My favorite postcard of all time.I think I bought it when I was about eighteen or nineteen, as a sensitive young gayboy in San Diego.

Peter Orlovsky (on the right) was incredibly beautiful and also a writer, but definitely inspired some incredible poems by Ginsberg, his partner of 30 years.

Peter Orlovsky 1933-2010

There’s just no teaching. I applied for some part-time teaching at a couple of other schools but it looks pretty dismal.

Hopefully unemployment will kick in and they won’t screw me this time like they have in the past.

In other, happier news I went to the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books last Saturday–took a bus up with Judy Reeves and other wonderful folk as part of San Diego Writers, Ink– and had a great, if overwhelming time. Overwhelming because there’s so much to do, see, so many books, panels, booths.

I did get to see panels featuring:

Colson Whitehead–looking awesome, handsome as usual and when he said, “I’m obsessed with outlining. I like to know what happens”– I wanted to go up and shake his hand, or kiss him. Probably kiss him. (ok, I admit to a guy-crush on Colson Whitehead. If that makes me gay, so be it. Oh, wait. I am gay).

Paul Harding—the guy that just won the Pulitzer and a Guggenheim (I bought and he signed his PP winning book: Tinkers, which looks beautiful and the reviews are staggeringly positive. He was also very sweet and gracious).

Rafael Yglesias–whose book, A Happy Marriage (a fictionalization of meeting his wife and then losing her to cancer), sounds heartbreaking and glorious and I think I’ll need to put it on my list. He also said, “Reading poetry helps bring emotional power to your own writing. You can’t make books or stories vivid without doing something to the language.”

Antonya Nelson–she was dead on when, speaking of the importance of reading (as learning tools, as inspiration, as teacher), she said: “A lot of what I’m writing is a response to what I’ve read.”

Marisa Silver–Love, love, love her story collection: Babe in Paradise who said “the story has to be an exploration for you.”

Ron Carlson– “I’m only interested in surviving the draft.” Love that line. I took a Creative Writing class from him at Arizona State in the mid-late 90s.

I also attended the “History Through the Lens of Fiction” panel featuring Tom Curwen, Gabrielle Burton, Thaisa Frank, and Indu Sundaresan. All very accomplished writers of historical fiction. One interesting thought I came away with is: “Finding parallels in your work (the historical fiction you are writing) and the world of today.”

Oh, and I came away with a new subscription to Tin House, too!

More on writing… later.

“The tough poetry of Fisher’s novel buoys this chronicle of Oregon migation along on an incantatory wave. It’s 1847 and dour patriarch Israel Mitchell drags his reluctant wife , Lucy, and their chilren out to the Oregon Territory. Their paths cross with James McLaren, a bereaved Scot trapper whose children have all died from smallpox and whose Nez Perce wife has run off. Each day the murderous landscape spools mercilessly ahead of the emigrants, and Fisher’s depiction of a familiar seeming journey that is not adventurous, as myth would have it, but a daily exercise in folly and survival, is astonishing. A Sudden Country requires a patient reader, but the spell it casts is transformative and rare. The heartbreaking first chapter alone is worth any number of lesser novels.”

The review doesn’t lie. The first chapter left me breathless. When I finished the chapter I turned to Ted (we were both reading before bed) and said “Wow.” I didn’t have the words to describe how mesmerized and devastated I was by that first, extremely short chapter. This is what editors and agents mean when they say the first chapter (let alone the first page) must grab you and pull you in.

Happily, the rest of the book is proving just as beautifully written and intriguing and surprising. One particularly moving turn of phrase:

He remembered the dry grief cracking out.

Fisher is teaching a daily workshop called “Spirit and Matter in Historical Fiction” that I’ve signed up for. I can’t wait!

On a probably not-so-related note, or, well, speaking of the big country, the wild west, I watched “Calamity Jane“– the western musical starring Doris Day as the title character and Howard Keel as Wild Bill Hickok, her eventual love interest. The film and the Academy Award-winning song “Secret Love” is referenced in my book as is the hunky Howard Keel.  Though I think this photo on the left is from “Annie Get Your Gun” in which Keel also starred, this time playing opposite another brassy blonde: Betty Hutton.

“Calamity Jane” has its moments, but I was really just watching to see Keel (my main character has a crush on him; it’s easy to see why) and to hear the song. You can see/hear it here.

