goes down with the ship

Fall 2011 FRiGG

2011-10-28T09:19:00.000-07:00

The new issue of FRiGG is out. I read most of the stories in it this morning and then went back this afternoon and read one or two of them again. I love Karen Britten's story "The Miracle." I know I love a story when I get jealous while reading it. I end up thinking, why the hell didn't I write this myself? Then I slap myself across the face once or twice as a kind of warning not to let these things slip by me anymore. "The Miracle" is serious and strange and very, very funny. It's even got a kind of horror element to it. That's right, I said horror. And have you ever tried to write a serious, funny story with a horror element to it? Not easy! Serious/funny? You've gotta be fast, nimble and maybe a little bit weird. Hell, even being just plain slightly amusing in writing is almost impossible and yet she's funny in the most surprising ways here. And she managed to keep shanking me with perfect sharp sentences I couldn't see coming. I'd quote them, but I don't want to ruin the surprises if you haven't read the story. Which I strongly advise you to do right now - or after you finish reading this. It's got that perfect brand of weirdness - something fresh, something different going on. Even the names of the characters surprised me. They just seemed right. Couldn't have been anything else. Absolutely non-arbitrary. I also really liked Vallie Lynn Watson's Veronica stories. I could see myself reading a full-length book of them someday - that is, if such a thing were to come into existence somehow. If I were an editor - which I am way too selfish and lazy to even think about being - I'd get in touch with her with a few questions at hand. There's plenty of other good stuff in this issue of FRiGG, as well as my own story Cobarde, the inclusion of which I am grateful for. Always nice to be included. In there with the other kids. I hope it gets some laughs out of somebody somewhere - or at least freaks somebody out.

Happy Birthday Flann O'Brien

2011-10-06T03:50:00.000-07:00

Flann O'Brien would have been a hundred years old yesterday if he hadn't died in 1966 on (as every biographical note I've ever read about him mentions, as if it were relevent) April fools day. Flann O'Brien was one of those writers who totally astounded me the first time I read him. What the fuck was going on here? Who the...? It just didn't make any sense how someone could write like that. The sentences were all so weirdly balanced, yet perfect. "Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes' chewing..." What? Who starts a novel like that. This was 15 years ago for me.

And, as you know, he wrote a funny novel about black hell, with men in it who are slowly turning into bicycles. Or something like that. Why not, right? Everyone was doing it at the time. It's been a while since I read The Third Policeman all the way through. I pick it up and read a few pages at random now and again. Maybe I'll read it again this weekend. Or maybe not. What if I hate it? That would be strange. I'll get back to you. Happy birthday?

Here's an article by a guy who's even more enthusiastic than I am.

Sententia #3

2011-09-05T06:02:00.000-07:00

Sententia #3 is on its way. The first two chapters of my novel Zero are in there - as I've mentioned. Haven't seen it yet, but I'm pretty excited. I love Zero. And I can't say the same about my other novels, both finished and unfinished. Maybe some human being out there will read those first two chapters and think they're an absolute fucking marvel and want to publish the whole book! That's probably what'll happen. I'm ready for it. For now, however, Sententia #3. There are also novel excerpts from Nick Bredie, Hosho McCreesh, Nora Jean Lang, Samuel Snoek-Brown, Michael Hickins, Abeer Hoque, and Fred Skolnik.

Here's the link, if you want to buy it: Sententia # 3, your life could depend on it someday.

I'm reading Barry Gifford's Sailor and Lula novels - a new writer for me. I think Tony O'Neill wrote something about him a while ago, wondering why he wasn't more well known, and for some reason that compelled me to go out and find his books and read them. Maybe I want to be someone who reads books most people don't know about. I don't know. But I always read those articles in places like The Guardian about neglected masterpieces of the 20th century. I don't usually bother to read the books though. I neglect them. I guess Tony O'Neill must be more persuasive than The Guardian. Anyway, I like what I've read so far. I'd say Gifford ripped me off, but he wrote those books 20 years ago while I was playing bass in punk bands I don't even remember the names of half the time.

how are you?

2011-08-15T16:29:00.000-07:00

I've been doing a lot of swimming lately. And eating. But I haven't been writing. That seems to be my summertime affliction.

I taught my son how to dive yesterday. What the hell else would I be doing? The sun was shining, there was a swimming pool. Bad weather is conducive to getting shit onto the page. When it gets dark at 5, and it's raining, I sit in my chair. I fear for things. I write.

Sententia 3 is coming out soon. The first 2 and a half chapters of my novel Zero are in there. The idea is that somebody'll read them and want to publish the whole book. If that doesn't happen I might get a little pissed off. It's a good book. I read the last page the other day and cried. I don't remember what the weather was like when I wrote it, but I doubt I wanted to go outside that day.

(I've been reading Georges Simenon books. The ones without detectives. They're pretty damn good.)

Hope you're doing well.

God Bless the Blake Babies - over and over again

2011-04-16T06:59:00.001-07:00

If you've never felt a moment of nostalgia for the 90's, you probably weren't born in the 70's. I can't understand it, but I've been feeling 90's nostalgia. I don't even know what that means. Is it too soon? And it seems, in retrospect, like such an undefinable decade. Kind of blah.

It's hard to accept the fact that Fugazi is (was?), by and large, an 80's band.

When I turned 30 I didn't mind it so much. If I'd known what was in store for me, though, I might have taken out a life insurance policy.

I was listening to the Blake Babies today as I hung the laundry. That puts me in a special catagory - I know, I know. How I know. But there is nothing I can do about it. I love, and have loved, and will love, the Blake Babies. Then I realized that somewhere in Downtime, we hit the pinnacle of western civilization - and it's not even that good a song.

It's all in your head.

p.s. The cover of Innocence and Experience still shocks me. Is it possible that those people were made by the same world that made Hitler? Not to mention myself.

Spring JMWW is out

2011-04-09T04:50:00.001-07:00

Have you ever asked your one-armed ping pong opponent whether he's right-handed or left-handed? Don't.

My story Photography is in the new JMWW. It's another one about a husband and wife who are nothing like me and my wife. Repeat: there are no similarities between the wife in my stories and the wife in my life. None. I know that's hard to believe but it happens to be true. I don't know why I'm telling you this. My wife doesn't read my stories - honestly I don't think she's read anything I've published - reading in English isn't really her thing - so I'm not protecting myself from her disapproval. I must be protecting myself from something though. Maybe my own disapproval. Maybe I'm leaving notes to my future self - who may not be quite the benevolent freak you are hearing from today.

I've been publishing a lot of stories about a husband and wife lately. They talk a lot. They have arguments. They comfort and help and torture each other in mind-boggling ways. I wrote all those stories a year ago, one after another. But I still don't know who those people are! I keep thinking about them. I want to write more stories about them. I easily could. But I feel like it might be a bad idea. Like, maybe I should just leave them alone. Don't badger them. So I've been writing other things. Things that are very different from those stories. But I'm tempted to go back for more. A strange temptation. It's like a form of writerly gluttony. I don't want to gorge and make myself sick. I also don't want people to get sick of reading about the same two characters - though I'm not sure they are always the same two characters.

