PRACTICE SPACE

BACK TO THE FUTURE PART 2012

2012-01-09T14:22:00.003-05:00

I am infatuated with the name of Restore our Future, who make attack ads for Mitt Romney. Restore our Future! This phrase is fantastic (literally) on so many levels:

1. How can you restore something that has not existed yet? I love the idea of the future as this object we built some time back--decades ago, presumably, if it has deteriorated to the point of requiring restoration, like a Victorian house or vintage automobile or Renaissance painting. The future is old, people. Needs a good touchup.

2. To restore a future, we would have to have had it first. And then it wouldn't be a future anymore, would it? It would be a present or a past.

3. Although in a way, the future is a real thing as much as conceptual art is. We all construct it every day, individually and collectively, as a people and as affinity groups and as a nation. The future is an idea that has been used as a tool for us and against us for a very long time, depending on which "us" one is at which time. "Our future" has been used to to establish college funds and medical research, and "our future" has been used to nearly exterminate the Native Americans. For something that does not yet--and never will--tangibly exist, "the future" has a profound influence on decisions that affect the present.

4. Which "our"? Which future? There have been so many.

5. But maybe that deliberate ambiguity speaks subliminally to the my more than the our. How many of us would like to restore our own future? How many people would love to go back and polish up their idea of what their life would turn out to be, to have everything still possible, to brighten and retouch that vision as if it had not aged a day but was still new, still now? What this imperative asks for is to give me back my idea of what life was going to be like. It's a bitter demand. It's rallying cry full of disappointment and indignant nostalgia.

Hilariously, one of the largest donors to Restore our Future is a guy who made his millions betting on the collapse of the housing industry. Also, the chairman of New Balance, noted.

I live in Williamsburg, Virginia, a town that fervently and aggressively wiped out an enormous portion of its physical present and future in the 1930s by reverting (recolonizing?) much of the town to the year 1774. Evacuated of its residents, cleared of all 19th- and 20th-century structures except reconstructions, Colonial Williamsburg™ guards a past that is constantly rubbing awkwardly against the present and battling the future (as time weathers paint and erodes brick and renders the longtime Thomas Jefferson reenactor increasingly anachronistic as he ages away from a plausibly 1774-aged Jefferson and into the next bygone century)--but I'll write that essay elsewhere.

SIX HAS ALWAYS BEEN MY LUCKY NUMBER

2012-01-08T22:13:00.001-05:00

Happy (estimated) birthday to my sweet Emmett, born circa January 2006 somewhere around Tillamook, Oregon. I took him home "to foster him" on September 8, 2006, when he was eight months old. In the rescue business they call this a "foster failure."

I couldn't have failed better.

I don't know what else to say except thank you, Emmett, for being the perfect road trip buddy, polite party guest (and host), woods wanderer, and reading armrest. You changed my life. I'm so glad you're in it.

I don't blame you for not wanting to fetch. It's stupid to keep bringing something back to a person who just throws it away again.

Happy sixth, little friend. Please stick around for another dozen if you can.

THE CHANNEL IS OPEN

2011-12-30T16:01:00.000-05:00

Went to the Walker Art Center yesterday. My favorite thing in there right now is a video piece called “Flooded McDonald’s” by Superflex. It's part of the John Waters-curated exhibit "Absentee Landlord." (Brilliant.)

The film is exactly what the title says. An empty McDonald’s looks like it’s been abandoned mid-day. The camera lingers on each thing in the room: Meals both fully intact and half-eaten, a container of glistening french fries, trays of refuse, an empty cup on its side on a seat, a chair, a tall Ronald statue, a full coffeepot. All these objects become characters in the film.

Then water begins to rush in beneath the crack of the door. It’s thrilling to watch it pour in, clear and fast. It fills the room quickly. The first things it picks up are crumpled wrappers on the floor.

As the place fills, things start to move. The rising water animates everything. Ronald rises to his feet and begins to bob. Eventually the cup on the seat gets lifted. Ronald tips over. The food is liberated from its tabletop inertia and joins in the flow, traveling to corners of the restaurant it shouldn’t be. The chair. The coffeepot is suspended so just its lip remains above the surface, floating along still full of coffee. The swinging doors of the trash cans begin to flap in and out. There’s a merriness here as everything falls from its place, displays collapse and all the bright litter is animated. Little kids in the room giggled.

Flooded McDonald's from Superflex on Vimeo.

But as the place continues to fill, the water goes from clear to dirty. It darkens, clouds, fills with bits of trash. French fries drift by, ghostly cups, the chair a tilted shipwreck. The water reaches the big electric M on the wall and it blinks a few times, buzzes, goes out. Eventually it rises to the backlit menus and those too go dark. By the end of the movie the screen is a hazy brownout, water to the top of the field of vision.