Don’t know why I had never seen this poem by Billy Collins before:

Marginalia

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O’Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
“Nonsense.” “Please!” “HA!!” -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
why wrote “Don’t be a ninny”
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls “Metaphor” next to a stanza of Eliot’s.
Another notes the presence of “Irony”
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
“Absolutely,” they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
“Yes.” “Bull’s-eye.” “My man!”
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written “Man vs. Nature”
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird signing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake’s furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents’ living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
“Pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love.”

Included in the book, Sailing Around the Room: New and Selected Poems

It was only a week, I know, but when it’s just me and the kitties it gets a little weird. I wonder what he’s going to do when i’m in Vermont for a month doing my writer’s residency?

So, the other night in one of my classes a student, talking to me after class, asked: how long has your hair been thinning?

WTF??!!!

He is actually a very sweet student, but very chatty. Also, his own hair is thinning so I think he was trying to relate to me… in a strange way…

It did get me thinking though… my hair IS thinning. Not in the back but definitely at the top, or where my [feathered] bangs used to be. What is that part of the head called? Above my forehead.

It’s thinning enough that it’s just starting to look a little, er, funky. And not funky in a good way, but funky in a ‘do I look like I’m trying to grow my hair out so you can’t see that i’m thinning?’ kind of way.

I’m thinking it’s about time I stopped trying to rock a trendy mullet or faux-anything. I might be at the point where

GASP!

i’m going to have to start cutting my hair really really short. Not shaved, by any means, but really short. Sort of Chris Meloni in Law and Order SUV short.

Plus, i’m going to be in Vermont for the month of January, and that means I’ll be wearing winter hats, and that means messy hair, so why not avoid all that and cut my hair short?

I was also thinking of growing a beard, but nah. I like my stache still.

Speaking of beards, I found the COOLEST artist on the website Fecal Face, Keith Shore, and love love love his print called “The Bearded Portraits.” I’ve got to put a bug in Ted’s ear so he’ll get it for me for Christmas.

If you check out Shore’s website you can see more of his paintings– I like how they look almost childish, but there’s something in the way he paints the characters’ eyes and mouths that to me look very tense and real.

Anyway, The Bearded Portraits reminded me of Walt Whitman’s musings on beards so I thought I’d leave you with a couple of excerpts.

Whitman rocked his own beard, as you all know, and mentions them in the preface to Leaves of Grass.

About America, he writes: “Here are the roughs and the beards and space and ruggedness and nonchalance that the soul loves.”

Then again in “Song of Myself”:

Washes and razors for foofoos …. for me freckles and a bristling beard.

*Whitman image from here.

(from The Writer’s Almanac, April 17, 2009).

Field Guide by Billy Collins

No one I ask knows the name of the flower we pulled the car to the side of the road to pick and that I point to dangling purple from my lapel.

I am passing through the needle of spring in North Carolina, as ignorant of the flowers of the south as the woman at the barbecue stand who laughs and the man who gives me a look as he pumps the gas

and everyone else I ask on the way to the airport to return to where this purple madness is not seen blazing against the sober pines and rioting along the roadside.

On the plane, the stewardess is afraid she cannot answer my question, now insistent with the fear that I will leave the province of this flower without its sound in my ear.

Then, as if he were giving me the time of day, a passenger looks up from his magazine and says wisteria.

“Field Guide” by Billy Collins from Questions about Angels. (c) William Morrow and Company, 1991. Reprinted with permission.

Big Sigh.

What a glorious trip! This is my third (fourth?) trip to St. George, Utah for work on my book but this time I really felt a much stronger sense of place–which I hope (no, I believe) I can convey in the book. Some days I just sat outside in the red rock canyon and listened to the sounds and wrote in my journal. It was a much needed trip.

I also read from my new favorite book, Tom Spanbauer’s The Man Who Fell in Love With the Moon. For years my favorite book has been Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides but now I think Spanbauer’s book is going to knock Eugenides off of the top spot.

I’m completely enamored with Spanbauer’s detail and descriptions, the bawdiness, the honesty– and the narrator, Shed, who I’ve developed a slight crush on.

Two lines from the book really stood out to me this week (both spoken by the character Shed):

Human beings just got to tell stories.

and

The only thing that keeps us from floating off with the wind is our stories. They give us a name and put us in a place, allow us to keep on touching.

Daniel Zalewski’s profile of the Atonement author (read it here) is so compelling, so readable, and SO long. I almost got a hernia on the elliptical trying to finish it (I didn’t–finish it on the elliptical or get a hernia for that matter– though I’ve already had two in my life–hernia’s that is– but that’s another blog entry).

