its role in inducing labor may influence our ability to bond with others, according to researchers at the University of California, San Francisco.
In a preliminary study, the hormone oxytocin was shown to be associated with the ability to maintain healthy interpersonal relationships and healthy psychological boundaries with other people. The study appears in the July issue of Psychiatry.
"This is one of the first looks into the biological basis for human attachment and bonding," said Rebecca Turner, PhD, UCSF adjunct assistant professor of psychiatry and lead author of the study. "Our study indicates that oxytocin may be mediating emotional experiences in close relationships."
The study builds upon previous knowledge of the important role oxytocin plays in the reproductive life of mammals. The hormone facilitates nest building and pup retrieval in rats, acceptance of offspring in sheep, and the formation of adult pair-bonds in prairie voles. In humans, oxytocin stimulates milk ejection during lactation, uterine contraction during birth, and is released during sexual orgasm in both men and women.
I think they shot oxytocin’s up the subject’s nostrils to see if it induced empathy. I was hoping to try this same trick at home with my girlfriend or perhaps at work with my boss. I am feeling deeply misunderstood in the world as I am reading this novel. The novel is called “The Women” but it seems to pay a great deal more homage to the man that is having an affair with them all. A typical loser if you ask me. I mean he is supposed to be this accomplished artist. An architect and designer but really he is broke most times and takes advantage of interns to do his housekeeping and he seems to have a large problem staying faithful and his disdain for alcohol makes me believe he is a teetotaler and perhaps could use a bit more spirituality in his life. But I never judge how well a book is written by how much I like it’s characters. That would be silly. One trouble I had with this novel is it changed narrators and skipped through time a lot but the reader was all too aware of the seam. It was jarring. I will say craft-wise it was very well edited very well written but there was something missing. Like Gertrude Stein said in reference to Oakland “There is no there there.” (and actually I would argue that there is something extremely satisfying in Oakland). I also question Boyle’s use of footnotes for exposition. It didn’t really add to the story and I eventually skipped them all. Not nearly as proficient as Junot Diaz’s use of the foot note in The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao so if you’re gonna do it, I say do it at least as good if not better, otherwise it’s distracting. Overall the language was crisp well done some good phrases, nice thick book but the greatest sensation I had when I finished the novel was relief and a small thrill of what I would look forward to reading next.

Boyle does have a mastery with the simile and metaphor:

“Chins encapsulating one another like the rings of a tree.”

“word travels fast it seeps and bubbles and runs in the ditches like heavy rain in a wet country.”

“A single globe of moisture caught like a jewel in her right nostril.”

“Lake as livid as a bruise.”

My final thought is that I almost just spent 80 bucks on a bottle of “Liquid Trust Spray” Oxytocin, newly enhanced with progesterone to increase romance as well... Oye.

View all my reviews

Loss

2010-08-08T21:01:00.000-07:00

I woke up thinking about loss. I was driving to work and this doctor was talking about empathy on NPR and various animals’ capacity to express empathy. And he mentioned this cat:

I have a cat like that. She’s magic and she senses when you have your menses and will rest on your stomach to soothe away your cramps.

Then later I went to dinner with a friend who suffered a loss. She performed in an Opera of sorts and made these amazing costumes out of garbage bags. This friend of mine is incredibly generous and talented and makes magic out of lots of things but what she can do with fashion and everyday household items is just mind-blowing.

She was going to make a couple more and do a fashion show with these gowns. But then a couple of musicians in the show threw them out. I know how it sucks to loose your art. I also know how embarrassing it is to think you will be getting paid for something and get recognition for it and you don't. The guy that asked her to make the gowns thought it only took her about 12 hours when it actually took her like a week while enlisting help from other people and she paid for everything herself. She had them bagged up and put on a wardrobe rack and everything and I guess the musicians just treated them like trash. I tried to cheer her up by telling her the story of how I dropped my computer and broke the screen and the loss of so many things I’ve written. How much time I've dedicated to searching for them rather than recreating them. We joked about how our work as artists finally becomes beautiful and perfect to us only once it's gone forever. Like those amazing emails we all write before they fly off into the ethers and we never get them again. But that wasn’t what hurt her. You see I always struggle with lack of grace. She was struggling with the idea of a lack of humanity. That one artist would injure another artist’s work.
Anyhow I thought I’d post her work here because I love her and I think her work is amazing and ought to be shared with as many people as possible and also because I think we can all relate to the idea of losing something and having it pierce our hearts a little bit every time we think about it and that happens until it doesn’t anymore.
But I think the combination of the people in the geriatric ward in the cat story and my friend’s story of her costume reminded me of another loss that was tugging somewhere in my psyche.
He was a scientist. He came from very little and grew into having very much. He was an African American Omega man of the year. He was a genius. He was driven. He was tough. He loved more than anything pussy, pot, and a gin and tonic. His first wife supported him through college and bore four of his children. He was a chauvinist. He finally landed a job at General Motors and left her. He had a great deal of pride in his race and his sons and wanted to arm them with the tools to fend off suffering. He named his first son after himself. He was narcissistic and needed to live forever. Some of his sons suffered from addiction. He moved on to marry again, he married an easy going white woman that had a career but also liked to give love and head and make dinners and left the butter out the way he liked it so it was always soft and spreadable. She was there for his big break. They got a nice house on a hill in a really affluent neighborhood and decorated it with Elephant printed Batik fabrics. They raised two kids and sometimes me and their kids turned out beautiful and loving and smart but always coordinated like them. It took some decades for his kids from his first marriage to forgive him. To be able to accept that he only gained this capacity to show up for his family in his second marriage. Although he showed up he showed up with many demands and a little too much pride. And sometimes his face looked exasperated and scary but somewhere in the latter years he turned softer. More accepting. Last time I saw him he hugged my girlfriend. It took two gay daughters and many girlfriends for him to be able to do that, but he did and when he did it meant a lot. I’ve tried to impress many people in my life and it seems to me the harder it is to impress someone the harder I try. Like the wizard of Oz he spent ninety percent of his time behind closed doors but seemed to know everything that happened which is why I was so relieved and delighted to hear that he was proud of me. I think people spend their whole lives waiting to hear someone is proud of them. I know I did. When I met him and his beautiful coordinated family I felt very bad about myself. I felt like I didn’t deserve anything and there was a river between people like him and people like me. Somehow in writing this I know that to hear this it would break his heart. The first time I saw his face it was full of rage and he was coming in to kick everyone out because some of the guys did graffitti on the fence next door. We were all so scared we jumped up and ran out of the house and I left one of my shoes behind. I was sleeping in a pile of teenage bodies soft limb spread over soft thin limb. Peach fuzz just barely sprouting the boys keeping their three thin hairs for confidence. The girls’ shyness increased. We were in what we called “the den” although it was just another bedroom with 2 queen sized beds squished together. It was a teenage den perhaps. A den where we studied dance moves from rap videos, smoked pot, cigarettes, drank 40 oz. bottles of beer, wrote on each other, had sex. A place where we spent hours doing nothing and letting time pass. I met him in this place. One morning when he crossed the threshold hallway that separated children from adults, threw open the door to the den and screamed, “Get out!” We were all terrified we jumped up and left. For a moment we caught eyes and his eyes glistened with fascination and disappointment than turned back to rage. It was there in that den that I lost my virginity, developed a voice, developed who I am. I was always so curious about the father daughter relationship. I used to take photos of men with their daughters everywhere. I wanted to know what that felt like. My mom did not do things that I thought dads did. Things that required reckless abandon. I think this is the void that allowed men’s disapproval to sting. I was afraid he would think I was a train wreck always hiding from DCFS in that den, and knowing he knew more than he let on. I played along and let him brag about himself his good looking family his cooking and I only told him the good stuff and eventually he told me he was proud of me and my heart swelled.
RIP Jerry Clinton.

Today August 2nd

2010-08-02T21:44:00.000-07:00

Is James Baldwin's birthday

and....

Oriental Tight Stuff

2010-07-31T18:18:00.000-07:00

Too funny!

2010-07-31T17:27:00.001-07:00

Breakfast in My Head

2010-07-31T15:32:00.000-07:00

This is the story of two sisters, Positiva and Negativa. They are twins. Positiva is light and loving and flows she is creams and whites and peaches. Negativa is dark and sex crazed she is reds and sharp angles black latex and fishnets. They are sitting across Postiva’s kitchen table drinking cafe con leche and talking.

“When she spoons me she clasps my butt with her left hand and reaches around and clasps my left tit with her right hand and I feel buckled into happiness.”-Positiva
“Yes, but what about when she doesn’t?”-Negativa
“When she doesn’t I’m wishing she was. Ay! But why do you always have to see the bad? There is good too you know?”-Positiva
“Oh really? Like what? You invited me over for a reason. You know how I am. You know what I say.”
“Like this- this cinnamon toast shaker. Look at it:

Look how sweet and perfect it is. I see it and I think of sweet little sticky baby fingers and it works so well. It’s like a blankie for an adult. It makes me want to twirl the ends of my hair and suck my thumb. I love it!”

“Huh! It reminds me of a Gulden’s Spicy Brown Mustard jar because I think that’s what it was.

“Look Positiva, again, if all you want to do is talk about what is good then why did you invite me here?”

“Because of things like that, I invited you here so I could see all the good things but I want to keep from being a fool.”

“Well then I want to remind you of a very important story my ancestors once told me involving an Australian blonde and an Italian american disco dancer with lots of tres flores in his hair. I want you to sit down in this chair beside me and click on the image below. This is what you must tell her.”

