Moments in Moments

We lose ourselves. I could mistype that as “we loose ourselves” but the meaning doesn’t leave the meaning of my meaning.

See: I count people on their phones and turn it into percentages. 95% of the people on a bus from the car rental place to the airport. 75% of people on a metro. 25% of every table at a restaurant. Buried heads. Inert eyes. I observe but am not observed.

Of course, I submerge as well. I am bored, so I see if Facebook is more interesting than the present reality. A text trumpets, so I respond. But I do resist. I do. There is nothing particularly real in my mechanical palm. It has no smells or tastes or sounds beyond the preprogramed and unsurprising. And the words? They wait. That’s the thing; they wait. What’s in front of me however…

I’m preaching, of course. I’m proclaiming a certain preference over another and a conservative one at that. If by conservative I mean it’s an attempt to conserve what was. That immediacy of life. That confinement in the moment, unable to be lost—or to loosen the ties. All of us forced to exist within the full grasp of our environment or the imprisonment of our interior lives. How the hell did we suffer through such a thing? I’m not even sure if I mean that as sarcastic.

Here’s the point:

I love my iPhone. But I hate yours.

Chicago Was...

So, I AWPed again. Books, booze and beards. I don’t have a beard. But I made up for it in books and booze.

At some point between Denver (my first and most recent AWP) and Chicago, I became the kind of person who runs into people at the book fair. I ran into a lot of people. And, of course, I sought more than a few others out. It was all a hell of a lot of fun.

Cool moment: discovering that Hayden’s Ferry Review made a button out of my story “Leap.”

Another cool moment: meeting Jarrett Haley at Bull and getting to thank him in person for publishing “What Our Fathers Knew,” the first story of mine to ever really got noticed in the indie publishing world.

Beautiful moment(s): hearing Cheryl Strayed read twice.

Beautiful moment addendum: I got to hang out with Cheryl Strayed for a while in the hotel restaurant. She has been a mentor and a friend and I loved getting to tell her how happy I am for all the attention and success she’s having.

Continuously awesome moment: rolling with my MFA gang (literally rolling, as it seemed we were always in cabs). Seth Fischer, Heather Luby, Yuvi Zalkow, Eric Steineger, LeVan Hawkins, Telaina Ericksen and Robert Egan are all killer writers, cool people, and fine, fine drinkers of adult beverages.

Most awkward moment: in a weekend full of awkwardness, I managed to compliment Michael Czyzniejewski on a story he didn’t read. Or rather, I completely misheard the story he read and told him afterwards how wonderful his story on William Wallace was, when it was a story about William Wells. Which should have been obvious even to my AWP-addled brain. He was reading from his excellent collection Chicago Stories.

Regrettable moment: all those moments I didn’t get to spend with people I’d planned to see. The whole thing goes by so fast and there are a million events at any given moment and my best laid plans were, apparently, not so well laid.

Best moment: The world that flowed chilly and occasionally snowy, so full of words, on pages, from mouths, in minds.

The Rabbit Was Yummy and Other Great Plots

I get blogger’s block. I do. Weeks go by and I have not a thing I want to say here. This is odd. I don’t get writer’s block. Or rather, I’m never short on ideas for stories. I’ve got stories aplenty. So many stories.

Here’s something: I just finished A Dance With Dragons, the most recent installment in George R.R. Martin’s sword-and-sorcery epic. I take those books in with a mindsweep. I unlock my literary jaws and consume them python style. My limbic system gets so juiced that my critical-reading faculties give up and go hang out at the bar until I’m done. Seriously. I cannot comment one way or the other on the series’ literary merit. Ask me to write a review of Martin’s series and you’d get: “ohmygod, ohmygod, ohmygod.”

One of the first books I remember loving was called Experiment in Terror. It was a YA title, I think. It was about aliens who grow up as humans and don’t know they’re aliens until their bodies start changing. Come to think of it, it must have been a puberty analogy. Experiment in terror, indeed.

Point being: I’ve always had an affinity for what’s usually called genre.

The novel I’m working on now has aspects of sci-fi. But it has far fewer aspects of sci-fi than did my first attempt at this story. I found that all the sci-fi I was including was absorbing too much of the story’s energy, pulling the gravity away from the characters. I have more tolerance for “big plots” in the stuff I read. I have very little tolerance for “big plots” in my own stuff. Everything always ends up feeling forced. A forgery.