I’ve decided i’m going to take a pen to the gym from now on so that when i’m reading the New Yorker on the elliptical I can mark places that I love.

Currently I earmark the page but sometimes I go back and look for what I was earmarking for and can’t find it. In fact, I earmarked a page in the McEwan piece and now can’t find why I had earmarked it.

Anyway…The other piece in this issue that I loved was on Donald Barthelme by Louis Menand. I first read him in grad school (60 Stories–here‘s a blogger who gives a pretty nifty analysis of Barthelme’s book) but was a little stymied by how he played with form; I was more of a traditionalist, linear writer then. Oh, my, how things have changed.

There’s a new biography of Barthelme, Hiding Man, by Tracy Daugherty (interestingly, a former student of Barthelme), which explains that “many people have got Barthelme wrong.”

“It’s not hard to see why they might have. Barthelme’s first short-story collection, “Come Back, Dr. Caligari” (1964), includes “The Joker’s Greatest Triumph,” which is based on characers from the Batman comics. His first novel, “Snow White,” which came out in 1967, is what they used to call, on the nineteen-sixties show “Rocky and Bullwinkle,” a fractured fairy tale–a modernized and mildly surealized adult version of an already Disney-ized story. His second collection, “Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts” (1968), includes a story, “The Dolt,” about a man preparing to take the National Writers’ Examination. In 1969, he published, in Esquire, “And Now Let’s Hear It for the ‘Ed Sullivan Show!,’” a scene-by-scene report of one of the programs in the manner of an agitated lover of the show. Many of the stories in his third collection, “City Life” (1970), are illustrated with images clipped from old books and magazines. Some of the stories are in Q. & A. form:

Q: Is the novel dead?

A: Oh yes. Very much so.

Q: What replaces it?

A: I should think that it is replaced by what existed before it was invented.

Q: The same thing?

A: The same sort of thing.

Q: Is the bicycle dead?

–”The Explanation”  (this excerpt from The New Yorker, Feb. 23, 2009)

I’ve only ever read 60 Stories, nothing else of Barthelme, but I’m thinking I might have to investigate these books. In the book I’m working on, I’m toying with the idea of using other texts throughout– letters, telegrams, photos, interviews, newspaper clippings, and various other documents i’ve acquired in my research.

Isn’t this called Mult-Textual? Intertextual?

Who else does this? David Foster Wallace, John Dos Passos… Who else? I know there are many more.

Is this distracting? Can it be done well so that it enhances the story?That’s what I’m trying to figure out.

Thoughts?

I mean, I have read stories and essays by him, but for some reason I haven’t committed myself to his books yet. I’m hoping to change that this year. Especially after reading his story, “The Gangsters” (which is actually an excerpt from his new novel –which, by the way, comes out the DAY before my birthday!), in last week’s issue of The New Yorker.

The story is about a group of boys, pals, in Sag Harbor in the summer of 1985 (well, ok, it’s about more than that but I don’t want to give anything away). What I loved about the story was not just the vivid, distinct characters, the references to eighties rap music and other bits of 80s-culture, or the rising tension woven throughout the coming of age tale, but really, what held me completely hypnotized was the narrative voice– smart, funny, nostalgic, realistic, with italicized asides, in-jokes, exclamations, revelations, etc. By the end of the story/excerpt I felt as if I knew the narrator personally. I felt as if he had been there talking to me face-to-face, telling me this story (which would have been kind of difficult, as I was on the elliptical when I read it, but anyway…).

As I work on my own book I’m really trying to get to know my characters, each and every one of them, and trying to get them out onto the page as honestly and realistically as I can. I felt so inspired reading “The Gangsters.”

Here’s a sample:

When I had free time between engineering my own humiliations, I was introduced to the hacky sack, a sort of miniature leather beanbag that compelled white kids to juggle with their feet. It was a wholesome communal activity, I saw, as they lobbed the object among each other, cheering themselves on. It appeared to foster teamwork and good will among its adherents. Bravo!

Unfortunately, it looks like the story is not available online (the NYer is sometimes so picky about what they let you read for free), but there is a cool interview with the Colson Whitehead, where he discusses the excerpt and the relationship between fiction and real life here.

**Any recommendations for which Whitehead book to read first? The Intuitionist? Apex Hides the Hurt? John Henry Days? Which book/s of his did you like and why?