C'mon it's super easy and super good

2010-07-30T08:13:00.001-07:00

Book Review

2010-07-27T08:32:00.001-07:00

The People of Paper by Salvador Plascencia

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

“Federico de la Fe understood that when a woman leaves a house there are many things to resolve. Some are simple things, like figuring out how to fold the linens, learning to cook smaller portions, and discovering where the manzanilla tea is kept. And then there are other adjustments-the adjustments that seem to be the simplest but take the longest time to make: the unclogged tub where her hair used to gather, the sterile odor of a lone sleeper, the missing swabs that she always left floating in the toilet. Federico de la Fe said that it was never the cleanliness of the woman that we missed, but the signs of their fallibility and oversights in hygiene.” Sometimes when we read we are able to unlock answers to our problems or we find an ally to side with us in an argument. Of course when you’re looking for something you’ll most likely find it. Which reminds me of a hair dresser I once had who told me he could find a verse in every version of the Bible that sanctioned cheating. This paragraph was written perfectly, lyrical, and sweet, but most importantly helped me prove a point. I read this paragraph and immediately sent it off to my girlfriend as if to say, “HA! I’m messy but if I leave you will miss me!” I have curly hair. I shed everywhere, on clothes, in the shower, on furniture. If this novel is The People of Paper than I am The Person of Hair. My foster mom used to clean the drains and complain it looked like TIna Turner was stuck in them. My cat and dog shed too. My cat has been nicknamed ‘Fur Stain’ because she leaves little fur stains everywhere. I had to leave my cat last year for three months of work. Each night as I closed my lids I would see her beady green eyes staring back at me. The guilt almost tore me apart. The person that was watching her would send me pictures on my phone but it wasn’t the same as having her here trailing across my notebook when I’m trying to write (as she she is now). The point being, most things we complain about could be missed. Like this morning I offered my girlfriend a Tiger Milk bar. She said, “What is tiger milk anyway?” “I don’t know. Tiger’s milk?”“I don’t like that they call it that.”“It tastes like a candy bar. The milk of a tiger?”“I don’t like them. I don’t like Tiger’s milk bars.” “How do you know? You never had one.”“I know. I don’t like them.” Maybe this is the type of thing I would miss about her. Her silly No’s. “Fidelity came from the most unlikely of places, sometimes occurring despite genetic predisposition.” “All the blood charts say that you are leaving,” he said to her. “I know what they say”, she said, “but I’m still here.” Aside from playing with time and form this is another brilliant thing Salvador Plascencia does. He consistently makes a literal translation of things, that gives this novel that feel of magical realism. Like I asked for ‘Love’ for breakfast but it was a little undercooked and so I was stuck with’Longing’ all day walking around fingering objects yearning for them. Come closer closER cloSER clOSER cLOSER CLOSER CLOSER CLOSERI don’t know I just made that up, it doesn’t do him justice, but you know what I mean. The best thing I can say about this novel is it was such a joy to read. I had so much fun with it. I felt like the author and I were playing together in a vat of mud. It’s a cross between an adult’s choose you’re own adventure, magical realism, speculative fiction, experimental fiction. It’s political, it’s modern, it’s grimy, it’s got balls (paper nuts), it’s sexy, it’s funny, it’s brilliant. Because the reader actively takes part in the novel, in their interpretation of things it’s all the good things about you. I felt like Salvador Plascencia approached his desk with a certain amount of ease and friskiness that made this read so pleasurable but I also feel like when reading this novel we get the best parts of his brain.

View all my reviews >>

Loose Morals- Please click this link to read the most gorgeous advice column there is

2010-07-18T18:13:00.000-07:00

“Did you know that more people jack off than pick their nose while driving?,” Allie was running a flattened hanger through the side of a car window. It was a silver Volvo. It was dark. I held the flashlight pointed at the window but flashed it at Allie’s face momentarily.
He was concentrating, he stuck his tongue out the corner of his mouth, and he paused and blew air up to swoosh his brown curly bangs out of his eyes.
“Shut up, you don’t know that.”
“Yeah man when I was riding in my dad’s truck I saw it all the time.” He had the hanger inside and he was sliding it back and forth along the door. Allie’s dad was really Italian. It was hard for me to picture him driving a truck or doing anything other than saying, “Here eat this it’s good for you.” as he slipped a clove of garlic in my mouth and then pulled me close to slow dance to no music at all. I walked over to the driver’s side of the car and pointed the flashlight through the window to the passenger door handle.
“That’s gross, guys are so nasty. You’re almost there.”
“I know. Shut up.”
“What?”
“What what?”
“What do you know that guys are nasty or that you’re almost there?”
The curved portion of the hanger was perched around the handle he tugged gently and as if on cue the lock popped up. Allie winked.
“Both.”
Allie opened the passenger side to the Volvo and then unlocked the backseat door. We both hopped in and sat down. The seats were a creamy grey leather. The car smelled not exactly new but a car that was kept pretty clean and like the owner never ate fast food in it or anything. There were no papers in it but a small indentation on the back floor where a briefcase usually sits.
The truth was the indentations were from a case that kept 12 step literature. The owner of the car was in a 12-step program for nicotene. Nicotene Anonymous and she kept her car clean as part of her program. Her car was a real trigger for her. There were so many memories of driving down the street, singing at the top of her lungs, with a cigarette dangling from her fingers. Now she drove listening to pre-recorded meditations on audibles.
There was a coffee spill stain on the front passenger carpet. Allie reached into the pocket of his flannel shirt and took out two camel filters. I reached into my butt pocket and pulled out the lighter. I hated sitting on things. I lit his. He lit mine. Awww and that first inhale. Ohhh man sitting inside and watching the smoke swirl around it was so nice. When they changed the smoking laws in California so you could no longer smoke inside I thought I heard my heart break. Then when it started happening other places. Places where you could get perfectly trashy artery clogging meals, well that was it. That was when Allie and I decided to take matters into our own hands.
On the little ledge behind the backseat that reached to the rearview window there was a Kleenex box and stuffed animals-dogs with bouncy heads, and little round pillows.
“Hey I think the person that owns this car is Filipino.”
“Why do you think that?”
I pointed to the stuffed animals and Kleenex.
“I dunno Kleenex, my grandmother was a fan of Kleenex but she also liked to hide her paper products with cute stuff.”
My grandmother had a barbie doll with a large crocheted skirt billow over the extra roll of toilet paper. It was important to hide the toilet paper. Toilet paper was dirty and evil.

My grandmother was good at filling me with fear. She once explained that if you ate in the bed, cockroaches would come and eat the crumbs then crawl into your ear while you were sleeping. From that point on every time I had an earache I would regret that spoonful of chicken soup I had when I was home sick from school. I could see the small silver ladle swimming with perfect squishy orange squares and a sliver of shredded chicken. Distracted by Judge Wapner’s stern sentencing I missed my mouth once and some of the sodium juice slipped down on the comforter. My heart quaked. I tried to remain calm, carefully placed my bowl on a side table, and ran to the bathroom to get cleaning supplies. There was only toilet paper and Ajax. I took the tabo, a bowl or oftentimes a Big Gulp Slurpee cup we usually keep in the shower to wash after you do number two. Filipinos do not believe just wiping will do the trick you have to do a below the waist bath, which again if you fail to do imminent death and destruction will come your way. Even worse you will be considered dirty and in possession of loose morals. So I took the poop water bowl and the Ajax and scrubbed the comforter with it. To my dismay the fluffy cream comforter with rose imprints started to wear thin. The Ajax began eating holes in it. The good news was I think I got the chicken soup out. The stuffing started to puff out as well. I panicked. There was only one escape in my family. Sickness. The only way you could be recused from church and school is if you were sick. Which was why I was feigning illness on this particular day. Sometimes when I was pretending I was sick I would make fake vomit out of bits of bread and corn and whatever was left in the rice cooker in the kitchen. I would leave it in the toilet (just a little) so my Lola could see evidence that I was in fact sick. Not just regular sick but miss-church sick. That was the answer! I would pretend I threw up on the comforter and then would put it in the washing machine and any damage done would be a consequence of the washer and dryer not me! You see I was very slick even then. This fear drug was working for me. It’s where I go in a pinch.
Allie pointed at a small house with a cracked mildewed white painted door. “Has that place always been there?”
I imagined the inside of the house. What went on behind that door. I could see the carpeting, a thick medley of blues, some of the knitted loops clumped together in places where there were spills. I could see one of those giant floor model television sets with wooden scrolling doors. Perched on top was a much more modern set of rabbit ears extended with hangers. I could see the microwave. I could smell the constant Raid, cigarette smoke, and dirty diaper smells. I even imagined the mattress. It didn’t have sheets on it. It wasn’t the shiny silky blue kind with the white flowers it was more cloth-like with grey and white strips and it sat atop a wire frame that folded in half and had wheels on it. I called it a cot. I wanted to go in. I wanted to give up. I wanted so bad for my outsides to match my insides. Hungry man dinners in front of black and white televisions where you constantly recalibrate for a reception; that’s my insides.
“I dunno.”