It’s like watching death, I whispered to my companion, who said, I was just thinking that.

Also, it’s like America.

That alone was worth the admission. I also liked Mike Kelley’s framed carpet and map of his junior high, and the Glenn Ligon coloring-book painting, and this dolphin oracle you could ask questions by typing them on a keyboard. After you hit return, an ellipsis appears, and then the dolphin squeaks and chirps and writhes a little while its subtitled answer materializes. It is terribly charming.

The answer to "Are you messing with me, dolphin?"

The much-hyped graphic design exhibit exhausted me in about two minutes. About ten years ago I developed serious design fatigue. I had worked at a design magazine run by a megalomaniac tyrant who had us all on 70-hour work weeks. I was eating too many Twizzlers out of my desk drawer and getting skinny, severely underpaid and overworked, and I got so sick of Good Design. I mean, I love good design. But I tired of the fetishization of it. (See also: the hilariously/cruelly named Design Within Reach.) This exhibit was a tornado of type and logo, and it was crammed into a few big rooms where every surface seemed to swim with letters, but not in a beautiful or harmonious or interestingly-clashing way; it was like walking into a world of internet sidebars. Most of it was advertising. That’s the problem with graphic design. Almost all of it exists to sell you something. The embedded museum shop was indistinguishable from the exhibit.

But speaking of Facebook, this breakdown of the eight elements of status updates was in one of the newspapers on display.

Last stop before heading back north was Birchbark Books, which is owned by Louise Erdrich and is now one of my favorite bookstores anywhere, beautifully selected and appointed and staffed by an extremely relaxed dog named Dharma.

It's one of those stores where the selection is perfect instead of vast. And there are handwritten recommendations by Louise Erdrich all over. Doesn't get much better than that.

Yes.

CATCHING UP KEEPING UP

2011-12-27T11:51:00.000-05:00

Well, blog. We have a lot to talk about.

One thing is that I abruptly and semi-impulsively deactivated my Facebook two weeks ago. I had 900-some friends and all but a handful are people I actually know or have known in my many lives. I think I even like almost all of them. But the noise got to be too much. Facebook was like too many radio stations playing simultaneously. I forget half of what I hear but I remember almost everything I read, and so all that trivia was printing itself all over my brain.

And the pleasure had gone out of it. The first, most potent pleasure of Facebook for me was finding the long lost. There were so many: from my entire childhood in Park Rapids, from Norway, Iowa, New York, Oberlin, the Stegner crew, music-world people, writers and editors, Portlanders, et cetera. But pretty soon, everyone was found. And the thrill of the discovery quickly sagged into the mundane. I loved the initial burst of information, when it was like running into someone unexpectedly in a bar in another city: the catching-up. Where are you? What have you been doing? You look great. These are my dogs! But then it didn't stop. It went from catching up to keeping up. Keeping up with people, keeping up appearances. We were back in that bar every day. It started to feel less like a bar and more like a storage unit.

There are the friends who click Like and there are the friends who show up. (I've been both, I'm not exempt.) But I am more interested in the latter these days. I want your real face. I want your microexpressions and your voice. I want us to see the same thing at the same time, and I don't mean on YouTube. I want laugh and conspiratorial whisper, not just quip and complaint. Maybe 90% of Facebook and Twitter are quip and complaint.

When I worked at magazines in New York around the turn of the millennium, the (permanent) trend kicked in of articles shrinking while their photos grew. We were supposed to relocate more of the info to captions and sidebars, fragmenting the content like pre-cut food. "Quippy kickers," they called it at one publication. To dig into the substance of an article--the body of the text, as it is notably called--takes time and effort, and maybe people just wanted to look, not read. To snack, not eat. I think Facebook does the same thing. Magazines got shorter and so did we. Our images grow and grow while our (visible) content shrinks. We just sample each other. Swish and spit.

My departure is probably not permanent. I know myself too well to claim that I'm Gone for Good. But the time away has felt great.

Meanwhile, friends (yes, friends, not friends™!): let's write.

REAL SHOTS FIRED

2011-11-17T17:37:00.001-05:00

My essay about fear, power, and the first time I shot a gun is now up at The Rumpus, if you'd like to take a look. http://therumpus.net/2011/11/silhouettes/

NOTES FROM IOWA 75

2011-07-16T23:47:00.005-04:00

From Raygun in Iowa City.