I haven't read all the other stories in the new JMWW, but I read the first one - When I Pulled Her Out of the Water. It's really good. I was a little pissed off when I realized I hadn't written it myself. Then it ended, which also pissed me off - because I hate hearing about how a short story could have been a novel, if only the writer had kept going. It sounds like you're saying there's something wrong with the story as it is, that it's not really a short story at all but the beginning of some longer work, a fetal novel, but in this case - yes, I wanted that story to keep going. And for all I know it IS the beginning of a longer work. I hope so. There, I'm a hypocrite now too. Add it to the list.

So check out the new JMWW. Tell me what you think about Photography.

15 minutes

2011-04-05T05:13:00.000-07:00

I've got 15 minutes to kill. That's not enough time to get any work done on the story I'm writing, or actually it is, because even a minute or two is enough to get something done, to change a word for a better word, or cross out a crappy sentence or a sentence that doesn't need to be there, or realize that the story actually begins midway through page two and then delete the first page in a fit of sadism, or masochism, and then perhaps regret it later, or murder an adverb, or cross out the word little a few times, since I write it like a nervous tic, or do any number of other things, because 15 minutes is a long time, and if you add all those 15 minute sessions together you get a few days, or weeks, a few more weeks of writing or working on your writing, work you wouldn't have done otherwise, because you would have been too busy looking at your facebook page, or reading The Guardian, or doing god knows what with your time, like blogging, your spine popping between your shoulder blades, your eyes burning, your stomach churning, the sun shining on the plants in the window as the leaves push themselves out of the trees in the courtyard. Or whatever that place is called. That's 12 minutes gone. Time to make lunch. I want to go to Ireland this summer.

Naked

2011-04-02T05:42:00.001-07:00

Dear Everybody,

Here's a story that's more like a blog post. I wrote it on 5.26.2010. Since then it's just been sitting there, doing nothing. Well I sent it to the New York Tyrant but they rejected it with a kind note attached. Probably thought I was one crazy moron. ATTENTION: it's a STORY. Fiction. Not really me. Well sometimes it me, but not really! I mean, I'm kind of grouchy, but I'm not THAT bad. Not yet. I also don't use such foul language or hate my neighbor or think about my mailwoman's underpants.

Kevin Spaide

Naked

I went for a walk with my clothes on. Everybody else had their clothes on too. Even the children. It seemed sort of stupid. The whole clothes-on thing. Because it was fucking hot out there. I was sweating into my underpants. I wanted to jump in the river. I wanted to drown in my bathtub. Sometimes I feel like an alien being.

The woman who delivered our mail was walking up the street in her uniform. I said hello to her. She looked at me and said hello and probably thought about my mailbox. I thought about her body inside her clothes. Then I thought about her underpants. Then I thought about my hand inside her underpants.

When I go to the beach I wear a bathing suit. My wife walks around with nothing on. Right in front of everybody. Right in front of Japanese people. For God’s sake, she just doesn’t care. I mean, those people could be anyone. Anyone at all.

I don’t give a fuck about a lot of things, but I wear my clothes. I don’t sit around naked. No way. Not even when I’m alone. I’m naked in the shower. I’m naked when I hump my wife. That’s about it.

One time a cat got loose in my house and knocked a rock off a windowsill. The rock cracked the bathroom sink, pieces of which fell on the floor. If you turned the water on it leaked out of the sink and ran down the walls in the kitchen, which was under the bathroom, and then the power would go out. We put a sign up to warn our friends. My wife drew little flowers in the corners of it. I don’t know what kind of flowers they were. Then the landlord came over and said, What the fuck is THAT?! I tried to explain about the cat. She said, CAT? CAT? So I got another sink and asked this guy I knew to install it. He said all right, and he came over and got to work. There was some sort of problem though. Some tool he needed. I don’t remember what the deal was. Anyway it’s not important. For some reason he called me into the bathroom. I found him there wrestling with the sink, fitting it into place. And he was totally naked. He didn’t even have his underpants on. I don’t know why. It was like he thought he had to be naked to do this job. He seemed at ease. It was the most normal thing in the world for him. He grew up in Amsterdam. Everybody knows the Dutch are light-years ahead, but this was ridiculous. I didn’t say anything about anything. I felt like I shouldn’t draw attention to his nudity. He didn’t mention it either. We’ve talked many times since then, but we’ve never talked about him taking his clothes off in my bathroom. Maybe someday.

Charlie Parker got locked in a mental hospital for walking around a hotel lobby without a stitch of clothing on. He was drunk. I’ve been drunk on occasion, but I don’t ever remember disrobing. I mean in public. I’m the other way around. I get drunk and sleep in my clothes, my winter jacket, my hat. My wife has to pull my shoes off. Charlie Parker kept showing up at the reception desk naked. He was relentless. Wanted to use the phone. The porter got freaked out. You can read about it on Wikipedia.

Politicians are sometimes described as “nakedly ambitious.” Countries sometimes use “naked aggression.” The naked in these phrases connotes undisguised rapaciousness.

I seem to recall a TV show about people hunting with no clothes on. Or maybe they were just running naked with some animals. I don’t know. But they were naked and they were running and there were animals involved. It was pretty damn striking. They were white. The people, I mean. Their bare asses were like vanilla pudding. It all seemed to make perfect sense. It took me back. Maybe about sixty thousand years.

On my walk with my clothes on, which is where I began this thing, I met my neighbor. No matter what time of day I leave my building I meet this woman, my neighbor. She must walk her dog twenty-five times a day. I don’t like dogs. I especially don’t like it when people put clothes on their dogs. It makes me feel like I’m living on the wrong planet. Like my life is some terrible mistake. An error. It makes me feel like a stranded alien.

I said hello to my neighbor. We hate each other. That’s because we constantly meet up in the stairway of our building. No matter what. Her dog didn’t have any clothes on because it was too hot for that, but I’ve seen that dog dressed like Sherlock Holmes, a little pipe in his mouth. No, I’m kidding about the pipe. But he had the tweed hat on. The one with the ear flaps. Or whatever those things are.

When I meet her on the stairs she talks to her dog instead of talking to me. She talks to her dog ABOUT me. Informing him what to do. How to negotiate my presence. How to navigate his little doggy body out of my terrible way. I have to admit I find this irksome, but really I don’t care. Who has the time? This has nothing to do with being naked. Sorry for diverging from the topic.

I write stories that involve going to a corner store or supermarket. This crops up often actually. Not sure why. Maybe I shouldn’t write so many stories about shopping or shoplifting. Maybe it’s boring. Maybe I shouldn’t write so many stories period. It’s not good, you know. It’s dooming my marriage. It’s killing me, and I’m not getting much out of it. What a fucking idiot I am. The sun is shining and I’m in this tiny room full of books and rocks. The rocks belong to my wife. She collects them. They’re all over the place. What am I doing with my life?