I entered foster care when I was 13. I was terrified when I entered my first group home. At home I could have complained about noise, or fighting, or too loud sex, or someone sitting in the corner stabbing at their skin with a staple. This place you could pull back the sheets to find a head sized blood stain and not say anything. Which is exactly what happened to me. My first group home had head-sized blood stains on the sheets, girls cut themselves with staples in the corners, I was forced to say the Serenity Prayer with a fifi, (something guys use to masturbate with in jail, a working man’s pocket pussy), in my mouth. I got used to showering and talking on the phone beside an egg timer. I got used to sharing, cooking, cleaning. My days were broken up into fragments. When I entered foster care is when I first developed an ache. The don’tgettooattachedcan’tfuckeatspendyourwayoutofit ache. I’ve dedicated my whole life to remedying this ache. Some people called what I did to rid myself of the ache “Attention Seeking” Attention seeking. There are those two words. The worst scarlet taste attached to them. “Oh she’s only attention seeking.” A former caseworker will say dismissively. But what are they asking? They really just want to know if it is a real emergency or not. There’s a huge stigma attached to it. Like that is the last thing on the planet we would want to be. We would rather be an ant than a wounded macaw calling attention to ourselves. Attention-seeking has become synonymous with time-waster. But like suicide bombers they’re still hurting themselves everywhere. That is how suicide bombers are born. Maybe it’s that first fetal kick. That first stretch or yawn. Maybe it’s when their skin feels air for the first time. For some of us achers our baby cheeks were met with newspaper remnants in a trash can, some of our cries were met with cold smacks in foster care, or a teenager’s dotting, or worse an alcohol soaked rag that begins alcohol drenched nightmares.I find the only thing that helps soothe the ache is breaking into cars and smoking in them.
xo

click here for funny smart article

2010-07-12T13:06:00.001-07:00

if you have ten minutes to spare watch this beauty

2010-07-01T22:08:00.000-07:00

I'll take anyone

2010-06-30T22:55:00.000-07:00

click here for a totally creepy video that relates to this post    When I woke up my face was damp with tears and the last thing I could remember from my sleep was umbilical cords. My birth mother kept my belly button and baby teeth and even though she was massively abusive and bat shit crazy I knew that she loved me because the debris of my body was preserved with such high regard. This also gave me an even stranger message, a codependent one, like chasing after me for momentos equated itself with love.
    Later on when I entered foster care and my foster parents had their own children I noticed the vast blankness in the scrap books where I belonged. They kept their natural children's belly buttons and teeth also. As a result I initially left a mess in my wake hoping to weasel my way into these scrapbooks then since I was unsuccessful in that I became an overachiever and tried to forge my way in like that. That didn't work either. Today I try very hard to be notable. When you are trying to be something you want to be recognized for authentically it never works.
    I eventually made my way out of bed and got ready to go to some friend’s baby shower. They are a lesbian couple so the entire couple would be present. Traditionally baby showers are things that only women attend and in some gay couples only the femme side attends but really it’s a silly ritual because it’s for the baby and only having the feminine side there implies that only the woman will be tending to the baby. Even if I wasn’t into it, getting gifts and eating good food should work for anyone right? Plus women can be really sexy when their horny and plump with baby envy. If I could make a hard-on I’d like to be around for that. On my way to the baby shower I passed the Silver lake walking man.

Pop.u.LA.tion: Hit the ground walking -- latimes.com via Los Angeles Times

And then I don’t know if it was so hot I just started daydreaming, or I was remembering a dream I had previous. The cars blurring past made a hypnotizing monotonous back drop of noise. Like the metronome only the metronome sort of goes click-clack-click-clack and the cars in LA sound more like a rain stick ya’know more like “Shhhhhhhhhhh” then there’s the occasional hiccup like a motorcycle or skateboard. “shhhhhhh vrooom shhhhh tic tic tic tic tic.” So after some walking I may have slipped into a day dream or recalled a dream I had previous.
    I entered foster care and group homes when I was thirteen years old, in real life not in the dream. I thought I had found a nice home with foster parents but it didn’t work out. I had sex with my foster brothers. I had foster brothers that eroticized me and wished they could fuck me. I lived in group homes. I stole stuff. My ex-girlfriend was adopted. Her parents love her. Her experience was different. In my dream today as adults we had to go back into foster care. She adjusted perfectly fine. I did not want to play with the other kids. I thought their games were boring and stupid. I answered the phone one day. There was a nice lady on the other line. Apparently the assuaging hold noise when someone is waiting to be transferred to a live-person is a running commercial for the different children that were available for adoption. “Meet Jimmy he is sweet, potty trained, plays ball and with dolls and his favorite word is ...” “Gimme” (in little 6-year-old Jimmy’s voice).
    Then I heard the lady on the line.   The nice lady said she was so touched by the hold message she wanted to take all the kids home with her but she could only have two or three. I was sad. I knew at my age, 34-years-old I was not a candidate. I wanted her to be my mom. I came out of the dreamlike state still feeling sad that that nice lady could not be my mom and feeling the weight of not having any parents.
    Once I got to the baby shower l I tried to be of service to the parents-to-be’s mothers because it's become second nature to me to want to appeal to other people's parents. I'll take anyone. In fact I guess that’s how I got the idea.
    I’ll take anyone. Of course you have to use some scrutiny, like at first I thought if I wanted someone older than me, like old enough to actually be my mother or someone sort of young and hip. I decided that they had to be at least ten years older than me because my girlfriend is ten years older than me and so they had to be older than both me and my girlfriend and also I’m really smart and quick to pick up on things and despite this story I’m pretty mature so I wanted someone that was more mature than me. Sixty seemed like a good age. On my way home I started combing the streets. I was at a stoplight on the corner where Gelsons is across the street from Trader Joe’s. In the parking lot there was a sundries store, a dry cleaners, a nail shop-- which I tried not to stare too long at or the little heads of the women who worked there would perk up-- like they had a sixth sense for longing, or maybe it was grief they sensed.
    Of all the emotions I appreciate grief the most because it is the most authentic. So I looked around at the people mostly young hipsters doing last minute grocery shopping on a Sunday afternoon and I realized that I did not want to have the type of parents, now was it parents I was looking for or just a mom? I think just a mom would be fine, a dad I’m not sure what I would do with. Anyhow I realized I didn’t want someone that put off grocery shopping until Sunday. I didn’t want someone that had to still work or punch a clock either someone that was free to do their shopping on a Wednesday afternoon. I also wanted a woman that was racially ambiguous like me but in a good way not a Fine Young Cannibals or Mariah Carey sort of way, although at various points in time I have been compared to both and felt it as a compliment. A couple walked past. The guy was wearing a black T-shirt, loose jeans, and a pair of converse and the woman a white and buttercup colored dress, a giant sun hat and sunglasses. She shifted her body to the side so she wouldn’t hit me with her hat. The guy was smoking. I used to smoke so I smelled the smoke before I saw the couple and I wondered if she should smoke and I decided that there is probably something inherent in me that causes me to revisit the same injuries so she should smoke, that way if we ever get to really loving each other she will die shortly after and I can experience the same loss and abandonment I had before. Just when I thought I couldn’t. I thought that also perhaps she should be wearing a scarf. I don’t know why I thought it but I did and just then a small thin, smoking racially ambiguous (yet I could tell was a black Puerto Rican and something about her told me she was not just a Puerto Rican but a Nuyorican), woman with a coral scarf came up beside me. Perfect Perfect Perfect. It was like when I sent my nephew a small doll of Glinda-the-good-witch from the Wizard of Oz and she came complete with stockings and heels, and a crown and magic wand and my nephew took her held her close nose to nose and whispered “You’re perfect Glinda! Perfect.”
    “Excuse me?”
    “Oh.. uh did I say that out loud?”
    “Yes, I’m sorry were you talking to me?”
    “Well, uhh I was just
    “Huh?”
    “I was just thinking out loud. Sorry”
    My pulse raced I tried to do something distracting crack my back-no that would look too crazy. I reached up and cracked my neck. I think a lot of people must do that. I waited for the light it was taking a long time. Now was my chance.
    “Do you have any kids?”
The light changed.

Shut up! How freakin' cute is this guy!

2010-06-28T21:29:00.001-07:00

Kingsford Goes to the Beach -

The Kid: newyorker.com

2010-06-28T08:40:00.000-07:00

The most gut wrenching of The New Yorker's 20 under 40 issue. I have this nightmare all the time.

The Kid: newyorker.com

some randomness and a little talk to unblock the block

2010-06-25T21:34:00.000-07:00

Random observations:
I forgot to tell you the most disturbing bit about the ugly bad teeth staff person that rode in my car. She is sought after. Men flirt with her all the time. She has a modelesque boyfriend. When we got back to work and I walked her to her truck I asked her why she had such a big truck if she was so afraid of traffic. She said "Oh this, my baby daddy went on vacation and let me have it while he was gone." "Oh how long has he been gone for?" "Six years."
Initially I guessed it was one of those went to go get milk things. Then found out that he was locked up. On my way to the gym yesterday I passed the Harley shop right where Glendale turns into Brand and it made me think of a video I shot there once. It was some VH1 promotional deal but there were models that were supposed to be Harley experts and were supposed to answer our pre-scripted questions. But they were neither hot nor Harley experts. You could tell it was a B level shoot just by looking at the staples on the bottom of one of the girls pants to keep them from dragging. So they couldn't answer our questions about the bikes. My friend Antonia tried to save the day by asking "How many wheels does it have?" The model's face brightened. She even let her tummy loose for a moment when she answered "Two!"
Later Antonia and I were walking to her car and these guys from the shoot came up and one of them asked, "Those were good questions did you make them up yourself?" Antonia looked at him and said "Do you care?" That is my favorite classic Antonia moment, her tight shirt her sure gait it all said "I have tits and I'll cut you."
I was listening to the radio earlier today and heard this guy talking about how if a man grows up with courage and then something happens and he looses that courage and becomes shy or quiet he can rarely bounce back whereas if he was always a coward there's some hope. I was thinking about that for a while because I feel a little bit as if that happened to me that as a kid I was plump with courage. The good part about being my mother's protector is that I always felt bigger and stronger than I was. Somewhere that changed. I think it was when I outgrew my abuser. I mean when I was physically bigger than her and sill accepted the abuse.
The woman next to me in Bikram had antique lace colored skin and it was perfect because she wore antique lacey like panties that peeked out above her stretch pants. Her perfect bob and freckles reminded me so much of what I thought it was to be pretty in the eighties.
Lastly, I saw a pepto bismol pink hummer on the way home today and naturally thought, I wonder how much make-up she had to sell to get that? When I was a kid my grandmother would have the Mary Kay lady come over and do my make-up and we had our full kit of creams and cleansers powder pink bottles lined up in the bathroom beside one another. I liked it. I liked sitting at the kitchen table being girlie with my grandmother. She never spent money on anything but food.
have a great day. love you.