In June I took a respite from packing to drive out to Iowa City for the 75th anniversary-reunion-celebration of the Writers' Workshop. It was worth the nine-hour drive across I-80, whose stretch of Ohio-Indiana-Illinois makes one think things like, This is what we're fighting for? I swear once you cross the border into Iowa everything looks better. I loved living in Iowa. It was one of the prettiest, most underrated landscapes I've ever lived in. Deep emerald in summer, endless gold in fall, snow-blanketed fields washed pink by sunrise and sunset in winter, a huge blue sky.

All you people who didn't come because you felt insecure or underpublished or worried that people were going to be competitive and size you up (what? at Iowa?), it was in fact so not like that! It was so friendly and relaxed, no résumé checking at all. No one murmuring disdain about your last workshop disaster or cackling over Conroy's lacerating one-liner. No velvet rope or VIP rooms. Just a big loose-knit party. Here are my ramshackle notes from the weekend.

1. The best thing in Indiana is Joyelle and Johannes, who opted not to reunite with the masses but graciously fed me lunch.

2. First stop after checking in with my excellent hosts Kembrew and Lynne and new tiny Alasdair: Marilynne Robinson at the Englert. Choice quote TK when I find my little notebook.

3. O George's Bar of the flocked wallpaper and utterly transfixing scrolling backlit Hamm's sign! In a narrow dark booth that night——Peyton and Pauls and I devised, or derived, titles for bestselling novels. The dim scrawling in my notebook includes

The Justice of Riga (name of an actual sword!)
The Executioner's Son, or should it be Daughter?
Orphan Season
American Teeth
American Lesbian
The Lesbianists
The Leper's Guide to Sanitation.

4. Next we hit the immortal Foxhead. When we were at the workshop, the Foxhead was the poets' bar and George's was the fiction bar. Now it's the opposite. I always liked the Foxhead a little better, but George's had that enchanting Hamm's sign and would make you a toasted cheese sandwich (a hamburger bun with pickles and a slice of American cheese) for $1.50. (Still!)

Foxhead outside

Foxhead inside

Two Foxes

5. Because my whole life is a small town, of course I ran into Jarrett who I used to know in Portland. He now lives in Iowa City and runs a coffee cart called Wake Up Iowa City. That was my first stop in the morning with Lynne.


Says the blackboard: THE ESPRESSO MACHINE IS ACTIN A FOOL. SORRY

I love Upper Midwest punk. There's something very low-key and homey and unpretentious about it.

Do you have to-go cups? we asked. "Just bring the mugs back whenever you're done," said Jarrett, "or do whatever with them." This pair were too good to risk, so we opted to gulp down the strong black French-pressed coffee right there.

6. And then off to some panels with grandiose titles. (What Makes Literature Immortal? How Realistic is Realism? etc.) And the Golden Microphone goes to: Allan Gurganus, hands down. Thank you for your bracing sardonic wit and appropriate irreverence. ("Back then, 'diversity' meant admitting a Quaker from Maine. Who wrote prose poems.")

I took hardly any pictures of Official Events, but the Christian Science Monitor has a long thoughtful article. (At the end of the slideshow of famous and famous-ish writers is a nice shot of a group of us chatting on the museum steps--captioned, appropriately, "other alumni.")


The Dey House, partly, its massive new addition too large and luxurious to fit in the frame of my 50mm lens

7. At noon my phone rang. Malena and Antoine's flights had been canceled in Denver the night before. They then got in a van with four Iowan women, none of whom had ever met before, and drove all night, twelve hours!—only to hit a deer 15 miles from Iowa City, at which point I was called to retrieve them from the side of I-80.

8. My beloved tiny house at 723 1/2 East Jefferson Street still stands. The sunny yard to the west (my bedroom window) is now a giant vinyl-sided, student-tenant-crammed addition to the modest gray bungalow that once was, and the shady yard to the east (my kitchen windows) is now a parking lot to a new apartment building. I guess I lived there at exactly the right time, with Jamie Schweser as my landlord ($360/month!) and awesome lesbian neighbors Mel and Kara in the main house's basement apartment. (They duct-taped corncobs to the rearview mirrors of my U-Haul on the day I drove away.) I wrote so many stories in that house.

Sometimes I would roll the television cart into the bathroom and watch movies in the 3/4 (exactly me-sized) clawfoot tub while my cat Foot Foot walked around the rim of it. I fell asleep watching Breathless and woke up when the water had gone cold.

9. Anyway. Iowa City has gotten a little fancier. There are more coffee shops and restaurants. The Record Collector and Daydreams Comics are still going. The public library is much fancier, and the new workshop building is stunning, replete with sumptuous wood-and-leather library. But mostly it still feels exactly the same. For example, La'James College of Hairstyling is still in business,

and the Hamburg Inn No. 2, though much cleaned-up and remodeled since my time here, is still very much itself, pie shakes and all.