Speaking of plots, about time for The Walking Dead to find one. Come on, guys. Can’t spend the entire show sitting around a farm waiting for Shane to kill or be killed. A little momentum is not a bad thing.

A Dance With Dragons has pounds of plot. You could use the plot to calculate the density of the sun.

The plot of the novel I’m writing revolves around the finding or not finding of a mythical city. Kinda. It’s also about love tearing the world in half. Perhaps I should add in something about aliens experiencing puberty. And throw in a few zombies and dragons, too. I bet a teenage alien zombie dragon novel would sell. Thing writes itself.

I guess the plot of this post is plots. Although, when I started, I intended on mentioning my successful preparation of rabbit. On Wednesday of last week, I decided I wanted rabbit for dinner that coming Saturday. I made this happen. The plot was: Alan wants to eat a bunny. It was a very linear story progressing to a happy ending. No genre elements in sight.

A Political Rant of Sorts

We are the language of propaganda. We use words like “abomination” and “unconscionable” and “unforgivable” to describe what is really just “unpleasant” and “concerning” and “imprudent.” We choose anger because anger is simple. Or we choose to be oblivious because oblivion requires nothing in return. When we gather, we do so in tribes, and we do so with chants, and we mistake our camaraderie for morality and our obsessions for principles. The other tribes we see only from afar and only in the shadows cast by their fires. We paint those shadows in all their deformities and we call what we see an abomination. “They will destroy us,” we say. And we believe the words. For the words are we.

Finite Thoughts

Next to my bed is a bookshelf full of all the books I intend to read or have begun reading or enjoyed so much that I feel the need to keep close to me as I slumber. For a good while, Infinite Jest occupied the “plan to read” shelf, sitting there in its immensity, spine taunting, the book clearly aware that I am a slow reader and an easily distracted reader, the kind of reader who has five or six books going concurrently and is reading none of them with any expediency. At a little under 500,000 words and notoriously dense, Infinite Jest seemed very much like the kind of book I wouldn’t finish. So I didn’t start. Until, of course, I did (no book gets away with taunting me forever). And an unexpected thing happened: I didn’t once put the book down to pick up something else. I finished it. Every word. Sure, it took a good, long while and lots of hauling around, the book occupying entire compartments in my luggage whenever I traveled, the thing sitting prominently on nightstands in ways that felt a tad ridiculous. But I finished the novel, damn it. I persevered.

If it sounds like the book was a bit of a struggle for me, that’s because it was. Don’t get me wrong; I quite enjoyed Infinite Jest. The language is astounding and the ideas are huge and the effect is penetrating. This is not a novel about which I will soon stop thinking. I would very much like to write a novel as grand. But, good God, the thing can get tedious. David Foster Wallace has no patience for my impatience. It’s his world and he’s going to reveal it in as much intricate detail as he can. Even when that detail lacks any sort of internal propulsion, narrative or otherwise (save Wallace’s enthralling voice).

Plot? This novel has no traditional plot. It has moments that may or may not be part of a greater plot but are, just as often, nothing more than temporal segments extracted from the lives of fascinating characters. These moment/segments interrelate, but the interrelations occur most often in the gaps between sections (i.e.: in the spaces within the reader’s mind) as much as they occur on the page. The last tenth of the novel is mostly flashback and summary of flashbacks of things that occurred well before the events of the novel. The first chapter occurs after the events contained in the rest of the novel. We have here not a story told from beginning to end, but a rain of fragments, a splintered meteor ablating into luminescent parts that incandesce in loose formation, streaking towards us and begging to be assembled back into their whole. Of course, such an assembly is not fully possible, not for this novel and certainly not for life itself where our own moments come and go and end up contained in remembered fragments, some possessing great significance, some merely absurd, and some waiting unattended within us until recalled at a later time and imbued with a new meaning.

Infinite Jest occasionally teases with the possibility of a grand plot, but it ends right before everything seems ready to coalesce. The first chapter gives us clues as to what happened after the “end,” but all we really get to see is the effect those events had, not the grand events themselves. Those events are transformative, but Wallace chose not to write them. I think I like that. Much of our lives are about those things that come “before” and those things that come “after.” The events that change us are just that: events. They are not the change itself. Change is something else. Change is the thing that transpires inside all the other moments. Even the ones that feel mundane.