click here if you wanna read a stunning advice column

2010-06-24T20:54:00.000-07:00

The other day I drove around los angeles through laker’s parade traffic with a passenger that had auto-accident PTSD. She works with me and her teeth are rotten and she talks funny as if she has braces but she doesn’t. She has a hard yet slimy plaque coating over her teeth and because she has had two accidents in the past year one from behind and one from the front whenever you speed up, slow down, or change lanes she grasps the arm rests on the doors so hard her black knuckles turn white. And she insisted on referring to National Lampoon Vacation, or whatever that movie is called, and I am one of the few people who hasn’t seen it and I wonder why people that get stuck in the car for a long time still insist on referring to this movie. Slapstick bores me and is for nerds and if I’m gonna watch some empty headed mess there should be good outfits or sex in it or something. Slapstick reminds me of fart jokes. When I got ready for work I stopped and smelled her shirt. Her ‘Glory’ T-shirt and when I stopped to smell it it smelled like her and for an instant I remembered jumping up on my knees in my sleep to kiss her goodbye, and how sweet and soft her lips were, like we really meant it. Then I remembered that brief moment in time where she was courting me while she was away for work in palm springs and I slept in her long sleeved blue shirt and this was before we lived together and before we agreed to share so much so this T-shirt thing made me feel really special. I even remember washing my clothes and coming across a pair of her chonies and placing them on the bed to take a photo of them and ask her what was missing... because to me the answer was obvious the answer was her. Although I have to admit I had a tiny moment of insecurity where I thought perhaps that was too familiar perhaps I had gone too far and she would have been embarrassed at the sight of her underwear, but she wasn't. Anyhow there was a time that I started to think of that wasn’t and isn’t too long ago when she and I were forced to dream of one another and now I am happy to tell her that her T-shirts are precious to me once more and I am sleeping in the grey/black holy one that says Glory and holding on loosely till she gets back here.xoxo

Look mama my book review is on the rumpus click here to leave a nice comment

2010-06-21T20:38:00.000-07:00

Except no one liked the book including one of my best friend's who hasn't even read it :(

Melissa Chadburn: The Last Book I Loved, The Death of Bunny Munro

Melissa Chadburn bio ↓ · June 15th, 2010 · filed under books

This novel is a delightfully raunchy tale. If you crave raunch; to be torn open and fucked up, The Death of Bunny Munro delivers.

Munro has all the elements I love. I love surprises. I love pussy. I love beautiful words. I love the tension. I read it to escape and wound up connecting very sadly with every character.

Cave carries a steady hand throughout, offering each of his characters a high level of honesty and flashing their worried selves, fallible selves, sincere selves three dimensionally on the page. Cave also seamlessly slips from the mind of an Avril Lavigne vagina obsessed salesman to the tender naïve mind of his nine-year old Encyclopedia enthralled son. If I had more time, and the copy of the novel I borrowed was actually mine, I would have liked to map out all these transitions, as I think Cave reached a level of mastery with them.

Another gem was Cave’s beautiful metaphors: the curtains hanging like “strips of uncooked meat”; the once totemic quiff that lies as “limp and insentient as roadkill.”

The downloadable enhanced ebook features video clips, Cave’s laconic narration, and Warren Ellis’s music; and will no doubt further enliven the engorged, vivid language. Whichever way you come to it, you’ll struggle to think of Avril Lavigne in quite the same way again.

···
Melissa Chadburn is a thirty-four year old MFA graduate from Antioch. Her work has been published in 52/250, Thunderclap Press, The Bohemian, People's Weekly World, Political Affairs, Shelf Life, Battered Suitcase, and Splinter Generation. She has studied with writer's Leonard Chang, Susan Taylor Chehak, Tananarive Due, Dana Johnson, and Steve Heller. Chadburn has a background working in addiction medicine, as a homeless service provider, and is a former foster youth herself. More from this author →

3 Responses to “Melissa Chadburn: The Last Book I Loved, The Death of Bunny Munro”

Lorenzo Says:
June 16th, 2010 at 2:57 am
Hello, I read the book, I found it funny in some situations, and yes it contains nice/rock n roll metaphors!
But to tell the truth not a great book, the story is nothing new, I would not recommend this to anyone…
would we read the book if the author was not Nick Cave?… Do we expected more from an artist like him…?
Sarah Says:
June 16th, 2010 at 7:32 am
I’m with Lorenzo. It’s an ugly story about three-generations of loser men (there are three Bunnies, after all).

Yes, Cave comes up with some interesting metaphors, but who could possibly like this protagonist? He’s an arrested-development, narcissistic misogynist and a horrible, horrible father. I was waiting for Child Protective Services to swoop in and rescue his poor son.

Now that I’m “of an age,” I’m finding that there are lots of books written by/for younger people that totally lack a certain dimension of humanity. Maybe it’s because they haven’t lived long or much. Although in this case, Cave has no excuse.

Blech. Five Blechs. No stars.
Antonia Says:
June 16th, 2010 at 10:43 pm
I want to tongue Nick Cave from his neck to his knee caps, but I don’t love his books. His lyrics are vicious, delicious and true and his music is macabre but I found “And the Ass Saw the Angel” tiresome. “King Ink II” was sloppy but satisfying because it contained his lyrics.
This book review on “The Death of Bunny Monroe” is beautifully written, no matter what you think of the book. Maybe it sucked, but the review has spunk. I wanted to read more from the reviewer, and skip the book.

bird.

2010-06-05T15:54:00.000-07:00

I spent this morning bombarded with thoughts about birds.

First I was sent a link to an article in the LA Times about the bird man in silverlake:

Pigeonhole this actor thusly: the Birdman of Silver Lake - latimes.com

this is a man that has fascinated me for months he advertises a new campaign in his little push cart each week. One week there was a sign requesting that we slow down for the squirrels. The next was to please beware that the water under the sidewalks was poisoning the pigeons. You usually are able to read this sign while you see him manically sweeping away at the water outside of Gelson’s market.

Well I finally broke down and watched the Youtube clip that he also advertises on his cart.

It was sweet but made me wonder a little bit if this was a crackpot’s way to fame. Then I thought people have done dirtier more selfish things to reach fame.

Then I went on to read this amazing advice column at the urging a facebook friend and colleague:

DEAR SUGAR, The Rumpus Advice Column #39: The Baby Bird - The Rumpus.net

If you’re too tired or bored or have ADD the gist in the story and how it links to birds was that the advice columnist had to murder a bird. He/She found a baby bird and remembered that one is not supposed to touch a baby bird because then it would be shunned by it’s mother but the neck of the bird was broken so he/she had to kill the bird/ The narrator took the bird and put it in a bag and smothered it, and described that this was difficult to do. I myself have wondered if I would be capable of killing something even if it were for it’s own good. Part of me feels like this is a wish, a fantasy. That somehow someday I would have permission to murder. I’m not into violence or even the shock value of it. It’s just that I want to see if committing murder would cause me to slowly unravel or if my life would stay the same. To me that is the most disconcerting thing about murder that people could have done it or are doing it and acting as if nothing is happening.

This particular bird story reminded me of a time a pigeon got stuck in my grandmother’s house in Seaside, California. The pigeon got in through the fireplace. I thought I would save this bird and catch it. My uncle held the bird close while I taped it’s beak shut. or maybe we placed a tiny bird-head sized hood over it’s head and tied a bow around it’s neck. I don’t remember. I was around six or eight. A lot of bad things were happening in my life then. I just loved getting the tomboy attention from my uncle while my meeker male cousin hid in the corner. I did not know why the bird needed to be confined in this way. I guess to protect us from getting pecked. We then put the bird in a cage. My grandmother is Filipino and did not believe in domestic animals. Animals were for consumption mostly. So we had to keep the cage outside. The next morning the cage was swarming with ants. They ate my new pet pigeon. The pigeon lay there with its KKK hood on stiff and dead swarmed with ants. Little tiny meat particles of it being carried away by ants.
The idea of the dead pigeon and race and obligation made me think of yet another bird story. The bird story in Toni Morrison’s Nobel lecture (a.k.a. my commencement speech):

“When I think of my duty as a writer, I’m reminded of Toni Morrison’s Nobel lecture in which she tells a story of an older blind woman who was said to be a clairvoyant. Some kids come up and challenge her. They have a bird in their hands. They ask the woman if the bird is dead or alive. It is a trick. If she says the bird is alive they will kill it. If she says it’s dead they will keep it alive. After a long pause, she simply says, “I don’t know but it’s in your hands.”
Morrison made an analogy between this story and what she believed her responsibility is to language. Essentially, we sit here today with the power of language in our hands.”
-good writing to you.
m

click here to read a quick and grimy one

2010-05-31T16:29:00.000-07:00

A teacher once gave me an assignment to write a story in 60 words or less. this lovely online journal just ran the pieces I wrote. The link is above.

click here to read the story of my name

2010-05-31T16:27:00.000-07:00

A teacher once gave me an assignment to write a story in 60 words or less. this lovely online journal just ran the pieces I wrote. The link is above.