At Artifacts--which is still called Artifacts but no longer owned by Mark, who opened up another place three doors down--we discovered the world's most fascinatingly repulsive lamp. It is very heavy brown ceramic and it costs $125.

10. On the last morning I met Cathy and Malena and Shannon for breakfast at the Hamburg Inn. I saw them a block away walking up to the restaurant together, these three wonderful brilliant people I have now known for eleven years, and for the first time all weekend my friendly nostalgia swelled into a wave of emotion. For a moment I pretended we all still lived here, and I was just meeting some of my favorite friends for breakfast. The force of the recall knocked the tears right into my eyes.

I paused to let myself miss them, our time there, my sweet little Iowa life. Then I picked up the pace and hurried to meet my friends. There was a wait for a table and the morning was chilly, but I didn't mind. All nestled together on the outside bench, we stayed warm.

AUTHENTICITY FAIL

2011-07-15T14:40:00.000-04:00

Nice try, J. Crew. Minnetonka Moccasins ditched Minnesota (surreptitiously as they could) years ago for cheaper labor.

And get a better proofreader.

OVER & OUT

2011-06-30T09:35:00.023-04:00

The end of the school year was a sweet one. For the last meeting of my Beyond Genre workshop (full title: "Beyond Genre: Fabulism, Fantasy, and Speculative Fiction"), we convened in the town cemetery at 7:00 pm. Then I set them loose to collect names of the dead and bring them back to life on the page.

So we prowled around the tilting tombstones with notebooks in hand. But finding names was so entertaining it was hard for anyone to stop to actually start writing character sketches. Chauncey Wack! Rufus Jump! And his son Giles Jump. Halloween K. Peabody! Darius Darling. Narcissa Pay!

Living in such a tiny town, walking my dogs down the same streets every day, I always liked veering off to take the cemetery route. There was always something to read. Other lives to imagine. One of the best parts of teaching is that you can share these things with a little audience. You love a story, and then you get to teach it. You find a lovely spot, and then you wait all semester for an evening that's temperate enough to bring the students to it. And they bring chocolate-covered Oreos. What a job.

Names in hand, before we headed back to the seminar room.

My friend Ginger Brooks Takahashi came during commencement week to give a talk about her art. She said that it's important for young artists to know that there isn't just one Art World, there are many art worlds and ways to be an artist. Smart and true.

In college Ginger and I played in a band called Endor, along with Gillian and Lena. We had a handful of songs and did a cover of "The Metro" by Berlin. All that survives is a very scratchy tape recording of a co-op basement show and some photos wherein I'm wearing a suit made of duct tape. But it was one of the most rewarding things I did in college. Ginger has a punk soul and a great pop sensibility, an excellent combination. She is also brave and enthusiastic. Which in a way are sort of the same thing.

Last radio show at WOBC.

On Commencement Day itself I didn't walk in the ceremony (I don't own the requisite regalia--Iowa's graduation is an informal affair--and didn't rent it this year). I headed down to Tappan Square anyway to scope out the crowds and bid farewell to some of my students. I was seeking, I think, a sense of closure. I had hoped that the ritual would give me a sense of finality. But when I got there, though the president was just launching into the C names, the ground was already strewn with trampled programs and people wandered around, talking and mingling. It was as apt a closure as any—a handful of people going through the formal motions in the background, while real life chatted and shuffled around and made kind a benign mess.

Nothing ever really feels over.

Classic OC.

Thanks, Oberlin. What good stories you've given me.

I'M STILL LIVING IN THE DARK, I'M STILL LIVING IN THE DARK

2011-06-06T13:09:00.002-04:00

Do you ever wake up with a song in your head, and you can't do anything until you've played it? This morning that song was "Electrocution" by Bill Fox.

Bill Fox: "Electrocution"

A year or two ago I was looking for this song "The Dress You Bought in Cleveland," which meant something to me in 1995, and came across this comp of Ohio bands, I Was Up All Night Listening to Records. I'd never heard of Bill Fox but I couldn't stop playing that song.

Well. Apparently Bill Fox is (not)famously brilliant--Guided by Voices' love for him is all over their sound, he's like a proto-Pollard--and (not)famously reclusive. A lengthy Believer piece had a writer lurking around Cleveland for weeks trying to find the guy, and failing. As it turns out, he works at the Plain-Dealer selling ads.

He played here a few weeks ago. A forty-minute set in a gymnasium, early evening light in the high windows, a couple of handfuls of people sitting on the floor before the huge stage where it was just Bill Fox and his guitar.