Anyway, there’s this corner store in the neighborhood, but I almost never go there. Some old guy named Angel owns it. I bought a bottle of cognac from him once and he took it off a high shelf with a special stick he probably made himself in the 1950’s. Maybe his father made it. A perfect little clamp fastened around the bottle and down the damn thing came. Ingenious. The cognac was expensive, but it was a medical matter. I had a sore throat and it was raining.

It rarely rains in my stories, though the sky tends to cloud up with depressing regularity.

Sometimes I write about a woman or a girl working in Angel’s corner store. No woman works there really. I just make them up out of my head. Inevitably I describe how her body fits into her clothes. This seems to be a fascination of mine. Or a preoccupation. Or - let’s be honest - maybe the signal of a base longing. Maybe I’m a pervert. That’s probably it.

I’m always amazed at how many words writers use to describe clothes. Why this need to catalog clothing? Am I missing something? Vestis virum redit. I know, I know. But why do I need to visualize what all the people in all the books are wearing?

Why?

As in: He sported a green button-down shirt and a pair of tan slacks. The slacks were worn at the knees as if he were constantly on them performing God knows what unspeakable service of devotion. The toes of his shoes were scuffed. He had ring-around-the-collar. One of the buttons on his shirt didn’t match. It had been sewn on by hand. Etc.

Yes, those slacks (slacks?) were tan. Not brown. Tan.

And when they get into brand names? Oh my God!

She had a pair of white Adidas on. Her faded blue Levi’s were too long but not long enough to roll the cuffs as she did when she was a little girl because her alcoholic mother was too dense and lazy to alter the hem. Her gleaming Raybans sat atop her head like a delicate plastic crown. It was as if a miniature Louis Vuitton spaceship had lowered them there without her knowledge. The traumas of her childhood had made her a master of casual wear.

Maybe people who read my stories think my characters are naked because I don’t describe their clothes. Is that possible? Do people read my stories? Do I have to mention what color a guy’s shirt and pants are every time he walks onto a page? That’s enough to make me give up.

If only!

My wife would be so happy. The editors at McSweeneys and Ninth Letter would throw a party. I would too. What a relief! I could go for a walk instead of writing about going for a walk. I could get a dog and dress him up like Sherlock Holmes, a little pipe in his mouth, an actual little Sherlock Holmes doggy pipe, and parade him around the neighborhood. I could have an affair with my neighbor. Our dogs could fight and breed. We could play tennis together. We could play video game tennis in her living room while our dogs rutted and fought under the dining room table.

I could do so many wonderful things!

I could feed this computer into the oven. I could grow old without going crazy. I could get drunk at night, and howl, and take my stupid clothes off. I could walk around and around and up and down while calling people on the telephone. Naked. Whispering into strangers’ ears. Out of my mind. Naked.

Charlie Parker died when he was 34.

You probably would too.

Hands, Children and Flann O'Brien

2011-04-01T04:49:00.000-07:00

So my Romanian friend left his dog and his sister under the bridge and made his way to Italy to work on a tobacco farm. Saturday nights won't be the same. No more standing in the rain drinking cans of cheap beer while Chinese people try to shoo us away from their door. He'll make more money cutting tobacco than parking cars, but not much. I said, Why are you going all the way over there for so little money? And he said, I'm living under a fucking bridge.

I have work to do. But I'm not doing it. Instead I'm telling you I have a couple of new stories out. They're funny. I don't understand it, but they made me laugh. I wrote them, of course, but I hadn't read them in a while. I laughed and thought, You are a genius! And then I thought, You are a fucking asshole. A skunk. Imagine thinking of yourself in such terms. It's ridiculous.

Sometimes people tell me my stories are funny. The strange thing is that I am the least funny person in the world. One time someone even told me I was the opposite of funny. I wanted to punch him in the face. That's probably why I became a writer.

Hands is at Pif and Children is at Corium. Both are new venues for me, and I'm happy to be there. And, as usual, in good company. Check them out. Then you can come back here and tell me my stories are shit and not funny at all.

p.s. It's the day Flann O'Brien died. Pick him up and read him. You both deserve it.

visual noise

2011-03-27T04:45:00.001-07:00

I felt so odd sitting in the Taco Bell yesterday. The scenario wasn't making much sense to me. I got analytical with the decor. It was like the cultural version of the shit that gets stuck on the bottom of the pan when you are cooking rice and all the water boils out. There it was. Outside was Madrid, inside nowhere. Or everywhere at the same time, which is pretty much the same thing. There was an American flag in black and white. There was a blonde woman, a black guy, an Asian guy. The Asian guy was flying through the air somewhere doing a kung fu kick. It was like a little part of California. Or somebody's idea of California. I stared at all these pictures, this violent mishmash of cliche, and wrote an essay about them in my head. Nothing was in its proper context. And that's fine. That's to be expected. But why was it all so clumsy? Why was it all so obviously crap? Did a human brain think it all up or was it randomly generated by a computer program?

I'm not much fun to have lunch with.

The first Taco Bell in Spain was on a military base. Now there are four or five of them. They are spreading. My wife's mother has never ordered a pizza or eaten at McDonalds. In the States old people hang out at McDonalds. I don't really know what I'm getting at here.

Have you read my story at Necessary Fiction? There is so little noise in that story. That's the world I am aiming toward, unfortunately. Apples, boats, islands, water, trees, oars. A telephone rings and disrupts everything, almost destroys people. The Taco Bell decor is visual noise. It forces me into a position of cynicality - and, no, I don't want to be that guy. Because there is nothing more boring than being the guy who complains about things that are so obvious they're invisible.

Last night I got half-drunk with a Romanian guy who lives under a bridge. He lives under the bridge with his sister. I walk over that bridge everyday.

Islands at Necessary Fiction

2011-03-26T04:39:00.000-07:00

I have a headache. I also have a new story at Necessary Fiction. It's called Islands and it's set on Lough Gill in Sligo. More the Lough Gill of my imagination than the Lough Gill of the world. Then again, my imagination is part of the world, and you probably have no idea where Lough Gill is. Or my imagination.

We used to go looking for mushrooms around Lough Gill. Now somebody else is looking for mushrooms there becuase we don't go there anymore. We live in another country. We have lived in another country for a very long time, it seems. I could start a story right now, but I won't because people are waiting for me.

I could say something like: We were at the edge of the lake with nowhere else to go, and Ray was there with his gun... There were sheep... bicycles...

I have a headache. Check out Islands. Thanks to Ethel Rohan for including me in the Irish issue. I'm grateful. I'm not Irish but I can't shake the place and wouldn't want to.

books I almost wrote

2011-03-12T04:17:00.001-08:00

Sometimes not writing is harder than writing - but not really. It's just hard in a different way. The guilt. The nagging sense that you're losing time, getting nothing done. You end up feeling haunted. I was writing almost everyday, working on a novel. It was going pretty well even though I didn't know WHERE it was going. I figured I'd recognize it - the WHERE of the thing - when I got there. Then I'd go back and cut out the shitty parts (also the really good parts that just didn't fit.) That's how I do it. I let the thing go and it drags me along behind it. All I have to do is hang on.