Book Review- for one I didn't dig

2010-05-23T20:30:00.000-07:00

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

My rating: 1 of 5 stars
Never Let Me Go

This novel has been accurately described as “quietly haunting”. I was impressed with Ishiguro’s style of examining small moments but disappointed by the lack of plot. To me this novel lacked both honesty and pretty words. What keeps me enraptured with novels that lack a strong plot is in the end pretty words, or rather good writing. The accolades, the awards, the words devastating, took me to the pages thinking, wishing hoping Ishiguro would earn a space in my mind beside his contemporaries he’s so often compared to, Ian McEwan, Marilynne Robinson, Chang-Rae Lee, and Margaret Atwood yet he didn’t.
To me this novel read like a YA novel and while the pacing was disturbing there was something slightly ungratifying about it that I can’t put my finger on, that in itself could also be disturbing. Lastly, this is probably one of the most tedious criticisms I’ve ever made but the word “Hailsham” (the setting for earlier portions of the novel and later referred to so frequently it could have been a character), felt like poison in my mouth.

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ASk The Dust

2010-04-28T07:09:00.000-07:00

Ask the Dust by John Fante

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A quick and crazy fun read. It’s mind-blowing how much story and detail could be packed in so few pages. It reminds me of an essay on the use of stillness in literature. Fante does this: stays still and reports every detail the reader never feels harried or missing out but it’s all there in only 165 pages.
For example: “She was gone when I woke up. The room was eloquent with her departure. A window open, curtains blowing gently. A closet door ajar, a coat hanger on the knob. The half empty glass of milk where I had left it on the arm of the chair. Little things accusing Arturo Bandini, but my eyes felt cool after sleep and I was anxious to go and never come back. Down in the street there was music from a merry-go-round. I stood at the window. Below two women passed and I looked down upon their heads.”-95
I thought to myself Is the secret that not much happens? but on looking back a good deal happens and Fante tackles some very tough political topics for the time, race and class and drugs.
“But I am poor, and my name ends with a soft vowel, and they hate me and my father, and my father’s father, and they would have my blood and put me down, but they are old now, dying in the sun and in the hot dust of the road, and I am young and full of hope and love for my country and my times, and when I say greaser to you it is not my heart that speaks, but the quivering of an old wound, and I am ashamed of the terrible thing I have done.”-47

There were only two things that nagged me:
1) The protagonist Arturo Bandini a loser and gifted writer that produced and published work whenever he felt like it. Writing that somehow often made him temporarily wealthy. I guess this was supposed to be satirical or possibly breath hope into the futility of a writer’s life but at times it just pissed me off. Because as you all know I am in direct competition with Arturo Bandini.
2) I wonder if the weed back then was stronger or if perhaps John Fante was actually really straight and didn’t do his research or If this was again some sort of fictional slant on marijuana, as the antagonist would go out and smoke weed in what sounded much more like a crack den and eventually lost her mind and I have yet to know of any cases like that.

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Take this as a tip for those of you that are in the pubescent stages of dating but a gift giving landmark event is about to occur.

2010-04-16T18:17:00.000-07:00

Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I loved this novel for two reasons. The first is the story behind the novel… how I got it. The one that reignited dead butterflies handed it to me as we sat in the cab of her truck. It was my birthday and I was full of spaghetti and cake. We only had one date and a coffee before this night that was my birthday so I wasn’t sure I would get a gift. It turned out to be the perfect gift for so early on in dating. It was her favorite novel wrapped in newspaper. I still don’t know if this edition was purchased especially for me or if this was her copy recycled. Either way it doesn’t matter. What matters is that she admitted later it was just an excuse to see me. What matters is how fun it was to make out after in the cab of her truck. Her truck that was parked outside my Echo Park apartment surrounded by dogs, roosters, Borachos, stale empty cans of beer, and food wrappings.
What matters most is the lovely prose (the second reason I loved this novel).:

“In the storm lit darkness, the beaded sweat and raindrops on her arm were like so many glittering stars, and her skin was like a span of night sky. I pressed my lips against the sky and licked the stars into my mouth. She took my body into hers, and every movement was an incantation. Our breathing was like the whole world chanting prayers. Sweat ran in rivulets to ravines of pleasure. Every movement was a satin skin cascade. Within the velvet cloaks of tenderness, our backs convulsed in quivering heat, pushing heat, pushing muscles to complete what minds begin and bodies always win. I was hers. She was mine. My body was her chariot, and she drove it into the sun. Her body was my river, and I became the sea. And the wailing moan that drove our lips together, at the end, was the world of hope and sorrow that ecstasy wrings from lovers as it floods their souls with bliss. The still and softly breathing silence that suffused and submerged us, afterward, was emptied of need and want, and hunger, and pain, and everything else, except the pure, ineffable exquisiteness of love.”-400

And the life lessons:
“Wisdom is just cleverness with all it’s guts kicked out of it.”
“Fanatics always seem to have the same scrubbed starving look about them. They have the look of people who do not masturbate, but who think about it almost all the time.”
“A dream is a place where a wish and a fear meet. When the wish and the fear are exactly the same we call the dream a nightmare.”
“Fear and guilt are the dark angels that haunt rich men. Despair and humiliation haunt the poor.”
“Trouble is the only property that poor fellows like us are allowed to own.”

Another thing that seems to matter a great deal to me about this novel at this point in my life and writing is that it took thirteen years to write and the first two drafts (six years and six hundred pages of work) were destroyed in prison. That matters to me because it spells out hope in this very special way that only a good novel that took a really long time to write some humility and some failed attempts can do.
What matters more is this novel has taught me writerly tricks like “I did not know then how important _______ would be.” Or how to use sensory memories of scars and scents to brings us back and forth through time in a way that makes the reader eager to know.
The true reason it doesn’t matter whether or not she gave me my own copy or it was a recycled book she already owned is because today four months later as I complete this novel I can place it back on the shelves of the books we share in the home we share. Just like someone who doesn’t read isn’t worth fucking someone who reads good books shouldn’t get too far.

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Winter Reads

2010-01-21T17:37:00.000-08:00

The Death of Bunny Munro by Nick Cave

My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Cave, Nick, (2009),The Death of Bunny Munro , Faber and Faber, NY, NY This novel was a delightfully raunchy tale. If you crave raunch; to be torn open and fucked up this novel delivers. This novel has all the elements I love, I love surprises, I love pussy, I love beautiful words, I love the tension. I read it to escape and wound up connecting very sadly with every character. It’s a very quick and easy read but you may feel perverted while your doing it (reading I mean). Cave carries a steady hand throughout offering each of his characters a high level of honesty and flashing their worried selves, fallible selves, sincere selves three dimensionally on the page. Cave also seamlessly slips from the mind of an Avril Lavigne vagina obsessed salesman to the tender naïve mind of his nine-year old Encyclopedia enthralled son. If I had more time and the copy of the novel I borrowed was actually mine I would have liked to map out all these transitions, as I think Cave reached a level of mastery with them. Another gem was Cave’s beautiful metaphors: the curtains hanging like "strips of uncooked meat"; the once totemic quiff that lies as "limp and insentient as roadkill". The downloadable enhanced e-book features video clips, Cave's laconic narration and Warren Ellis's music, and will no doubt further enliven the engorged, vivid language. Whichever way you come to it, you'll struggle to think of Avril Lavigne in quite the same way again.

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Winter Reads

2010-01-20T21:05:00.001-08:00

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño

My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Bolano, Roberto (1998), Savage Detectives , Picador USA, NY, NY Recently I sat in on a workshop on writing at 826LA. The lecturer mentioned that there were two types of readers, readers that read to escape and readers that read to connect. He also mentioned that there are three elements any of which that could get a reader to read a novel from start to finish and they are :1) The sentence, essentially pretty words2) Tension3) Honesty In terms of the first element, the sentence, he used Roberto Bolano as a prime example of this and I tingled with glee because I was reading this very novel at the time. I was getting into the club I thought. He was right well for the most part, Bolano writes gorgeous sentences. His relationship with words is so noble, so doting I would have underlined complete paragraphs if I could. But I still struggled with getting through the novel. I kept on repeating this lecture in my head that I heard in grad school as I tried to flip forward to the end of each chapter. The lecture I was repeating was how to read like a writer. I am no longer supposed to approach a novel like a contract between colleagues that begins with the first page and ends with the last, but rather more like a sniper, get in take what I like and get out. Which is fitting because in my other life, the one with the paycheck I am a union organizer, and as a union organizer I often compare myself to robin hood. I soo wanted to love every morsel of this novel. I even had a friend that designed an entire visual arts show on the concept of the main characters, the visceral realists, and after helping him proliferate over details of how to execute some of his work the front cover bore a special thank you to me. Which made me special and already have a relationship with these nonexistent people that accomplish so much in the way of art and letters. I think this novel lacks plot. I think I need plot. So while I used to categorize myself as a reader that reads to escape I suppose I have to embarrassingly admit that I am perhaps a reader that reads to connect. There was a lot of poetic references and poet name dropping and I found that if I dulled my brain and skimmed past a half a chapter of names I didn’t miss anything and so I resented that they were there. Then I realized that this novel itself was perhaps designed to read like poetry and rather than resent it’s 648 page girth maybe I should look at it and treat it as a poem and put it down and come back to eat whenever I have a penchant for pretty words. I think I take it all too personally when someone goes on for more than 300 pages without plot. I think it’s narcisstic. But the truth is I am not stuck prisoner of a novel. I do not have to date the author and then over a cup of coffee imagine us getting married and spending our lives together, as I do on normal coffee dates, and then of course divorce the author. I simply have to pick this novel up every now and again and admire it. I would just amend one thing from the lecture, I believe good novels need all three elements mentioned above rather than just one of them. In the case of this novel it lacked both tension and honesty, in my mind. What did I connect with in this novel? “Why do I have to like the worst ones? I thought, why do I have to be attracted to the most brooding least cultured, most desperate ones? It’s a question I ask myself twice a year. I still haven’t found an answer. “-175 “I’d only heard him, and who could be sure that what I was hearing was crying, and not, for example, the heavy breathing of someone in the middle of jerking off?”-pg. 300 But let me be clear at this point I giggled because I thought this was part of a conversation between Bolano and I and I thought that this novel was very much reminiscent of listening to someone jerk off for 648 pages. “Since when the glass is, shall we say, glazed with mescal, the tequila is more at ease, like a naked woman in a fur coat.”-281 Now these are definitely the brand of yummy gems you find in here. Rich with exquisite similes and metaphors. Very much like poetry, reads like a long ode to poetry in a lovely poetic tone however, to use his own words, “You can woo a girl with a poem, but you can’t hold on to her with a poem.” -172 Now I should warn you that I have a terrible reputation for not liking novels that some people would die over, so if you enjoyed Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridien you might want to just donkey punch me and get on with the rest of your day.