His voice now was hoarser than the recordings, which have a crackly sweetness to them--it was strained, a little laryngitic Westerberg-ish. Between songs he hardly said a word. He played some of beautiful songs from Shelter from the Smoke and Transit Byzantium. He did not play "Electrocution" or "Bonded to You," my other favorite. And he played several protest songs in 6/8 time that I wasn't that into. But he clearly meant every word. And I was just glad to have him there.

I like knowing that someone like Bill Fox can be hiding out in Cleveland, a city half leafy and homey and half in ruins. A treasure in the rubble who has no interest in being found. He's like that cave in the new Werner Herzog movie: all this beautiful art concealed behind a landslide, its secrecy its saving grace.

BLANK TIME

2011-05-24T10:21:00.001-04:00

Classes are out and I'm writing and writing. It's such a treat. I can be a little obsessive and it's a great pleasure to fixate fully on my work again instead of my students and their stories and needs. I wandered over to This Recording to read what other writers say about writing. Chekhov's words I instantly copied and put many asterisks by (and, I confess, felt the urge to send to my students). The one I'm lingering on now is Toni Morrison:

You learn how to use time. You don't have to learn how to wash the dishes every time you do that. You already know how to do that. So, while you're doing that, you're thinking. You know, it doesn't take up your whole mind. Or just on the subway. I would solve a lot of literary problems just thinking about a character in that packed train, where you can't do anything anyway. Well, you can read the paper, but you're sort of in there.

And then I would think about, well, would she do this? And then sometimes I'd really get something good. By the time I'd arrived at work, I would jot it down so I wouldn't forget. It was a very strong interior life that I developed for the characters, and for myself, because something was always churning. There was no blank time.

And I looked at my iPhone sitting black and serene on the desk. How my blank time has changed since it entered my life. And I'm going to grandiosely generalize and make that an our, since every line I stand in is a row of people finger-stroking a little screen. Even waking up in the morning--that moment of easing into consciousness as the world materializes again, sorting the dream from the day and trying to make sense of it--has changed. Too often I cut it short, reach for the nightstand, and look for what the device has brought me in the night. Which is? E-mail.

For years now I've clenched my fists under the table at the friends who can't stop texting during the board game, who pause dinner conversation to attend to the clinking-glass sound of their iPhone, and so on, whose attention is divided between the here and the there.

It's annoying. But even worse, I think, is what it does to solitude. I tell my students that you can write everywhere, in your mind--in the shower, walking across campus at night, during the orchestra concert, etc. I solve a lot of story problems when I walk the dogs (notably, a two-handed affair). But alone, walking home or waiting in line at the post office, how often do I compulsively, absently pull out the iPhone and check something or other? Vs. what did I do before?

Nothing will doom writing, per se, I'm not saying that. But I think a lot of us are missing out on those unplanned moments where we go places in our minds. We look at the weather app instead of the sky.

AMY THIELEN WON A JAMES BEARD AWARD

2011-05-07T17:39:00.001-04:00

I emerge from weeks (months!) of bloglessness to shout this out. Amy won a James Beard Award in journalism! I can personally attest that Amy's gifts in the kitchen are equaled only by her eloquence and humor and grace as a writer. I have been a vegetarian since 1989, and still I will read with relish and delight Amy's accounts of, say, cutting up a whole pig in her yard or cooking steak in the Spanglers' sauna.

Go read her blog here for aforementioned and more. And here are the articles that won her the prize:
• "From the Bean Patch, Plenty" ("Their pods pack as much insulation as an arctic-rated sleeping bag"
• "Low-Tech Wonder" ("My first aioli separated. I fixed it, but sat through dinner beneath a black-mood cloud, undone by a broken sauce but loath to admit it.") (I've got to make the recipes for romesco sauce, chimichurri, and hazelnut praline) (or just go over to Amy's when I'm home in MN and gaze at her hopefully from my kitchen stool perch)
"Walleye: Plentiful and Only a Phone Call Away" ("It turns out that walleye's firm flesh steams beautifully, and within 15 minutes after getting to work I was dipping moist, snowy chunks of sake-steamed walleye in a spirited ponzu sauce that I Midwesternized with a little freshly ground horseradish in place of wasabi.")

Proof you can live in the middle of the woods with six-month(+) winters thousands of miles from a coast and be the most kick-ass chef and food writer ever AND be recognized for your genius. (As does the brilliant artist she's married to, Aaron Spangler.) High fives, old friend.

NOSE TO THE GRINDSTONE

2011-02-24T14:39:00.001-05:00

All of January and nary a post. I was writing in my snowy den. My third January in Ohio was an interior one, literally and figuratively. Snowfall was too erratic to even snowshoe. The landscape was sometimes white as a page, other times brownish and deadish. Much like the writing cycle. We stoked the fireplace and got a lot done. I use Scrivener and on many days the little toolbar that shows your progress toward your target went from red to green, and sometimes even blue (exceeded!)