I have a feeling that reading Infinite Jest has changed me. Many books do. But this one may eventually get a place back on my bedside shelf. Alongside those other favorite with which I like to sleep.

This is the First Time I've Ever Mentioned Tao Lin

Apparently there has been a controversy (litroversy?) over a story published at MuuMuu House. “Adrien Brody” by Marie Calloway. I like Rae Bryant’s take. Super intelligent and just the right tone.

MuuMuu House is a Tao Lin production. Tao Lin gets mentioned an awful lot in the indie lit world. This is the first time he’s been mentioned here.

It seems people like to take positions concerning Tao Lin. My official position on Tao Lin is: meh.

My official position on “Adrien Brody” is: I’d have liked to have seen it as a 450 word prose poem.

Full disclosure: I didn’t read the whole 15,000 words. I found it not to my tastes.

This Caitlin Horrocks story in Paris Review is to my tastes.

As is this Robb Todd piece at The Fiddleback.

Both those stories take place in a normal kind of day and are written in clear prose. And yet, the voices are beautiful and the impacts lasting.

I got into a period last year where I moved too far away from direct storytelling. I blame Matt Bell. How They Were Found has some brilliant stories written in structurally innovative ways; I read it early in 2011 and was so impressed I wanted to try some formal experimentation, too. Turns out, I can’t do what Matt does. Or, perhaps, rather, my most true voice cannot accommodate too much fiddling with form.

Last year was mostly a lost year publishing wise. But I think it was a very significant writing year. Even if 98% of what I wrote in 2011 will never leave my file folders.

By all accounts, Marie Calloway is very young. I wonder what she’ll be writing when she’s 40.

I wonder what I’ll be writing when I’m 40.

I’ll be 40 in 2.75 years.

People tell me this makes me young, too.

Making Time

The newest new rewrite of my novel involves a map. As a child, I spent hours drawing maps of imagined places. I’ve learned I haven’t lost this particular passion.

On my desk (which is really just the dining room table) there sits the phone blinking with the notification of a voicemail. I have no desire to listen to said voicemail. I never have desire to listen to the home phone’s voicemail. The news I care about comes by text or email or cell phone. My home phone is a relic resigned to those people and things about which I care little.

In the town of my youth, they sold no alcohol because they believed this would lead to violence and sin and would ruin the neighborhood. Now, I live in a very nice neighborhood where liquor stores are common. You know what this has led to? Excellent selections of fine liquors. Seriously, the single malts are amazing.

We had a rotary phone growing up. It was in my parent’s bedroom. Even then it was out-of-date and I used to think the time it took to dial was insufferably long. New technologies make so many things insufferably long. We live in an era governed by the millisecond.

And yet, find a good single malt, and time will wait.

What I mean: if I were to draw a map of my desired life, the cardinal points would be a measurement of time and up at the top, where hours linger, there’d be friends and family and books and single malt scotches, and down there at the bottom, where everything moves fast, there’d be voicemails on my home phone and rote copywriting and dental appointments. I’d get what feels like a hundred years to write a novel. Paying bills would seem to go by in a blink.

Ruin, I believe, is only sometimes a product of external influences. Most of the time it’s a product of an error in our internal compasses. So I try to keep directed to what’s important. Like family, and novels, and single malts enjoyed on a November porch.

Of Droughts and Mayors

Got a story up at Hobart called "A Good and Hopeful Man Leading His People Forward. It's here.

I love Hobart. I own a Hobart shot glass and almost every print issue. I don't need to tell you how happy I am to be part of this great publication. But I will.

I'm overjoyed.

Pre-Order. 'Cause Post-Ordering is for Losers.

I refuse to be negligent. These things must be noted. Proclaimed.

Jason Jordan’s novella The Dying Horse is available for pre-order from Main Street Rag.

Tiny Hardcore Press is offering you Lauren Becker, Erin Fitzgerald, Kirsty Logan, Michelle Reale AND Amber Sparks all in one place. Pre-order the chapbook collection Shut Up / Look Pretty here.

These are writers y’all want to be reading.

Occupation

There are people on Wall Street who aren’t normally on Wall Street. Doubtless you’ve heard because the media coverage has been non-stop. If by “media” I mean “a bunch of my friends on Facebook.” Of course, some days, that is my media.