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The Lovely Bones

2010-01-20T09:32:00.000-08:00

The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Sebold, Alice, (2002),The Lovely Bones , Little Brown and Company, NY, NY

A fresh sweet whimsical way to look at mortality. I haven’t been this enchanted with death since ‘What Dreams May Come’, which I am unsure of if it was a novel prior to being a films and if not just a silly film reference that does not belong here.
The writing was beautiful but unfortunately I lent my copy to an ex-lover so can’t give any direct quotes here. If this excuse is actually working I may use it for the demise of all future plans. Unfortunately I think there are few things that I can tell folks about this novel that they don’t already know or will come to know as they see it in the theatres. I guess I can only use my writers lens in stating that all characters were even handed, all naughty people had good parts and all good people had naughty parts and I wanted to read it and cry and I wanted to love everyone and I did. The first novel I was able to fully pay attention to since my break up and for that I owe it my life.

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Click here and read an excerpt from my novel in the Citron Review

2009-12-13T08:59:00.000-08:00

TINY UPWARD SHOVE!!!

Painting my red flags white

2009-12-13T08:57:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I was confronted with the concept of rejection. I awoke really cognizant of people that were removed prematurely from my life. Not by death but mostly by break up. It was my recent ex-girlfriends 40th birthday and before bed I crafted the most loving note/email I could. Because there was a day when I knew her. There was a day when she was closer to me than anyone else. And in those days she feared turning forty. She feared not working even more. She feared the departure of elasticity in her skin. But that was months ago, when I knew her. Today I am not much to her. I am untagged photos on facebook. There’s a ghost trace of my existence. Then I got up and went to get coffee. At Starbucks there was a man that once was a sponsor of mine. I chose him because he was handsome and had two foster daughters that he seemed to love very much and I wanted him to be my dad. I wanted him to love me like that. We met for coffee once and began some step work. He asked me to write about my most painful memories in the voice of the child within me that was affected by these memories. The next week
I met him at the same Starbucks and read out a first hand account, in the voice of an eight year old, of being raped and then having cocaine sprinkled on my pussy. He told me I had done well he gave me another assignment, an even harder one. He set an expectation that I be honest. I felt closer. Like he might love me for a long time and give me cakes at meetings and I might meet his daughters, and maybe I can see him and his partner rather than my family over the holidays. The next week I showed up with my journal in hand and he wasn’t there. I tried calling him but there was no response. I called him again and left a message. Eventually I just assumed something happened to him. I never saw him again until yesterday. He was in front of me in line at yet another Starbucks. He was fine. It upset me.
And now I am thinking of this concept of honesty. What it is to be honest or dishonest. I went to a great lecture on memoirs the other night and the lecturer gave this great analogy. He said we have all had a relationship end in our twenties due to one or the other person lying or being dishonest, but then years later when we look back we realize that person wasn’t actually lying because that requires intent they were just not able to be honest with themselves or you at that time. I realize that I spent some time in my life painting my red flags green. Presenting myself nobler than I am. And I remember thinking of that sponsors last words before we parted that last meeting. To just be honest. When he first disappeared I imagined it was not a mistake but that he had somehow found out that I was being dishonest and was punishing me. So today I paint my red flags white. Instead of guns blazing I submit to it all. I acknowledge the people that have left my life sooner than I planned and thank them for making room for those that are able to show up.

FEMME INVISIBILITY

2009-11-29T08:16:00.000-08:00

I’ve been thinking about this theme of femme invisibility lately. I’m not sure exactly if I buy it or if or how that statement applies to me. I don't think of queerness as the largest part of my identity. I don't even think of femininity as the largest part of my identity. I have had people I work with consider me not a "girly-girl" because I possessed and exerted power over them or took my dog hiking in the morning. I find it really interesting to think about what the straight world considers to be feminine. Apparently they consider power as masculine. I much more frequently get asked about my race than the way I present on the binary.
It’s true that I, like other femmes are constantly put in a position to come out because most people assume they’re straight. It saddens me that the chicanery that falls upon the inquisitor is what sometimes increases the femmes lack of safety. But I have to admit I sort of enjoy this dance. When I’m out and some guy offers to buy me and my femme girlfriends a drink I usually respond with, "Ok but we're dykes so you’re not gonna get any." I love it when that happens because it's true at times there's something looming in the air between a person who may wonder if they're a potential suitor and myself and I enjoy just being straight up about it in the interest of saving time mostly. Huh, interesting the same thing happened to me recently. I was at a friends house for dinner and in walked the sweetest looking soft butch. She was rocker butch with a thin T-shirt and no bra, so you could see her adorable perky little nipples graze against her shirt, she wore jeans, I remember thinking it was the way she looped her belt that made her feel butch to me. It was talented and masculine. Most femmes I would say are not extremely belt proficient. Only one I know comes to mind right now, and she’s straight and rides a motorcycle and blows all of your ideas out of the water anyway. So in walks this cute rocker butch and I’m wondering why my friends have hid her from me and where has she been? As the night progressed and I thought our chemistry increased, I mean I imagined moving into t he vacant apartment next door lifting up the blankets and her curling in beside me in the mornings. I imagined her taking me coffee. There was a moment when we went to investigate the place next door and we both stood elbow to elbow looking at a view that did not exist, it was a view of a small grumpy lil house next door. But we stood at the window and paused I thought it was so our elbows could touch but maybe she just liked how it framed out faces. Like when you’re young and you feel like a camera is following you everywhere. Her red hair vs my curly dark mane. I almost said right there, “So you wanna make out.” I’m glad I didn’t because she came out as a straight person later at dinner. She mentioned that her boyfriend and her like to go to certain bars together. She did mention she had a lesbian stint in her twenties. Whoa a straight rocker butch? Never seen one before. I ached.
There's something that feels so adolescent about the need to be so definitive around what everyone else is doing in bed. It reminds me of the phases I took on as a teenager being so punk rock one day and then the next week being all things hip hop. Yet, I too am guilty of subscribing to the femme butch spiel. I liked the way someone put it that I went on a date with recently, she just said I like the butch-femme dynamic. I also think that it's interesting the level of invasive questions that happen when you first begin dating someone queer. When having a strictly hetero date I'm sure in the early days they don't determine what their sexual disposition is over a first cocktail. Mostly, I like that this world is becoming a veritable fluid gender playground. I just hope to find my cozy pillow in it to lean back donning my high heels waiting for my butch to plunge into me. At the end of the day I find the gender issue more mundane than the race issue and all distractions from the class issue. I don't care who's sleeping with who or how people are categorizing me or having to turn down unwarranted suitors (because let's face it if you're hot that will happen no matter what), as long as the classist people are still masturbating in the corner somewhere far away from me.
For those of you that want to get deeper on the topic I added a link that explores this topic further.

RAGE

2009-11-18T09:51:00.001-08:00

“Eyes shining, mouths open, triumphant, they savored the right of domination.”
-Lord of the Flies pg. 29

“He tried to convey the compulsion to track down and kill that was swallowing him up.”
-Lord of the Flies pg. 51

I’m thinking this morning about rage. This visceral part of people. Last night I went to a picket. My job was to be a human barrier between two hostile parties. To keep the line moving. We brought people and drums and chants and this all catered to our most angry selves. I watched grown men, one in particular transform looking like an overgrown child, fists clenched ready to fight. Every time he passed me he would peer over my shoulders to see if there was anybody there to pounce on. His inner hackles were up. I’m small but I was given a flashlight and a yellow vest.
I watched anger and disgust dash across grown folks faces. There were drums and buckets of champurraddo and microphones and I watched as people tried to work their way into hysteria. I think I woke up feeling sad how easy it can be to manipulate people’s emotions. Sad to see people eager to vent their naughty parts. If anyone in the opposing group successfully fought their way past the picket line they would bend over or flick us off or raise their fists, they did some action to cover their embarrassment, if you looked close you could see a slight blush, like when someone trips. While they were on the other side of the line there was only one of them and hundreds of us so en masse we puffed up and yelled.
This is our most visceral selves, our angry selves, our fighting self, our most animalistic place. We chanted over and over again, “WHEN WE FIGHT WE WIN! WHEN WE FIGHT WE WIN!” So along with the drums and the flashlights and the dancing when the opposition arrives testosterone has made its way even through the tiniest veins of the tiniest 60 year old woman. She is there fist in air spitting on someone. Another human being. Intellectually I know that at times these actions get us toward a greater good. I know sometimes to make change one has to even create a crisis. I know that there are amazing forums for this brand of energy, for example sex, there’s room for this type of natural rage in sex. It’s just that I looked at hate in the face last night. Like when you’re wrestling with a friend and their eyes harden, they get serious you know the energy shifts from play to hatred. I’m wondering now what action does the opposite of all this. What softens people?