If you are writing a novel or collection or any kind of long-form project, you have got to try Scrivener.

I did start a Tumblr upon which I will post the Incident Reports. I like Tumblr so far, mostly because I like looking at queer old vintage photos and following various excellent book stores, whose Tumblr authors are just the kind of smart, witty readers & writers one would wish for as tastemakers in the bookselling world. Of Another Fashion, an outgrowth of the brilliant Threadbared academic/fashion blog, is an amazing archive of the style of women of color. I also really like the Lazy Book Reviewer and Things Organized Neatly. Things Organized Neatly exemplifies the purest form of my Virgo paradox, which is cluttered chaos on the macro and obsessive/aesthetic on the micro.

More coming soon.

MR. CARTER

2010-12-29T11:24:00.003-05:00

Years after the fact, I can joke about high school theater and its devout practitioners. The drama we threw ourselves into and created, our over-emoting, our line-quoting, all the ways we fell in love with our own adolescent performance. It's an easy target. But yesterday I attended the funeral of my beloved English teacher, play director, and speech coach Martin Carter, and was hit hard in the heart by how important and wonderful that freaky funny little microcosm was and is.

Maybe things are different in urban and suburban schools, where the stakes are higher, competition stiffer, and the top talent really might go on to be professional actors. But in the homogeneous middle-of-nowhere small-town school where physical prowess reigns and strict gender codes keep kids brutally in their place, the theater department is a rare refuge. A place to escape and a place to pretend to be someone else. To try on other lives for size. To construct another time and place to inhabit where you are implicitly important to the story. And Mr. Carter was genius at bringing us in and making us feel like we mattered.

He had a lot of pain in his life--he'd been orphaned young and raised in a foster home, and his only son was in and out of trouble and died tragically--and the way he carried that was neither a hard bitter scar or a needy open wound, but a steady pulse of sensitivity, the openness of his marvelously expressive elastic face, his slouchy, purposeful stride. It fueled his drive to make life better for the kids he could reach every day. He was a magnet for misfits, nerds, smart kids, shy kids, weirdos, kids that were or felt different in any way.

He had a big classroom next to both an outside exit and the door backstage—a gateway and escape. In it he taught literature by day, coached speech practice after school, and gathered us for play rehearsals in the evening. Mr. Carter's room was like a living room for me and my friends and our fellow speech-and-drama nerds. It was where you could go to find each other, to take a break, to eat lunch in his office in peace. In the back of the room were three closet-sized dressing rooms, in which I smoked my first and last puff of clove cigarette (I fell down from the headrush). In the makeup room, our faces were slicked with thick sticks of stage makeup, a heavy perfumey grease that was near impossible to wash off. Newly crow's-feeted and cheekboned, we blinked at ourselves in the wall of mirrors, trying to touch without smearing the new faces on our faces, these garish caricatures of adulthood: Is this what I'll look like? In the costume closet, surrounded by decades of discarded prom dresses, we turned off the lights, gathered around my Ouija board and summoned spirits who spelled badly and alluded vaguely to ominous deaths.

No matter how ridiculous, we were always welcome.

When we would go down to the Twin Cities for the state speech meets and one-act play competitions, or I would visit Amy who had moved to a cushy suburb, it shocked me how well-trained and equipped other schools were. The immaculate sets, the cushy auditoriums and classrooms, the students' exquisite poise--even the techies scurrying around were super-cool, dressed to the alternative nines. We were a ragtag northern bunch, with our nice clothes from the Fargo mall, rayon dresses and teal button-ups and cheap shoes from Baker's, many of us still permed and mulleted. I people-watched with awe and fascination and occasional seizures of inferiority. We were so small.

But Mr. Carter elevated us all. Everyone knew him, and he knew everyone; he was sort of a legend. And he took for granted that we were as good as or better than anyone else there, no matter where we or they came from. And, it turned out, we were. He loved to win, yes, and he often did--but mostly he just loved us. The real prize, always, was him.

Photo from the Enterprise from 1993, the year he technically retired--yet his funeral was full of current high school students. "I see Mr. Carter pretty much every day," one girl told me. Teacher for life.

ME TOO, BUDDY.