And then somebody put a spoon down my ear and beat the shit out of my brains. Handed me a new phone and welcomed me to the 21st century. Which means the novel is on ice. It's just kind of lying there. I'm not sure if it's dead or alive. A cryogenically frozen fetus. Stem cells. It's just lying there, scaring the crap out of me. So I try not to think about it. I think about Libya. I think about the weather. I think about my job and the people at my job. I think about all kinds of things - I worry about all kinds of things - but I don't think about the novel. It comes after me though. It finds me.

Maybe this summer I'll go back to it. More likely I'll start something new and abandon it when work starts again. Then there will be two of them. But of course there are already more than two of them. How many? Five, six? Ten? I don't know. I try not to think about them. There's the one about the guy whose wife lives on some island, calling him on the phone occasionally, taunting him from her island. There's the one about the guy stranded on another island overrun with marsupial dogs. There are others. They all have islands for some reason. And then there are the ones I've finished. What to do with those?

Sententia is going to publish the first three chapters of my novel Zero. That's heartening. Because it's good and I love it. I mean I love it as if it were the thing that created me and not the other way around. I love the characters in it and want people to read about them. They're a little strange, but it really couldn't be otherwise. What would be the point? The main character thinks he's a monster.

In the novel I've just abandoned (I've admitted it!) there is a character who looks like Henry David Thoreau. He has a terrible sense of direction and gets lost in a cornfield for several days. I don't know why I decided to make him look like Thoreau. There's probably no serious reason behind it. Just for laughs. But I guess I'll never know unless I go back to it.

Go back to it.

I can sit down every morning for months and write, and then something happens, some event out of my control - work, birth, near-death experience. And that's it. Dead. All I can do is go back to it.

p.s. Nominations for the Million Writers Award are open for a few more days. Till the 15th, I think. I nominated Anita Naughton's story Bitter Lemons. And what about you? Get over there. Make somebody's day. Make my day!

mutterings

2011-03-11T01:52:00.000-08:00

Last ten books I read in 2010:

Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje
Inside Madeleine - Paula Bomer
Angels on Toast - Dawn Powell
A Time to Be Born - Dawn Powell
Ray - Barry Hannah
Behindlings - Nicola Barker
Gold - Dan Rhodes
Timoleon Vieta Come Home - Dan Rhodes
The Optimist's Daughter - Eudora Welty
Julian - Gore Vidal

Last ten books of 2000:

The Loved One - Evelyn Waugh
Myra Breckinridge - Gore Vidal
Scoop - Evelyn Waugh
On the Black Hill - Bruce Chatwin
Moon Palace - Paul Auster
The Poor Mouth - Flann O'Brien
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Hunter S. Thompson
Flame Angels, an anothology of Irish writing
The Snapper - Roddy Doyle
What Am I Doing Here? - Bruce Chatwin

Have my tastes changed over ten years? There are no women on the 2000 list, though I'd been reading Grace Paley and Jeanette Winterson before I got into Waugh. (I read three Grace Paley stories this morning, in fact - sometimes you need help in the morning.) Half the 2010 books were written by women, and three of them I'd read before. All of the 2000 books I was reading for the first time, I think - except for Myra Breckinridge. I used to like that book. Not much of the Waugh sticks with me. I do remember, however, taking a piss in Linda's Tavern in Seattle earlier that year - 2000 - and reading "I'm currently making my way through Waugh" scrawled next to the urinal, and I thought, Yeah, I guess it's about time I got around to that too. So that explains that. I can't deal with Paul Auster anymore, though I loved him at the time. Flann O'Brien is forever. Fear and Loathing - not much to say there, though it made me laugh. That's important. I lost the Snapper years ago. I still have all of Chatwin's books. Wouldn't want to get rid of them even if I'll never read them again because they're good and strange and you never know. I doubt I'll read On the Black Hill ever again. But I love The Viceroy of Ouidah. Is there anything else quite like it? Utz is like that too.

I saw this girl reading Julian on the subway about a week after I'd read it and wanted to talk to her but didn't. I wanted to tell her I'd just read the same book, but in English. It was like we were related. We were different from the other people on the subway. Both of us had been spending time in the 4th century among fanatical Christians, mad Romans, and cyncial Asiatic philosophers. I mean it's not like we were reading Harry Potter or something. You see people reading Harry Potter on the subway all the time. But Julian? No. We were connected. But it was enough just to feel the connection, I guess. I didn't say anything. I wouldn't. (In Madrid, by the way, people actually look at each other on the subway. Sometimes they stare right at you. I find it a little disturbing. You can talk to them. Madrid is not London. But I am not from Madrid. Not from London either.)

Eight of the 2010 books I would describe as funny. You have to be a pretty astonishing writer, I think, or at least have something pretty weird going on, for me to read and like your book even if you're almost never funny. Michael Ondaatje is like that. I wasn't crazy about The Optimist's Daughter though - I wish I had been, but I wasn't. Also, I was reading it in the waiting room of the Oncology ward, which probably doomed it. Writers don't have any control over where their books are read. You kill little pieces of yourself writing something, churning your brains apart, burning holes through your actual memories so that you can't say for sure what's happened in your life and what you made up for someone else's life, the life of some person who doesn't exist, and then some guy goes and reads your book in the Oncology Ward of a large Spanish hospital.

I read Inside Madeleine on my computer. Somebody should publish it so I can read it off of my computer. I've written about it before. It's one of those books that makes me want to write. It put an energy into my blood, woke me up a little, shook me out of my dream, scared me into the world - made me feel younger, kinder, readier. Maybe a little dizzy at times. In other words, it surprised me. Dan Rhodes does something like that for me too. And Nicola Barker? If you haven't read Darkmans...

Sometimes I pick up Ray and read a page or two. I just grab it and hold it in front of my face. Thirty seconds, a minute. Ten sentences, a page or two. Then I put it somewhere. A week later I grab it again. Sometimes I take it into the bathroom with me and read it on the toilet. It's a book that can go anywhere, so there is no danger of interference from the toilet. Nothing is shocking to that book. It's also another of those rare books that rejuvenates. Actually makes me feel healthier, livelier, even smarter for letting its weird voices into my head, for running my brain on its frequencies. I can't see how I'll ever tire of it. Then again, I might have felt the same about Auster at one time. I don't know. I think my tastes were more volatile ten years ago. A little more all over the place. Now I know what I like. Which isn't to say I'm shutting myself off here and there. No. I'm still ready for whatever the hell there is.

2011 Million Writers Award is open.

2011-02-16T11:22:00.000-08:00

The 2011 Million Writers Award is open for nominations. So if you're a reader of online writing, think back to whatever story knocked you out of your chair or made you see stars last year and head over to the website and nominate it. If you're an editor (any editors reading this?) pick out the top three from your magazine and put em up there. As someone who's had a couple of stories nominated in other years, I can say that it's quite a good thing to do for writers. And, hey, even if you don't have anything to nominate, it's still a good place to pick up on stories you might have missed. There will be an avalanche of titles.

Fish Farm online!