Longing

2009-11-16T18:07:00.001-08:00

I’ve been thinking a lot about my relationship to longing. I was talking to a friend of mine one night who said she welcomes longing. It was easy for her to say this as we sat and drank amazing bulbous glasses of wine and ate the yummiest most precise cuts of cheese at Stella Café. In fact she was truly being French because this was the second dining experience she was having in the space of two hours. It’s hard now to imagine that on this particular night either of us would have longed for anything. She accepts longing as one emotion on the spectrum of emotions we experience. Me on the other hand, detest longing, it makes my skin crawl, it’s like nails on a chalkboard. Longing is a very uncomfortable state for me to be in. But on further inspection I discovered it wasn’t the longing that bothers me but the threat of acting on it. The impatience of sitting in it causes me to act and cut the grief and discomfort of longing by jumping into a distraction which most often ensues into a hot mess of sorts. This is when I go on a pain hunt because definitive pain seems more acceptable than longing to me. It’s an answer to a question.
I sat with this new suggestion that perhaps I can make space for longing sit down, hang out, court longing, if you will. Because at the end of the day the truth is one cannot evade longing.
The next day I woke up curled around my dog, my cat at my head with that familiar tug of loneliness and sadness that I have come to know as longing. You could have gently placed ten more animals around me and I still would have been hyper aware of any gaps of light say between my toes or fingers. I tried to remember what my friend said, to value this experience. I stopped at Starbucks that evening before a meeting. One of the patrons there, an older man with a really obviously bad hairpiece was staring at me. His nephew approached me with a thick Italian accent, “My uncle wants to know if you’re a celebrity like he is.”
I think the man thought this because I was somewhat of a spectacle with big hair and small dress, tattoos, electric blue nails. To a much older man I could look something like a moon child which celebrities might be akin to.
“No I’m a union organizer. What does he do?”
“He’s a singer. A tenor.”
He kept the accent on tenor so it sounded like the Spanish senor.
“Well, why doesn’t he sing?”
He returned to his uncle who was still staring dubiously and asked him to sing.
His uncle let out an earthshakingly disturbing noise and all of Starbucks stopped to gawk.
“He’s ninety!” The nephew exclaimed with glee.
I took this moment to say the only prized phrase I know in Italian , “La vestida don fue ir Monaco.” (forgive my spelling I don’t write this phrase I speak it.) Or “The dress doesn’t make the priest.”
This got them even more excited “You speak Italian!”
I left the Starbucks thinking of the man with the bad toupee. He looked like he was in love the way his eyes lit up. He reminded me of a foster grandparent I once had. Papou , a Sephardic Jewish man who was Spanish and Greek and spoke many languages was short and chubby and mostly drunk on Uzo and spent most of his days in love. If you asked him how he was he would say “I’m very happy I’m in love.” He spent his day wandering the streets falling in love. He had fleeting ten minute crushes on every beautiful woman that crossed his path. I thought this was the personification of welcoming longing. This is what that looks like. You let love come and go you marvel at it’s beauty. You have fun with it.

Spooky October Fiction

2009-10-23T23:24:00.000-07:00

Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy

My rating: 5 of 5 stars
McCarthy, Cormac (1985), Blood Meridien , Vintage International, NY, NY

I have no idea what happened in this novel. There was some scalping there, but it was the Godiva chocolates of scalping or some more decadent European brand only offered at Dean & Deluca. What I’m trying to say is this was the richest most dirty temptation of blood and wit offered in prose that I have ever come across, although admittedly I do not really remember the story I just read. It’s the details that clung to me, like dirty syringes poking into the inflated belly of the perch that skim the surface of Echo Park, the details and the fine way that McCarthy cradles the word is haunting.
I had been swimming in non-fiction and reading memoirs and this was a black belt version of the fiction I had been yearning for. Every fiction mentor I’ve had speaks of “the stage test” in which a writer asks themselves if all the elements of a stage are in each scene they’re writing. McCarthy exemplifies this not only in his ability to completely set and ground each scene but he starts off wide and then hones in on the intricacies so the reader sits at rapt attention waiting to be weaved in to the next scene and he does this line by line scene by scene. Every fourth page was underlined completely. In addition to this every fifth word was underlined. If I used my kindle as a barometer for the quality of novels I choose to purchase I would have to say this is not a book for the kindle this is a book I need to hold and love and coddle and return to every three months to jumpstart any writers rut I might find myself in. Contrary to that it is also the type of novel that makes writers question why they are even attempting to convey anything with words when someone else has been able to do so so masterfully.
For example, “They rode north along the river trace. The woods were bare and the leaves on the ground clutched little scales of ice and the mottled and bony limbs of the cotton woods were stark and heavy against the quilted desert sky. In the evening they passed through Tubac, abandoned, wheat dead in the winter fields and grass growing in the street there was a blind man on a stoop watching the plaza and as they passed he raised his head to listen.”-226
Haunting seems to be the very best word to describe this novel. You can’t read it and keep a clean loving psyche. Throughout the entire novel at least one of my dreams was laced with blood and guts and yet I found it beautiful. I felt safely distanced from it. I think perhaps this is why the main character, a boy never got a name. To protect the reader from being too attached or to allow the reader to be the boy to see everything. So I suppose either to create or dissipate distance. I’m not sure. I remember when I was younger I used to have dreams of blood and guts and all these dreams featured a boy. Later on (through court ordered therapy) I came to learn that this boy was me a representation my body chose as a safe way for me to experience this pain this longing a way to encourage myself to look after over and beyond my younger more injured self. But again there are no words of my own that can exemplify this better than McCarthy’s.
“Some by their beards were men but yet wore strange menstrual wounds between their legs and no man’s parts for these had been cut away and hung dark and strange from out their grinning mouths. In their wigs of dried blood they lay gazing up with ape’s eyes at brother sun now rising in the east.” -153
“They found the lost scouts hanging head downward from the limbs of a fire blackened paloverde tree. They were skewered through the cords of their heels with sharpened shuttles of green wood and they hung gray and naked above the dead ashes of the coals where they’d been roasted until their heads had charred and the brains bubbled in the skulls and steam sang from their noseholes. Their tongues were drawn out and held with sharpened sticks thrust through them and they had been docked of their ears and their torsos were sliced open with flints until the entrails hung down on their chests.” -227
I have to concur with Steven Shavirot "the scariest thing about Blood Meridian is that it is a euphoric and exhilarating book, rather than a tragically alienated one, or a gloomy, depressing one. . . Once we have started to dance, once we have been swept up in the game, there is no pulling back."

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BReak Up Blues

2009-10-11T20:30:00.000-07:00

So over the years I have had a few break-ups and I have to say I pride myself on my eloquent break up letters...
Enjoy:

A Valentines for my boss’ wife:

I guess this story should begin on the night when I was watching television with my girlfriend. It begins way before that but in the interest of time I’ll start there. We were really distant then, avoiding each other in mutual corners of the apartment; me in the kitchen, she in the living room. On this particular night I decided to end this undeclared challenge of encircling each other in silence. So I joined her by the television. I know you may think television is boring and evil- preying upon the dormant lesser parts of our brain to take over the more noble bits; and I agree that’s just what I was seeking at the time; a reprieve from both a shallow existence in my home and the weight of the world whenever I left it. I gained solace in watching a beautiful suburban couple argue about something mundane. So there we sat each on a separate end of the couch leaving enough room between us to air our silent grievances. Then about one half of the way into the show she picked up the remote control and changed the channel! Then a quarter of the way into the next show she did it again!

I could no longer control myself. I could no longer be invisible. I was completely overlooked, in this very slight silly gesture. I mean I’m sure now that there was more behind the gesture. More than either of us would have cared to know. Being jobless and emasculated by my utter need for constant perfection like an anorexic and a pile of doughnuts this remote was the one morsel of control she probably had. She gripped its long black phallic self like it was an extension of her. And I annoyingly squeaked, “Hello I’m here… I was watching that.”

After that I don’t know what happened I guess these were not the words she expected to be the first to break the silent dance of the past couple of days. I guess they were the opposite. Because they were the exact combination of words that for whatever reason caused her to get up and walk out.
At the time it was 7 pm. She was gone and did not answer her cell phone until 2 in the morning. In the meantime. I cleaned, set my clothes out for the next day, cried, and felt all the guilt and shame of having an addict for a partner. I have my naughty parts too but on her end she had long been suffering from mental illness and was a recovering drug addict. Finally there was nothing to do but wait. When she finally did call I simply said “You broke my heart.” not with an edge to splice but my words were hollow like pebbles that skip across your mind and thump lamely in the pit of your belly. She begged forgiveness and to come back. I let her back in.

The next morning I groggily tore myself from the bed. It was five a.m. I had been taking to leaving really early in the morning because the only solace I had was outside of these walls that stifled me; emotions leaking through at every corner. I took my dog running and then went into work. Nick was in Sacramento. He had left his phone at home and needed me to check his messages for him. You had just gotten a test done, maybe a marrow biopsy not sure which test but the big regular one that gives your white count.