2010-12-27T00:57:00.000-05:00

ZOO SHAME

2010-12-07T23:24:00.000-05:00

Over on the University of Minnesota Press blog, a brief Q&A with Lisa Uddin, who writes about zoo shame, i.e. "why people feel bad at and about the zoo":

These decades [the 1960s and 70s] of intense revitalization transformed many U.S. zooscapes from the so-called “Naked Cage” template of animal display – widely condemned – to early incarnations of the naturalistic, immersive enclosures that typify zoo design today. Zoos also began revitalizing their animal collections in this period, breeding select species whose populations in and outside of captivity were dwindling. This spatial and biological overhaul often gets discussed as an institutional turn to wildlife conservation. What is missing from these accounts is analysis of how the turn was also fully contemporary with the smoldering racial tensions that defined the urban experience in the long postwar period, and, more specifically, the shame that made cities unbearable for so many Americans... I am considering how zoo renewal variously reflected feelings about race and urban space, how it amplified those feelings, and how it offered channels for relief. The shame of American zoos, I argue, is part of the shame of American cities.

The last time I was at a zoo was in the summer of 2008, when I went to see some bands play at the Oregon Zoo (friend of a friend playing, got in free, otherwise it would pain me to pass dollars through a zoo's ticket window.) The Cowboy Junkies were playing when we arrived and I wasn't ready yet to succumb to a blanket on the grass, the soporific was already heavy in the July afternoon air, so I wandered the perimeter and came upon the elephants.

The elephants were walking back and forth in the same easy meter as the Cowboy Junkies. I thought of a beautiful essay a friend of mine wrote about watching these same elephants sway in time to the music. "They were dancing!" she said, and that fit so well with what her essay was about, a moment of relief and beauty and redemption after an ugly, rattling event. But what I learned later, by accident, was that elephants sway when they're distressed.

THE VOICES IN YOUR HEAD

2010-11-07T14:13:00.004-05:00

I was thinking recently about how what you listen to while your brain is still forming, up through your early twenties, is extremely important. I'd been walking the dogs on a leafy lovely day and suddenly this stupid plinky song from my churchgoing childhood reappeared in my head like a little religious Chucky. It would not leave. I remembered every word, every verse. When I tried to dispell it with another song, an even more insipid Sunday School song popped in. ("Stop! And let me tell you/ What the Lord has done for me." With hapless leader Mrs. Crandall wielding a cardboard stop-sign prop.)

The best antidote to this was going to see Guided by Voices on Halloween night. I got Bee Thousand and Alien Lanes when they came out in 1994 and 1995, and I fell instantly for the off-kilter lyrics, tumbling melodies, songs that launch right into their best parts and cut out before they're over. Their brevity just makes them sweeter--the songs know to leave the party while it's still good, even if the famously inebriated band members don't. And I found I remembered every word and melody, even ones I hadn't heard for years.

I think these guys are legitimately grandfathered past the no-smoking law.

Guided by Voices seem to embody something particularly Ohio in a way that makes me feel a surge of affection for the place: their exquisite tunefulness wrapped up in unpretentious bar-band raucousness, the bass player's Spinal Tap-worthy ruffled shirt and open vest and vertical-bass moves, the wiry guitarist in his Dead Kennedys shirt hands-free chain-smoking through the entire show, Tobin Sprout playing diligently, delicately off to the side with a sort of wary bemusement on his face, Pollard the fourth-grade schoolteacher downing a half-dozen too many and singing his heart out, barking out the title of every song--"This is a song called 'Echoes Myron!'" "This is a song called "My Valuable Hunting Knife!'"--before launching in.

I last saw GBV play in 1995 and this show was, to my surprise, ten times better. Or maybe not to my surprise, because at that show they got so drunk they could barely play. This time, they were still drunk, but more joyful, and louder, and more loved—the crowd was mostly thirty- and forty-something Ohio folks, true fans, old-school, fists in the air, singing and bouncing along. They totally ruled the college kids in quantity and quality. All I need to tell you is, a student in front of me pulled out her Blackberry and checked her e-mail during "I Am a Scientist."

I stayed until halfway through the third encore, by which time Pollard had shifted from the onstage beer cooler to drinking straight out of a tequila bottle, a fight had broken out during "Motor Away," and I knew where the night was headed. Best to leave while the party's still good. Still great, in fact. Their songs are forever lodged in my auditory cortex, and for that I'm forever grateful.

KIDS THESE DAYS

2010-10-29T14:38:00.002-04:00

Why watch Guided by Voices ten yards away when you can watch them on your camera ten inches away?

SAM COOMES: People used to come to those shows, when it was underground rock, to get loose and lose their shit. Now the motivations are different—they come to make YouTube videos on their iPhones. I don’t know what the fuck is going on…. In your mind you think the older generation is complaining that the kids are too crazy or too weird and they can’t understand it, but now it’s kind of the opposite: The older people today are complaining that the kids are too well-behaved and clean and commercialized. It’s a strange turn of events. Satyricon definitely represents that old era for me.