2011-02-12T10:01:00.000-08:00

I haven't seen my mailwoman lately. She hasn't brought me anything new, so I don't know what's up with her. It's Saturday night - she could be anywhere. There are five millon people out there. Five million people drinking, eating, farting, laughing. It's enough to break your head in two. But Witness put a few selections from its new issue online and (yes!) my story Fish Farm is one of them. As happy as I am that Fish Farm is in Witness (yes!) I'm even happier it's in Witness and online. Now you can read it for free - and tell other people that they can read it for free - though I strongly recommend that you pick up a copy if you've got a few dollars to spare. It's good. Just looking at it on a shelf is good. It even smells good. It smells ... clean.

I hope Fish Farm is good. It wouldn't be in Witness if it were terrible - but I've written so much since then that it feels like somebody else's story. But I remember writing it. I was sitting on my bed in Madrid, and German Dave kept coming into my room. He said things like, "What are you doing?" and "I have two liters of beer in my backpack" and "Can you cut my hair?" I stopped writing (I needed a break) and cut his hair. I gave him a mohawk. We each drank a liter of beer. Then we went to the Casa de Campo and sat up in "the lookout," a little circle of trees you can see the city from, and drank another liter of beer. We passed it back and forth over the ants and the dead grass. It was summertime. Dave had his sunglasses on. His mohawk was fresh and new. I probably told him about my story, but I don't remember anything like that. He probably said, that sounds right. (He knew the territory.) Then I probably said, I'm going to write a story next week and put you in it. God only knows what happened after that.

In other news, Ethel Rohan has accepted a story of mine called Islands, which will appear at Necessary Fiction sometime in March, I think. And Lauren Becker has taken my story Children at Corium. Which is great news. Because that's one good magazine. Check it out if you haven't already. In the last issue they published a couple of stories by Glen Pourciau, whose writing is much admired here at down with the ship headquarters.

Witness 2011 is out.

2011-02-05T02:37:00.000-08:00

In a rare fit of maturity I wrote kind of a serious story - I mean a story where the characters have names. Witness published it in their Blurring Borders issue, a copy of which arrived at headquarters yesterday. When the mailwoman called me up on the intercom (pronouncing my name in the Spanish way: I used to have one syllable in my surname, now I have four) and told me I had a package I got a little scared because I didn't know what it could be. Who in this world had sent me something? I didn't bother to change out of my pajamas. I went downstairs as I was. The neighbors want to put an elevator in, but I like walking up and down the stairs in my pajamas. It's time I have to myself for thinking, ruminating, defogging. The mailwoman waited at the bottom of the stairs in her yellow uniform with a big white envelope in her hands. She said something about how the mailboxes are too small in this country and I said that if we made them bigger they would take up too much space in the world because there are so many people in this city. She didn't laugh much. I was in my pajamas. She was about my age. We were speaking a language that is difficult for me. She gave me the envelope from Witness. I wanted to tell her what was inside it, but she was already gone even though she was standing right there. She was putting telephone bills in the small mailboxes. I examined the sender's signature on the customs slip which appears to say Am aAm. I was appalled and mildly ashamed at the postage fee stamped in the corner. I went up the stairs, thinking, thinking.

I read my story, curious about it. Those were the days, I thought. It's pretty much all made up, but I did work on a fish farm in Ireland for a while. At the time I knew a Malaysian guy named Lim, but he didn't work on the farm. I don't know where he worked. He probably didn't have a job. He couldn't speak English but we used to hang around together, go for walks, take in the rainy Irish lack of opportunity. God knows where he is now. Probably on Facebook. And, no, I never knew any Nigerian brothers or homeless Romanians. I've met an angry Frenchmen or two in my time, but never one like Johan. Where had it all come from? I read my story as if it were someone else's - cringing only once, and that due to a grammatical error (maybe they'd packed up and WENT home) - then I read some of the other stories. I am in good company, once again. Peter Orner's story at the beginning made me cry for a moment or two. (Rosella. Rosella!) This weekend I'll read them all. Witness 2011. Get a copy. Looks good. I'm thrilled to be there.

and you heard the banshee howl...

2011-01-29T03:33:00.001-08:00

S. Craig Renfroe wrote a story in response to my story The Beard at Necessary Fiction. It's a pretty accurate portrayal of a "domestic scenario." The supernatural regularly comes into play - as it does when you are married. There is just no getting around these sorts of scenarios when you are married. You are in for it. Life becomes scenarios, and you see yourself in the mirror and say What the fuck? and your voice sounds exactly like part of a song Blake Schwarzenbach wrote. So check out The Banshee. Made me laugh. Which is all I'm really looking for half the time.

Blip

2011-01-14T15:05:00.000-08:00

I'm lucky enough to have a new story in the January Blip.

Or maybe it's not luck. Maybe I actually wrote a good story.

Who can say about these things?

But I'm happy I'm there. In Blip. Or Pistol Mice, or whatever.

Thanks to Courtney Eldridge for doing such a good job.

And, yes, I'm proud to have my name appear in a piece of writing which contains the words Husker Du and Minor Threat.

I'm also honored to be in the company of:

Courtney Eldridge
Delphine Blue
John McKernan
Kimberly Ford
David Laskowski
Erin Bealmear
Timothy Buckwalter
Karla Eoff
New Waves
W.F. Lantry
Mel Bosworth
Bill Yarrow
David Ryan
James Russel
Greg Pierce
Rae Bryant
Douglas Silver
Andrew Roe
Chuck Stephens
William R. Gilliland
Erik Smetana
Shelagh Power-Chopra
Daniel Crocker
Jon Patrick
Rick Moody
Nick Ripatrazone
Michael Snediker
Alicia Gifford
Sheree Rose
Matthew Levin

Now go read it.

Blip

ghost books

2010-11-16T01:12:00.001-08:00

We were walking fast because we had a bus to catch. Then we started finding books. Books propped in doorways, books reclining on benches where the homeless sleep. The books were in plastic bags against the rain. It was raining a little. My son picked one up. It was Moravagine by Blaise Cendrars. I thought, WHAT?

So there is this initiative in Madrid to get people reading and passing books around - or at least just passing books around. It's sponsored by a beer company. A children's charity is somehow involved. There's a webpage. I haven't looked at it. When you find a book you're supposed to go to the webpage and say where you found it (each book has a number) and after you read it you're supposed to (this is where things get a little weird) leave it somewhere, anywhere you want, for someone else to find. I don't know. I have the feeling that people who normally read books will read them and leave them somewhere, maybe even do the numbers thing on the webpage, but that people who don't normally read will take them and keep them. Why would I think that? What's a book to someone who never reads? (Maybe I've discovered an unusual paranoia in myself. Non-readers will take the books. Strange.) But as you walk down the street now you find books. They're just sitting there. It's like walking through a forest and finding mushrooms - these bizzare, kind of magical apparitions, the fruit of an underground world.