I don’t have time to have time. This isn’t an excuse or a complaint. It’s a statement of my state. I’m a parent and a freelance writer and someone who, when given a few moments, very much enjoys having a good meal or going to a movie. I’m not going to occupy anything but this chair where I work and where I hope to write something worth something. And by worth I don’t mean worth money. I mean worth my presence here. I mean: writing something that makes me worth having around as a writer.

I spent a few hours yesterday pining for a more innocent me. That innocent me believed that Tony Romo was a top NFL QB. These are the things that sometimes occupy me. I’m not ashamed of this. Without our diversions, we tend to be pricks.

But about Wall Street. I am not a rich man, but I am not hurting. I have a well-stocked bar and two working cars and I pay someone else to cut my yard. But there’s a stagnation here, a sense that my hard work—or, really, my wife’s hard work, because, God knows, she brings home the proverbial bacon—isn’t worth what it might once have been worth. And this time, by worth, I do mean money.

Let me just say this: when a small number of individuals or entities control large portions of the market, it’s not a free market. And you’re either for a free market or for a controlled one. And if it’s controlled, who breaks it up and spreads the power back around?

Seriously, Tony Romo hurt me yesterday. Cracked me.

But this Wall Street thing. Shit. I don’t even know if they want what I want. I suspect that they don’t. But for the love of God, do we not want something different? I mean, isn’t this the kind of moment where the best of us make us better? There ain’t nothing wrong about finding our diversions. But at some point, we’re going to have to find our purpose, too.

And Now?

I write this not because I’m unique, but because I’m not. Because I’m just another American who remembers that day and can’t quite shake free of its grip.

There’s a rawness here. Still. So I’m not going to claim that I am blessed—as are some—with that enviable ability to lean back and observe this all from a morally pure point of view. I can’t do that. This thing. It did a number on me.

That day? I was just at work. A lot of people were just at work. That was the thing, I think. It was so easy to imagine ourselves there.

A few days after, my wife and I decided to lay flowers somewhere, but we didn’t know the right spot. We were living in DC, so we walked down to the National Mall and wandered the vacant spaces between those memorials. We finally chose the statue of Roosevelt sitting in his secluded site. What we wanted was wisdom and strength.

You know what we’ve ended up with instead.

How about this: The bodies from the Pentagon traveled in yellow helicopters. They passed low as I grilled burgers on the roof deck.

That’s what I tell people when they ask for a story about being in that city, at that time. I also mention seeing a machine gun mounted on a jeep that drove down my little street. And the smell of a building and bodies burning for days.

But those aren’t stories. They’re fragments. Ash. And we still live in that debris, I think. A man falling. A fireball. A bullhorned voice and grainy images of dark-skinned men running an obstacle course. It all drifts down around us. Coats us, still, and makes it hard for us to see.

“Perhaps the most heinous act of terrorism in history.” A columnist wrote those words for my local paper today. He’s wrong, of course. People, throughout history, have terrorized one another in far worse ways. Unbelievably worse ways.

And yet...

What happened was horrific and frightening and angering and, despite what I just wrote, I get a little ill when I hear fellow Americans trying to minimize what happened, trying to act as if our national obsession over those events is somehow a sign of moral weakness or intellectual dimness. What it is, I think, is a sign of our humanity. As much as the horrors elsewhere in the world might make us ache, we Americans felt the scorch of those fires ten years ago. The worst atrocity is always the one that happened closest to you. It’s the way our minds operate. It’s understandable.

And yet, again...

We’re here. You, me. Ten years on and we’re still here. And I sit in a house I didn’t own back then, with two children who hadn’t been born back then, with a decade beneath me that couldn’t have been imagined back then—I sit with all this newness and know you sit with a newness of your own. And I wonder: where to now? If we can still feel so connected to people who were just at work—whom most of us didn’t know—can’t we feel connected to others as well? Can’t we sense those strands tying us together? In this newness—in this continuance of life—so many seem so focused on dividing themselves from others, on withholding compassion for reasons often as narrow as a difference in political affiliation. But to what ends? Truly. If we refuse to admit we're all journeying forward together, where do we think we're going to end up?

Because, you see, there are names in bronze lining two pools where towers once stood. But there are so many other names in this world that no one will ever inscribe. And there will be more. A lot more. And what are we going to do about that?

