Here are 5 that have gone out so far:

The postcards for the Write-a-Thon all have something to do with literature– I use pages from old books, lines of Whitman poems, lit criticism about Dickens and Bronte and then my usual film or pop-culture images or references, many from vintage magazines. I’m also experimenting with paint more– having fun painting rubber stamps and then applying that to the postcard.

I bought these AWESOME rubber stamps– one is a fleur-de-lys (you can see it in red and orange on two of the postcards) and then I found a  huge rubber stamp that looks like

wood grain (see below).

WS Merwin is such a sweet, spiritual man–a Buddhist and Environmentalist– who lives in Hawaii. (pic from Univ. of Arkansas Daily Headlines).

And, he’s 82!

Today NPR interviewed him (click to listen) for just a couple of minutes and he read this poem, so tiny and beautiful:

Separation

by W. S. Merwin

W. S. Merwin, “Separation” from The Second Four Books of Poems (Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 1993).

And here’s a pic of the young WS Merwin (photo from Univ. of Arizona Poetry Center).

OK, and shameless plug for a new T-Shirt, but it is writing inspired. It’s called, INKSpiration, and it’s

ONLY $10 and I love it. I just bought one. It’s from Threadless and you can buy it, for $10, HERE.

(cute guy not included–or I’m assuming). There are also many other shirts for $10 without a Pen on it.

I’m a sucker for these pulps from the 50s/60s–but especially if they’re film tie-ins, like this one:

The Best of Everything written by Rona Jaffe.

The movie starred Hope Lange, Stephen Boyd, model Suzy Parker, Diane Baker, Bob Evans (yes, The Kid Stays in the Picture), and special guest Joan Crawford!

Here’s a review.

If you haven’t seen it, it’s on DVD (I own it, natch).

The movie is totally melodramatic (“An expose of the lives and loves of Madison Avenue working girls and their higher ups”) and most of the story takes place in a publishing house–where Joan is the top editor.

Here’s a classic scene between Joan and Hope Lange–guess which lines are Joan’s…

Amanda Farrow: When you finish the slush files, then you may go. But I want my comments on each.
Caroline Bender: Typed?
Amanda Farrow: No Miss Bender. Beat it out on a native drum.

I think i’m ready. Today we went out and bought these slippers for me from L.L.Bean (great sale going on). They are really really comfortable. As well as a neon lime-green fleece blanket, another pair of thermal bottoms, winter gloves, toe warmers. I don’t know how i’m getting all of this up there. I’ve already sent a box of books from San Diego and I have two rolling suitcases. Yes, I AM that person with the two rolling suitcases. I just didn’t know what to bring. I’m from California! Yes, I lived in NYC for  years but it never got THAT cold. Well, one year we had a blizzard and a ton of snow but I had my duckboots.

So now i’ve got a bunch of mis-matched winter clothes: Ted’s blue down jacket that probably makes me look like a kid wearing his dad’s dinner jacket, my HUGE brown LL Bean duck boots that make me look like a  Transformer, black gloves (on sale), a bright orange knit hat, long blue striped scarf that I got when I was at Columbia; I’m going to be that ragamuffin–there’s always one in the group.
Might have to send a box back to San Diego with stuff I don’t need– or make Ted take it back for me. Ted, by the way, fixed my blog–apparently it was all messed up; of course I didn’t notice it, Ted being the techie in the family.

I’ve never been one to enter contests– not really. I think i’ve bought lotto tickets three times in my entire life. I rarely buy raffle tickets unless it’s for a good cause. The last thing I won was a Chippendale’s Puzzle playing gay bingo in the East Village New York.

It’s still in the box…

I remember there was a time in the late 80s and early 90s when those post-card contest scams were all the rage. I would get postcards in the mail saying there was a prize being held for me and all I had to do was call. Then when I called they told me to ship it it would cost $30 or something like that. I got fooled by it once– shame on me.