As we hurried for the bus (we always miss the bus by one minute or less) it seemed like almost everyone was carrying a book or two. Strangers were showing them to each other, holding them out, smiling at them. It was like the books were something besides books. They laughed at these things in their hands like they couldn't believe it. They turned them around and around. I was probably doing the same thing. I saw a woman smelling one. Or maybe I didn't. Maybe I'm making that part up. Now I'm not even sure. But I'm sure that people like finding things. And we also like getting something for nothing. For a moment, though, it felt like these book apparitions were changing the whole city. I was living in a city overrun by - haunted by - infected with - books. They were pushing up out of the wet ground like mushrooms. They were growing on stairs and telephone booths and park benches. Then we got on the bus (which didn't leave one minute early for a change) and read.

reject

2010-11-08T00:55:00.000-08:00

I have of late - but wherefore I know not - lost all my mirth.

And I was never all that mirthful to begin with.

I'm tired of checking my email 72 times a day.

Rejections used to make me sad, or even hopeful. Now I find myself getting angry.

Really? Angry?

Yes, really. Angry.

And now I'm actually blogging about it.

Wonderful.

I wrote a story that begins with the line, "The newspaper was full of fires and wars and little girls getting murdered and thrown down wells, so I looked at my wife and said, I don't think now is the time to be having children," and it was rejected for being a "domestic scenario."

I wrote a story about marriage, how much you've got to struggle sometimes to make it work - because you want it to work, and you do make it work - and it was rejected for being a divorce story.

No one owes me anything.

I realize that.

And I don't expect anything from anyone.

No one forces me to write.

But sometimes it's so hard it's ridiculous.

What a way to live.

FRiGG is here

2010-10-27T03:23:00.000-07:00

The fall issue of FRiGG is out, and I'm lucky enough to have three stories in it. Thanks - again - to Ellen Parker, who knows how to put a magazine together.

One of the best things about being published in FRiGG is the art that goes along with your words. It's exciting to see it for the first time. And I can't imagine the amount of work that must go into getting each issue ready.

The amount of time.

I mean - it looks incredible.

And the writing is fantastic.

Some of the writers I'd read before, while others, like Bobby Parker, are new to me. I loved his 4 stories. They're exactly the kind of stories that make me want to slam a door shut - just to shake my house. Or smash an old chair up because nobody ever sits in it - just to get it out of the room. In other words, they are the kind of stories that make me want to WRITE.

Which is a somewhat strange and wayward characteristic in a story, I think. Maybe even noble. You can barely read them for fighting the urge to set them down or turn them away and write something new, something of your own. The juices start flowing. You can't ignore it.

Reading Barry Hannah's RAY is like that for me. Sometimes I just read a page or two of that book because I can't feel anything good. Grace Paley's story WANT, which is only like 2 pages long, makes me want to write a 300 page novel in 24 hours. I'm not sure I know why.

Maybe these writers - Bobby Parker included - show me something I only half know about myself - or everything. Something I need to be reminded of again and again. They shake me. Their sentences, their words - you remember how fresh and alive it can be - words on a page - how TRUE.

So, the new issue of FRiGG.

Go stick your head in it.

That's what I say.

Read it, own it, love it.

Become it.

I wonder if I don't sound a bit insane in my comments though.

This morning I wrote something about a bird that gets loose in a hotel bar and rips the face out of a large portrait of Elvis Presley - while leaving his hair perfectly intact, mysteriously. It's part of a new novel I'm working on. A novel about human beings. And I honestly didn't know anything about it - this particular scene - until I sat down and wrote it this morning. Suddenly there was this bird chewing Elvis's face off. Where did that come from?

And last night I finally - oh yes - NAILED the last sentence of a novel I thought I'd finished months ago. Seasons ago. And now it's finished.

So what do I do with it now?

Not the last sentence, but the whole fucking book.

Ah, writing...

Anybody out there care to publish an extraordinarily - I don't know - weird, sweet, clean little novel?

And, oh, one last thing - my new stories are called Lawnmower, Oncology, and The Sweater.

Hope you like them.

Hope you fucking love them.

Because you never know -

Our lives might depend on it someday.

stories I like

2010-10-18T11:40:00.000-07:00

Almost laughed my face off reading Anita Naughton's story in the new Per Contra. And I thought: I'm in good company. My own story Strong Bones is sitting right there next to it. Then I went ahead and read her bio and saw that it's her first published story? What? How is that ... I mean ... but how? My first published story was probably a piece of crap. Somebody liked it enough to publish it obviously (and I was happy for that) but it certainly wasn't great. But I really love this story. How can you not love a story with this sentence in it: "One Friday night, a passing car emptied a volley of gunfire into my studio adding some rather larger dots to my paintings." That's just funny. And I am humbled. First published story. Wow. I hope she writes more so she can put them together in a book and I can buy it.

And a few days ago I read Ethel Rohan's stories in the new Guernica. I liked the first one well enough, but the second, Fish, had me sobbing in my computer chair - big, honking, uncontrollable sobs. When was the last time something like that happened? Maybe never. Sure, I cry a little now and again while reading but this was pretty crazy. I think I had to grab hold of the table. Beautiful, beautiful stuff. I suggest you read it now.

strong bones

2010-10-16T01:32:00.000-07:00

Well I must have been pretty damn busy or something because it looks like I haven't been around for two months. Seasons have changed. School has started. Suns have gone supernova. And, oh, yeah, I've been ... writing.

Writing ...

Oh, the agony of the first ten thousand words!

I'm also looking for work that pays the bills.

Oh, the agony of paying the bills!

But I have a new story up at Per Contra. That's something. It's called Strong Bones. Hope you like it. I still do. I probably laugh in all the wrong places though.

chaos

2010-08-15T13:03:00.000-07:00

summer = not writing = a little bit crazy

2010-08-14T05:55:00.001-07:00

So I was away from home, the plants died, and I've hardly written anything since June. I went swimming many times last week. I found a dead octopus that turned out to be a dead cat whose furless skin was whiter than anything in this world. I built sandcastles with miniature buckets and spades. I ate and slept. Thought about my novel set in the future but haven't written a word of it. Maybe never will. Won't know until the summer's over.

Can I say "my novel" in reference to a novel I haven't started and maybe won't ever start? No, probably not a good idea. But if you write novels you probably know what I mean.

Or maybe you don't. Maybe you just sit down and write them, and there they are in the bookstore with some guy taking them off the shelf and buying them.

I don't write in the summer. I get started in the fall and write through the winter. That's just the way it works with me. In the winter I get up before dawn, hang around, take my son to school, come home, write. I write and write in a room full of books and rocks (my wife studied geology.) Then the days get longer, the weather turns nicer, school lets out, and there are other things to do.

I guess I wrote all that to make sense of my summer laziness. Or whatever it is. I don't feel lazy. But I do feel guilty.

When I'm not writing I feel guilty and anxious and slightly less real, even when I'm finding dead cats in the waves and building sandcastles on the beach.

What a way to live a life.

So Frigg accepted three of my stories. (Thanks Ellen Parker!) They're slated to appear in the Fall issue. I was in the mood for good news - I mean REALLY in the mood - and I got some, I finally got some. I've also got stories coming out in Per Contra and Witness, but I'm not sure when. I'll let you know though.