He had probably told you that there was nothing to worry about that you would be fine because your message was ecstatic. Your message was “You were right! You were so right! I love you. I love you. I love you.” It’s true I felt guilty and voyeuristic listening to the most private of conversations between two people. And maybe that is one of my motivations for this letter. To even the score a bit. Something in your voice shifted something in me. Something in your voice let me know that this is the voice of a woman that is loved and loves back. They were simple words. Highly coveted, but simple. And I remember thinking this is what it is like to be part of a team. I thought that I deserved to be in a partnership where we rooted for one another. Your voice made me strive toward happiness. I’m certain the circumstances around your routine testing are much more dire and could probably teach me about all that I take for granted every day. But in that particular moment in time I felt like a piece of me was dying and I was voluntarily killing it. She no longer lives with me and today I spend my days reading, writing, walking my dog. Sometimes with friends and sometimes solitary but if I were ever to seek out love again you have set the barometer quite high.

Thanks

Happy Valentines Day

I wrote this before we met. This is not you. goodbye.

XOT

Lovingly Detached

The Solution

There are only two ways I can look at this:

1) Perhaps there isn’t anything wrong with either you or I it just isn’t a good match.

And if that isn’t compelling enough…

2) If we are meant to be together then when the time is right we will be.

The ARGH

I have one little argument left which is simply that the reason why that “pulling away” stuff works is because it’s hurtful and anyone with a modicum of self worth will not put up with it.

My Part

I did not accept everything as it was. I mean I did not want you to do with me what you have done with other women. I wanted to be distinguishable. I find deeply embedded patterns and want to change their directions. Which is why I can’t stand the constant rhythm of a metronome or get great pleasure out of jumping in the center of a perfect mound of fall leaves or the first fresh white hump of snow. You may be thinking it’s Tourette’s like but it’s not really a compulsion more of a hobby. When I was a little girl (hey I’ve already began the email might as well really write it), before there was heroin, or sex, or bills, or STDs, or fear, or loneliness I believed in God. I used to play this game where I would try to trick god. I thought he, she, it, knew what move I was going to make next, for example two steps forward, so instead I would take two paces back but then again he she it knew I would do that, so mid step I would go to the side. I would play for a couple of minutes, get bored, and pick it up again when it occurred to me. Sometimes as an adult, I catch myself playing this game on a different scale, with deeper risks, like with dating. Similar to when I was younger I’m reminded that I can’t win that game.

GRATITUDE

Overall I’m grateful for all of this:

-For intense bursts of pleasure and attraction

-For allowing me to be vulnerable and take risks

-For sharing parts of yourself with me

-For getting in my cab (even if you were impatiently watching the meter at times)

-And most of all for inspiring in me the strength and encouragement to quit smoking.

Best,

ONCE WE WERE FRIENDS

Written by Melissa Chadburn

Starring T DeM

It was one of those days that I felt more than comfortable in my skin. I had a great time hanging out with friends and then went over to your party. Max and I were talking by the fire. His mischievous grin was telling me that I was somehow being set up. I knew what was happening , I knew where I was. I remembered the night I met you seeing you watch me across the backyard and when I left you put up a slight protest. I wasn’t ready for you then. But on this particular night I felt extra confident. I let myself be whisked from party guest to party guest listening to your admissions , ‘I like her.” and handing me drinks , “Here the more you drink the better I’ll look!” Your personality was on fire , charming , teasing. Turning it all on and sparing little.

There was a nice crowd of strangers at your party that night but I also had a good sized safety net of friends to run back to if I ever felt that the attention I received was waning. We drank , we laughed , and eventually out back leaned against a car , we kissed. It was a nice kiss.. one that was timed perfectly to take me a little aback but also warranted. I pulled you closer by your shirt , you pulled me in by my waist. I’ll keep this pg-rated. It was nice. Then somewhere in the evening I saw you kissing someone else. I for some reason did not mind. I guess I was feeling just that confident. I’m almost sure it was before we kissed and not after and that’s why or maybe I somehow felt above all that. Besides at this point I wasn’t competing for anything. I was aloof.

As I was leaving I saw you two talking in your room. It looked more like an argument. She appeared sad , angry , and worst of all desperate. You appeared trapped. You shrugged your shoulders and waved goodbye and I laughed. It was all so harmless and somewhat funny. Funny I guess because we’ve landed ourselves on either sides of this coin before. That night the perfection and my happiness continued. Somehow you managed to send me a text before bed “You’re so fuckin cute!”

I know this because you showed me your failed attempt at texting (to my land line) the next night over drinks. You briefed me on the woman in your room. How it wasn’t anything serious. How she was questioning you as to where you had gone. How all you wanted to do was go and talk to me. I laughed with you when you said these things as we were open and talking and so new to each other. Plus you were stroking my arm in a very seductive way (right okay so PG-13). So I laughed but I made a mental note that I never wanted to be her. No woman does. I was determined to not let myself be in a position where a man would refer to me as an obstacle to another woman.

So I went through that whole recapitulation of our meeting to say this. The day I rented my costume I thought of you. In fact I even called you to see if you wanted to come along. I thought of you when I tried it on and it was the perfect thing that made everyone gasp the way I hope they will when I try on a wedding gown or get my hair done. I had no plans in particular but I usually make Halloween a Venice affair so again I considered you. When I saw you the following Friday you told me you were having a party so I rested well knowing I would have someone to share me in all my splendor with. All week I did things earlier so I could have room for you , fun , and friends on Friday. I did things on Tuesday I normally saved for Wednesday and things on Wednesday I normally saved for Thursday. Then on Thursday the day before your party you send me a message that says this “Would love to see you but you know how I get at parties so no grief from you. XO.” There it was in digital text. Ta- DA…..I was her!

No thanks. XO.

and the latest one :

The "What is it that I'm trying to say" list

I remember a poem about cold

I remember when the days weren't long enough

I remember a dull ache where I willed you to touch me

I remember a shared sense of longing

I remember The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Pesle

(I never read it but put it in there to be quirky)

I remember Just for Today and Courage to Change

I remember countless slogans ( a few entailing urine)

I remember a clamoring for intimacy

I remember talking on the phone and lots of times not talking

just breathing

I remember I'll be your man

I remember Have Love Will Travel

I remember I'm gonna love you too

I remember when you had me under your skin

I want ease back

I want ease back so bad that I'm filled with a longing for ease

I remember racing hearts, they raced just yesterday

but there's a vacancy there

There's space where there wasn't

the inevitable space of self preservation

it doesn't feel like that Band-Aide trick

It prickles and rankles

when a woman you're in a relationship with speaks admiringly of some woman who once was

her lover. This rankles even if the affair is now safely in the past, and you can imagine how much more enraging it would be if she were actually in the recent past. Still, there are also some situations in which it doesn't really bother you.

Maybe this is one of them.

Maybe it isn't

Maybe if it were divorced from the lack of ease

from the transfer of doting from you to online Hold 'ems and

last minute Save 'ems

there's a piece of you still connected

to someone else

I understand

but I want you when that connection

severs

not when it's still alive and being fed

Your desire for independence shouldn't

conflict with your desires

to touch me, fuck me

gently tease me

take me

and make me say please

for it

Your desire for independence shouldn't

conflict with your desires

for laughter

or a gentle mutual kindness

not like a tolerable kindness

but a genuine this is how I wanna make you feel kindness

there was a time

when we wanted

you wanted

me to feel

better than I ever have

and the distance between that and

what I'm feeling now

is growing

the worst part

is most times

you're generally good

there are no obvious faults there

there is no real crime

nothing I could put my finger on anyway

just a lack of ease

but that little lack of ease sometimes

makes me feel pathetic

I mull over yesterday's

words, letters, phone calls, gestures

I wade in it

I'm thick in it

reminding me why I'm here

arms outstretched drenched in risks

I don't like being so broken open

and then left to fend for myself

one thing I can't do well

I don't gamble

HEad BTc

2009-10-04T14:41:00.000-07:00

This seems to be the week of social awkwardness, people I don’t want to interact with contacting me, me contacting people that would like to be left alone. Hostile work environments, death, sadness, and ultimately love. I’ve decided to dedicate this post to the ones that seem to know how to do this thing right. The ones with the organized social structures that aren’t left misunderstood for more than unbearable amounts of time.

The animals.These are the turkeys I get to see on my hikes with the dog in the morning. As it gets closer to Thanksgiving I’ve been warned they’ll be more scarce. But right now they’re in full effect walking in large (I believe the word is “rafters”) they’re pretty big up close but I refer to them as “the turkey ladies” because of their delicate waddle across the street.

The turkeys usually show themselves out front of this abandoned house or granny unit as they call it as it’s a smaller place detached from the main house.

Here’s a shot of the main house which appears to be two stories high and I don’t know if you can tell in this picture but was at one point in time gigantor and now it’s covered in graffiti.

Then of course I couldn’t miss an opportunity to share some flicks of my dog as I always get so much joy out of humiliating her. On this particular hike she insisted on stopping for an apple. Which note to self…. Apples and the Tsukster don’t mix we ended up seeing it again a five minutes later.

This is her ready for Halloween… Cruel animal parents we are making our animals dress up like insects but come’on I couldn’t resist. Unfortunately I was harassed on the road on this particular night and it would’ve been helpful if she looked more tough and mean and less like a bumble bee. The humiliation doesn’t stop there.

This is her fashioning my first crochet creation. I decided while I was out here I would try my hand and some domesticity. The babies in the NICU can always use hats and booties so I thought there was purpose enough in this project to get all la-de-daa stay at home and watch re-runs.

check out my new article

2009-10-03T21:05:00.002-07:00

http://www.bohemian.com/bohemian/09.30.09/openmic-0939.html