Remembered Sounds

My neighbor is doing some work on his house and, this morning, someone was using what I assume was a nail gun. The sound was rich and rhythmic, something between a tap and a thud. It was a sound that sent me thirty-or-more years back, leaving me a young boy sitting in a wood-paneled den and listening to my mother type her first novels. Her work came in these tap-thud bursts that I'm sure I didn't quite understand. But the sound of that typewriter--the sound of my mother writing--must have pushed deep into my mind. Lodged there. So that this morning, as I worked on my own writing, a nail gun reminded me of my mother in her literary youth.

And I wonder, in thirty-years to come, if my son or daughter will hear a soft clicking like a keyboard and think of me, still young and believing, sitting with a dark head of hair at the dining room table of their youth and writing books that now sit on their shelves.

Charlie Baxter Dance Party

I was gone for awhile, on the mountain, they say, although those of us on this side of the continent (even those of us in the flat parts) tend to call such soft and rolling land hilly. Not mountainous. So, I was in the hills. Of Vermont.

Everything was very old, except the people. Many of the people were young and filled with what I believe is called verve. Even the old people had young people verve. I’m pretty sure no one was themselves and everyone was exactly who they are.

I’m talking about the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, by the way.

We ate at determined times and we ate what we were fed. I liked a duck dish. The tacos made me laugh. Those deemed to have incredible talent and potential waited on us and I could not help but note how much they all sweated. They were nice people. All of them. But I was jealous. They’d been chosen. I was just allowed to watch them work.

Somewhere between the inn and the Frost cabin, I realized why so few of my stories ever end in any satisfactory way. I was carrying this little green fruit that I’d been told was a crab apple and I was talking and talking, as I do, even when sober, which I was since you couldn’t get a drink until 5:30 or so. It’s about tension, I said. The story ends at the point that particular story cannot contain any more tension, at the point right after it breaks, or right when you know it inevitably will. There is no end until the tension reaches that point. This sounds rudimentary as I write it. There was more to it. There was revelation.

I credit Charles Baxter. He gave a lecture on plot that made people cry. No shit. That happened.

I wore sweaters some days. It was 100+ degrees back home and I was in sweaters and listening to the rain. You want to talk feeling displaced? You want to talk falling out of time? I could feel the thousands who had come before me. Hope. Laughter. In a corner of the barn a piano sat mostly unplayed. They used to jam on it, I was told. They used to fill that barn with their singing.

No one knew where we were. Even those who could find us on a map.

Everyone carried satchels of books. I just spent two-hundred dollars at the bookstore, people would say. And we thought this is how the world should be.

On the last night, there was a dance. There’d been a dance previously but the last dance is always the best dance. And so we drank and flung ourselves around. I smacked into Charles Baxter who laughed. I banged my fists on the floor with the guy who’d began as my roommate but is now a wonderful friend. I consumed a healthy amount of wine and, when the music ended, I was still spinning.

Coming down that hill (that mountain) on the final morning, I thought I might be ill. I blamed it on the wine. But it was probably something else.

Because It Can't Not Be Today

Sometimes I make the mistake of reading the comments sections of news stories. The anger is a sickness. I can feel it working its way into my blood.

I’ve heard we shouldn’t use clichés because they are lazy. I’m pretty sure they can also be dangerous. At least when enough people believe they’re true.

Amazing how language can become drumbeats, subtlety stripped and meaning stretched into a thinness that sounds hollow and repetitive yet nevertheless makes feet fall into line.

But, seriously, I mean, come on: at what point did so many people of modest means stop caring about the condition of those most like themselves and start fighting for the interests of the wealthy? How does something like that occur?

There is a myth of martinis and cigarettes and there’s a true story of fire hoses. If only it could be reduced like that. History as some pretty old Christmas card, or history as some righteous progression. We think we’ve lost something or we think we’ve valiantly moved forward, but you know what I think? Sometimes I think we’re just spinning.

Today will be a fragment of my children’s past. You and me, though? This is the middle. This is what we’ve been given. Work with it or just turn on Jersey Shore. You know?

"An Incomplete Registry of Deaths: Part One" Up at Corium

Got a new story in the new Corium. Read it here. It’s a series of somewhat interrelated micro fictions. I’m hoping to do more of these but who knows. My projects don’t always hold.

Thanks to the wonderful Lauren Becker for including the story. I haven’t been getting a lot of stuff out there this year, but this one I really liked and am so glad it found such a great home.