That's all. Now I'm going to sit on my couch and read a novel I've already read twice. Then I'm going to put my shoes on and go to the paloma festival and have a caña or two and pretend like I know what I'm doing.

the future

2010-07-29T06:09:00.000-07:00

I want to write a novel set in the future. I don't know what kind of future though. I'm not sure I even care what kind of future. Maybe a future that's more like the past than the present. Maybe a future that would be almost indistinguishable from now. I don't care about domed cities or moving sidewalks. Or maybe I'll set it on a transport ship making deliveries to colonies on the moons of Jupiter. I know almost nothing about transport ships or the moons of Jupiter. I don't feel like I'd need to know much about the moons of Jupiter or transport ships to write such a novel. Most of it would probably take place in rooms that could be anywhere.

So I'll get started on that. Something to take my mind off the slew of rejections I've been receiving this month. Yeah, a novel set in the future. Any old future I want.

a catalog of secret hatreds

2010-07-13T11:38:00.000-07:00

Almost everyone who knew him considered him a mild person, but he had a catalog of secret hatreds.

For instance, he hated the sound of jangling keys. If someone were walking down the street, jangling a set of keys, he questioned that person’s entire mode of being. How could anyone be so insensitive?

He hated when a hair got into the dishwater. No matter what you did, you could never rid yourself of that hair. It would interfere at every chance. You could try wiping it on the counter, but it would cling to your finger and eat up precious moments of your mortal life.

He couldn’t tolerate the sight of a broken clock being used as a decoration. If a clock didn’t keep the time, then it should either be repaired or tossed out.

He hated when there were more toothbrushes in a cup beside the bathroom sink than there were people living in the house. It made him feel distant from the people with the extra toothbrushes. He didn’t hate the people. He loved the people. And this is why he hated the idea of all those extra toothbrushes. He didn’t want to feel distant from them.

He hated phones that laughed.

And why did he get a little angry when he saw someone peeling an orange with a knife?

He hated golf because he hated golf courses. He’d rather stroll through the Nevada Test Site for atomic bombs than a golf course.

He hated the sound of a dog walking across a hardwood floor. It wasn’t as bad as the jangling keys, but the tapping of all those tiny toenails on the wooden floor was creepy and almost unbearably disturbing.

He hated the word “inappropriate.” There were other words he hated, but “inappropriate” had to be the worst.

He hated when someone said “Sir, I think you need to calm down?” very, very seriously in a TV show. Why did that phrase, those eight words, crop up in so many TV shows? He hated them.

He hated signing his name in blue ink.

He hated hearing someone complain about the weather even though he often did it himself.

He hated to be in a room with a bird in it.

All these secret hatreds took their toll, of course. Little injuries mounted up. There were counterbalancing pleasures – he liked watching people look at their own reflections in mirrors or windows in public, he liked watching women take all kinds of crazy junk out of their purses when they were searching for something and then put it all back in again – but, after a while, the hatreds began to sour him. So what if some guy peeled his orange with a knife? Maybe he liked to eat the pulp. But, no, it wasn’t that easy. He hated it, and there was nothing he could do about it.

He hated when he saw a television interview in which a famous actor referred to another famous actor using a nickname or a shortened version of the other famous actor’s famous name. For example, if the famous person in question were named Robert Deniro in every film he’d ever made, and the famous person doing the interview suddenly called him Bob, he hated it. It really irked him. He hated it even more if the famous person called him Robbie or Bobbie. That was horrible.

He hated these things.

There were other things he hated.

No one knew these things about him.

gol!

2010-07-12T08:25:00.000-07:00

So I've never been much of a sports fan, and I'm allergic to flag-waving crowds, but man, I lost my shit last night when Spain scored that goal. I was in a bar full of Spanish people. They all COMPLETELY lost their shit and later went rampaging through the streets and diving into fountains. I'd never seen such happy people. People who win the lottery don't look that happy. The queen hopped out of her chair on TV while murderers wept for joy in maximum security correctional facilities. Doctors performing surgery threw down their scalpels and high-fived their patients, then ran into the hallways to tackle each other. Pilots flipped on the autopilot and went whooping and charging up and down the aisles. ETA didn't blow anything up. A guy in Africa kicks a ball into a net and one whole country (ok, maybe three people weren't watching) jumps out of their chairs and hollers and roars, while another whole country sits down and groans. Almost everybody paying attention to the same thing. How often does that happen? Pretty crazy.

not vomiting yet, but getting close

2010-07-10T10:29:00.000-07:00

Revising a novel this week. Have almost, but not quite, reached the almost-vomiting-or-going-blind stage of the process (see previous post.) It's so much fun I forgot I was a living organism - for a while anyway.

Read Family Happiness by Tolstoy yesterday. Cried at the end. Who reads Tolstoy and cries? It's just odd. My son was learning to swim in the swimming pool - no, I don't have a swimming pool - and I was reading Tolstoy and crying. But that's how good it was. The guy is relentless. He never cuts any of his characters any slack while always remaining as kind and sympathetic to them as possible. How? I find it inspiring. Not much do I find very inspiring these days. Usually it's the other way around. Shit knocks the wind out of me.

This morning I drank a cup of coffee and read the first 40 or so pages of The Cossacks. What a blast. (Is this why I moved to Spain? It's so hot outside, by the way, you can't go out there, so I might as well sit here and write until I can't breathe and my head feels like it's ripping apart.) Then I sat there thinking about the way Tolstoy describes his characters. It's as if he does it without doing it. You don't notice it happening. You see the characters so clearly they might as well be right there in the chair next to you. They might as well be sitting there reading your autobiography, wondering if you're ever going to come alive on the page. It's a form of magic I want to learn.

Right. Back to the novel. Not blind or naseous enough yet.

Oh yeah, anyone out there interested in helping me publish the thing once I'm blind and revolted?

paula bomer

2010-07-02T07:43:00.001-07:00

Oh, I don't know. I read this story a while ago and thought, Damn, now this woman can write! So I googled her and read some more of her stories. Some I'd already read, so I read them again. Why not? If a story is good, and you like it, and it makes you laugh or cry or both, you should read it more than once. You should read it until you don't laugh or cry anymore. Or maybe that's going too far. Maybe that's just ruining things for yourself. I don't know. It's tricky. I've read Emergency by Denis Johnson probably twenty times and without fail I laugh my ass off every time I read that story, and I wouldn't want to lose that. I wouldn't want it to burn a hole in my brain. Sometimes I read my own stories over and over trying to locate some hidden problem until I feel like I'm about to vomit or go blind (that's when I know they're ready, and I can send them off to some hopeful editor and pray they get the jokes) but I wouldn't want it to get like that with someone else's story.

And then Word Riot had their Published for a Day day. So I downloaded Inside Madeleine (by Paula Bomer) and read it. Right away I was thinking, Why isn't this a book on the shelf behind me? Why has no one published this? (Of course, what do I know? Maybe she hasn't tried to publish it. I guess it's possible.) Anyway, it's that good, and no one can read it unless they were lucky enough to download the pdf file on Published for a Day day. Which is why I won't write anymore about it here. If it were published, then maybe I'd go on about it for a few sentences, detailing what I like so much, but it's probably not a great idea to delve into detail about somebody's unpublished novel on a blog. Someone I don't know. Just seems wrong. So I'll leave it at this: Someone better publish that novel someday. And once they do, you'd better read it. I'm telling you now. It's the least you can do for yourself.