Then there was that Free I-pod contest, remember? 5 or 6 years ago. You get all of your friends to click on these links and maybe buy a magazine or sign up for Netflix or something, and you were supposed to get a free I-pod. Well, I never did that one, but I think Ted did. And, I think he might have gotten the I-pod but only after a huge hassle.

I’ve won books before, forgot about that.

*

But about a month and a half ago I was reading a music blog and they were having a contest where the winner would get Rufus Wainwright’s new CD/DVD “Milwaukee At Last!” I love Rufus so I thought, why not? Plus I was going to comment anyway. Low and behold I won the CD/DVD (it’s pretty good by the way).

So, in short, ever since winning that i’ve been entering contests again.

A couple of weeks later I answered questions on a survey from one of the textbook companies that I order books from for my class and was entered into a contest to win a free Flip mino Video Camera.

Well…

I won!

I got a free Flip mino Video camera and it came yesterday!

How cool is that? However, It did come with the logo of the textbook company slapped on one side of it … kind of funny.

But now i’m feeling lucky.

I’m looking out for contests everywhere… maybe I should buy a lotto ticket?

And as soon as I learn how to use it can spend my time playing with my new camera (which, of course, I’ll be taking to Vermont with me for the month of January; oooh, maybe i’ll do podcast/blog posts?).

Speaking of luck… i’ve always loved this quote from Milton– especially the part about the fairy ladies.

Good luck befriend thee, Son; for at thy birth The fairy ladies danced upon the hearth.
~John Milton

Perhaps the fairy ladies danced upon the hearth at MY birth?

I was thinking the other day about the toy Stretch ArmStrong.

Remember him? “He stretches to four times the actual size, then returns to normal!”

I used to have one. I think I begged my mother to get me one. (or maybe I begged her to tell Santa?).

Even at that young age–I must have been 7 or 8–I thought he was kind of hot, before he stretched out anyway.

He was so bizarre. What was he filled with?

My older sister bit him on the groin once and left teeth marks (yikes!).

And then I think towards the end of his short (1 year?) life I might have accidentally punctured him (insert joke here too). Inside him was this pinkish gel, like maple syrup. Was it silicone?

In any case, it would be fun to explore my early fascination or fetishization of him  in my writing at some point.

He was a muscle man, and I was a 48 pound weakling. He was blond, handsome in a Ken doll meets Hercules/He-Man sort of way. And I was a scrawny toe-headed gay boy with a penchant for turtlenecks and singing songs in the mirror.

Stretch Armstrong.

There’s got to be a story in there somewhere, right?

*a Japanese Version goes for $299 on Ebay!

Here’s what he says in 1940 about writing for the New Yorker:

It is still, even in writing for the New Yorker, a question of feeling strongly, of being alive. It can be the first thing you see in the morning; a wet roof reflecting the bleak light, the suspicion that your wife’s legs under the table may be touching the legs of someone else, the happiness of burning up the road between New Haven and Sturbridge on your way home. In signing a contract with the New Yorker there are certain apprehensions as if writing were a mystery, something as chancey as a long shot on a wet track with mud all over the silks and the bums crowded in under the grandstand out of the rain. I have twelve stories to write and they’ll be good.

and here’s another gem:

Cheever would lie on his bunk and reflect on those lost, lazy days in prelapsarian Pennsylvania: “shopping in Frenchtown, building a fire to burn the damp out of the house, the first drink at four o’clock on the noste, the second drink at four-fifteen, the venery, the eating, the noise of the brook and the ice-box motor at night, morning sunlight, breakfast, a walk into Frenchtown maybe or raking hay or cutting wood.”

**

I’m teaching a new nonfiction/memoir writing class starting this week that runs for six weeks and still teaching summer school; now that our move is over i’m eager to get back to my book, which has been on hold (except for a few notes here and there) for too long now.

Cheever photo from Vanity Fair.

Today I went to the Atomic Testing Museum. Very strange. Very fascinating.