Meanwhile, why not read Homesick? After that you can move on to this. After that you're on your own again, a little bit different from before.

crash

2010-06-29T02:36:00.000-07:00

Woke up to a car crash this morning. The scream of the tires, glass shattering, a kind of awful crumpling noise, then the screams of the people. I'd never heard people screaming like that. Luckily I couldn't see the road from my window.

It's hot today in Madrid. And it's getting hotter. The kind of heat that makes people cry in bed. It doesn't bother me all that much, but I've heard people confess that the heat makes them cry in bed. They feel like they're being smothered. Like they need to take their clothes off even though they're already naked. In 2003, the temperature seemed to stay over 100 degrees for most of the summer. Maybe I'm not remembering that right, but I do remember that thousands of people died that summer, people who probably wouldn't have died if it hadn't been so hot. I sat around reading books about Antarctica. I read The Worst Journey in the World, a book about people who were never warm, people who were freezing to death. I forgot about the heat. Might have to dig that one out again this summer.

There is a metro strike today. All the trains are stopped. Something like two million passengers use those trains everyday. The words "chaos" and "paralyzed" appear in all the newspaper stories. I think I'll stay home and read a book. I'm beginning to suspect I'd rather live in a place without so much "chaos," without so many people on the move - a place without so many people. Madrid is a great city. But it's loud, and there's a lot of it. I wonder if the accident this morning happened because of the extra traffic on the roads. And why are the metro workers striking? Because the government plans to cut their wages by 5 percent, one of the measures to slash the deficit. And the pressure to tidy up the deficit is coming from... I can still hear those people screaming.

I just looked at my bookshelf, wondering what to read. The first thing I saw was The Road. I don't think today's the day to re-read The Road. Then I saw Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald, who died in a car accident the year the book was published. So that's out. Maybe I'd better go back to the 19th century. I spend a lot of time in the 19th century. Tolstoy. That makes sense. I'll read a 19th century Russian book in English because there was a car crash outside my window in 21st century Spain. The car crash might have something to do with a metro strike that might have something to do with a global economic crisis that started on Wall Street.

run, run, run

2010-06-24T07:45:00.000-07:00

For about five years I've been planning on running next week. I spend so much time sitting in a chair writing I feel I need to get out and run around. Run up and down the street like everybody else. Run along the river. Run over the footbridge across the highway and run around the artifical lake in the Casa de Campo and run back home. Run up the stairs and lock the door behind me. Just run. I need to start running or I'm going to die sitting in this chair, typing.

Five years ago I bought a pair of running shoes. Once in a while I buy running clothes - clothes I could imagine myself running in. I read books about running. I read interviews with writers who run. I read about running on Wikipedia. It sounds like such a good idea. It sounds like my life would be a better one, even more meaningful, if I were to start running. Every kid runs because they know it's fun. My body would grow stronger. My heart rate would slow. My brain would receive more oxygen which would make my thoughts sharper which would allow me to write more and better - or maybe not. Writing of course is tricky. I've written some of my best stuff with a hangover.

One of my favorite stories is Grace Paley's The Long-Distance Runner.

Why do running and writing seem like related activities? Or at least activities that support each other? I have the odd, hopeful belief that running would make me a better writer. But I don't run. It's always next week.

I think about running. I write and read about it. I even worry about it. The thought of other people watching me run worries me. But I don't do it. If I were the only person in the world I would probably do it. Or maybe not.

Next week.

story links

2010-06-20T06:04:00.000-07:00

There you go. I've put some story links up. It wasn't easy. I agonized over the title "story links" for quite some time. At first I thought I should write something funny like "shit I wrote" or some other self-deprecating thing, something that might make people believe I'm some kind of funny guy, a guy who doesn't give a shit, but then I remembered - no, that's not me. I'm not that guy. It's important not to lie about yourself to strangers - so "story links."

I think you should read The Beard first. That's why I put it at the top of the list. It's also the last thing I published. That's probably why I still like it. I've published a bunch of other stories which I decided not to include in the list because I don't really like them anymore. I'm not even sure I still like a couple of the ones I've linked to, but there they are anyway. And, except for The Beard, I've changed them all, even going so far in some cases as to rewrite the ending after the stories had already been published. I don't know why I do that. It's the kind of thing you do when you don't have anything better to do, or because you're brushing your teeth or stepping off a bus in the middle of the city, ten thousand strangers swarming around you thinking God knows what strange thoughts, and suddenly the real ending to your story reveals itself even though you weren't thinking about it and didn't want to rewrite it because who the hell is ever going to read it? Maybe someday I'll publish one or two in a book. Who knows? Who cares?

So read a story or two if you have the energy for it. I hope you do. That's why I wrote them.

Pourciau

2010-06-18T04:27:00.000-07:00

I was in the check-out lane in the supermarket. There was only one lane open and the woman in front of me had a full cart while I only had one item. She was pretty old. I felt bad for being impatient with her. Maybe someday I would be old too. I would hold up lines in the bank and the supermarket, inconveniencing the young. But time seemed to slow down and stretch out and the room seemed to grow brighter as I watched this woman put one thing after another on the conveyor belt. Why was I in such a rush? What the hell was the matter with me? Then the woman turned around suddenly with a jar of pickles in her hand and saw me. She tried to give me the jar. She tried to force the jar into my hand.

She said, I don’t want these.

And I said, I don’t want them either.

Maybe I should have taken the pickles. I don’t know. She’d caught me off guard. There were other things on my mind. I wanted to get home and drink a beer. I wanted to get out of this supermarket. It was late.

The old woman stood there with her pickles. Then she said, Now I’m angry!

The kid at the cash register was looking at me as if I’d done some terrible thing. He reached out and took the pickles and put them somewhere. The woman muttered as she put the rest of her stuff on the conveyor belt.

The whole thing was really strange and awkward. Also, all of this took place in Spanish.

Later on, as I was telling my wife about it, I felt kind of like a character in a story by Glen Pourciau. Except in a Pourciau story I probably would have let the whole thing mount up in my head. I might have ended up having a discussion with the cash register kid. He would have needled me, and I wouldn’t have been able to let it go. We would have verbally sparred with each other. Menaced each other until we were on the verge of attack or some other form of mayhem. But luckily I wasn’t in that story. I paid for my one item and got out of there.

Maybe I’m being a little presumptuous here, foisting myself into an imaginary story by Glen Pourciau, one he hasn’t written and never will write. My point, though, is that I love the guy’s stories and want more people to read them.

Today I spent the morning reading his stories on the internet. They’re really good. Funny, surreal. The awkward encounters, the imagined arguments, the sudden passive aggression between strangers in libraries and restaurants. Every story I read made me wish I’d written it.

I’ll buy the guy’s book one of these days. As soon as I scrape some money together.

Meanwhile there are Fountain and Fork and Yap to read. Yap is beautiful. And there are quite a few others out there. So take a look around.