In the museum there was a 13 minute movie about the Atomic Bomb and Testing in Nevada. They must have put speakers or something under the floor and under our seats because every time the bombs went off the floors and seats shook and rocked us around. Then they sprayed warm air on us. It was all very Captain Eo but without the 3-D (now that woulda been cool!).

There’s a slight thread running through my novel about the Nevada Testing Sites in the 1950s.

Here’s a postcard I bought at the gift shop.

And here’s the lyric from a hit Doris Day song from the movie My Dream is Yours (1949):

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?

This week, amid all of the chaos and driving to and from the schools I got in the mail the two copies of the anthology, Fool For Love: New Gay Fiction, featuring my story “Party Planning.” It’s been a long road for this book, but it’s finally out (ha ha, out, get-it?). The editors, Timothy J. Lambert and Becky Cochrane are my heroes; they persevered as the book changed publishers, and all the time remained so positive and gracious and kept us informed on what was going on (special thanks to Richard Labonte, too, who helped find a new home for the book).

I hadn’t seen/read the story in, wow, maybe almost a year? So strange and wonderful to read it again in print. It’s a story I first wrote about four or so years ago that went through so many revisions in the last few years. One thing about it is that it is not at all autobiographical. Many (but not all) of my stories have shades of my life in them or are loosely based on my own experiences but this one was completely made up.

I’m also thrilled to be included among these writers, a few I’ve met, many I haven’t, all exceptional:

Thai Angel, by David Puterbaugh
Love Taps, by Mark G. Harris
Matchmaker, by Shawn Anniston
A View, by Brandon M. Long
Gratitude, by Felice Picano
Happy Hour at Cafe Jones, by Famous Author Rob Byrnes
Trunk, by Trebor Healey
De Anima, by Joel Derfner
Like No One’s Watching, by Josh Helmin
At the End of the Leash, by Jeffrey Ricker
Two Tales, by Paul Lisicky
Heart, by ‘Nathan Burgoine
Party Planning, by Rob Williams
Two Kinds of Rapture, by Andrew Holleran
Everyone Says I’ll Forget in Time, by Greg Herren
Angels, What You Must Hear on High, by John H. Roush

I mean, hello! I’m shoulder to shoulder with Andrew Holleran! In the same book as Paul Lisicky (actually this is our second anthology together…), Joel Derfner (author of Swish and Gay Haiku), Felice Picano, famous author Rob Byrnes, the always awesome Trebor Healey,  Jeffrey Ricker (one of my favorites in the anthology), Greg Herren, Mark Harris, and the others i’m eager to discover.

Here’s the first page of my story, perhaps it’ll entice you to buy the book…

Party Planning by Rob Williams

We were on our way to set up for Linda Simon’s sweet sixteen birthday party when my mother, who was driving, slammed on the brakes of our burnt-red station wagon, causing the entire contents of the back seat, including tablecloths, multi-colored disposable plastic cups, streamers, rolls of butcher paper, and Mrs. Kingston to come hurtling to the front of the car. Mrs. Kingston, our neighbor and my mother’s new party planning assistant, was fine, if a little disheveled and shaken, but the tiny black pillbox hat she had attached to her head with an elastic band had slid further forward so that it was just below her forehead.

“Cocktail napkins!” my mother screamed at her. “For God’s sake, how hard is it to get simple cocktail napkins!”

Poor Mrs. Kingston. She was a novice. She’d only been assisting my mother for a few days after begging for years to let her tag along, to help out. (“I’ll just watch from the sidelines. I won’t be in the way.”) My mother said she just didn’t have the knack for parties. Her taste in streamers was appalling. But her husband left her three months ago and my mother took her under her wing. A new project. My mother was famous for her projects.

And now Mrs. Kingston had made a mistake. She’d bought rectangle-shaped paper dinner napkins, and not the square, thin, cocktail napkins with the shell embossing that my mother had asked for.

“You can’t fan a dinner napkin!” she screamed again.