--from the Willamette Week's oral history of doomed and beloved skanky rock dive Satyricon.

See also the terrifying NYT Sunday Styles piece last week about the iPhone as baby-hypnotist.

WE'RE STILL AROUND

2010-10-18T11:09:00.006-04:00

I went to a candlelight vigil last week for the queer and perceived-queer teens who have taken their own lives. Vigils often feel a little awkward to me but I felt it was important to show up, to be visible and present. After the fifteen minutes of silence, people got up and spoke. One said, Remember that even though this is getting a lot of attention in the media now, we can't let it fade out with the news cycle. It will keep happening long after the news forgets it. Another person shared what her mother had always told her: It is not your task to complete the work, nor are you free to desist from it.

Corin Tucker's new song and video "Riley" aren't about this specifically, but they still connect for me. The song is a shout-out of support to a young person going through a terrible time, from an adult who may not be a regular part of the kid's life but still cares deeply. Riley, we're still around.

I like that we. I think of all the struggling kids I've known over the years, from the queer SMYRC youth to the girl rock campers to the high school students I would meet with every week after school to sit down and write. Some of them did reach out to me when things got desperate at home. Many didn't. I tried to give them tools to empower themselves--writing prompts and journals, cooking dinner together, permission to be loud, scream circles, a model for forging the life you want, not the compulsory one you're taught. I'm trying to resist the rescue narrative because that's not what happens, it's not saving people one at a time so much as it is being present for them. It's showing up. Every day or week or month or summer. I hope these kids and now-adults know I still think of them. I hope they know there are a lot of us out here rooting for them, people who may not be in their inner orbit but who stand in this outer circle, ready to catch them if they fall. If they call.

(Props to Corin for her moving new album and Aubree for the beautifully-shot video.)

WRITERLY SPECTACLES

2010-10-13T11:43:00.000-04:00

So a few weeks ago, I read Freedom—the first Franzen fiction I've ever read, I confess. I wanted to know what all the fuss was about. And I liked it. It's compulsively readable, swiftly paced, ambitious, it's quite funny, it's character-driven. Plus, as a fourth-generation northern Minnesotan, I couldn't help but love the pivotal role (fictional) Nameless Lake up by (real) Grand Rapids played in the book.

I'm fascinated about why the guy is a magnet for repressed writer rage, because I too have long felt a kneejerk irritation at the sight of his contented smirk and writerly spectacles. (Recently snatched right from his face and held for ransom!) Per the more recent woman-writer outrage so prominently acted out on Twitter, he ends up standing in for all lauded straight white bourgeois male writers; I guess someone's got to fill the late Updike's loved-and-loathed shoes. Meghan O'Rourke wrote a good piece on Slate about how the whole tempest stirs up deeper questions about unconscious bias not only in reading but in writing.

But I also have to say, for such a gifted creator of characters and the interplay between them, ultimately there's something off-putting about the women in Freedom. Patty Berglund is, I'll grant, a pretty great character, full-fledged and complex and full of drive and yearning. But the other ones?
• Lalitha is the delicately-accented brown beauty who is defined mostly by her twin passions for a) Walter and b) Walter's cause. Walter actually reflects in one moment in the car that one of the most satisfying outcomes of women's liberation was that Lalitha could accelerate the car with confidence.
• Neighbor Carol is a working-class woman whose youthful sluttery with a man in power has landed her a lifetime supply of hush money that only enables her bad manners and bad taste in men, housing, and aesthetics.
• Jenna is a mumbling sexpot who seems destined only for a Real Housewives franchise twenty years down the road.
• Connie is a total cipher. I have never read a more passive character in my life, which is I suppose partly the point, but when the character's one act of transgression is to halfheartedly let her manager sleep with her a few times... come on. And how I wish I could unread the line about the "clitoris of Connie's intelligence."
• The daughter Jessica is the exception—smart, together, capable, self-sufficient. She is utterly, almost comically, ignored. For the entire novel.

It's not like the main men in the story—Walter, Richard, and Joey—are angels. But they're so interesting. They get things done. They're complex. They're captivating, even when they're doing things you grit your teeth at. Even when Richard is lamenting "the yawning microcosm of Patty's cunt," another line I wish I could delete from my memory.

Ultimately, I think Freedom is really a love story between Walter and Richard. The women are mostly there to get in the way of it--productively for the story if not for the women.

DEPT OF NO-HIO

2010-09-25T15:41:00.001-04:00

From the free local mailer The ADvocate [sic], an unfortunate mismatch of headline and photo:

"SUSPICIOUS ACTIVITY," AKA THE INCIDENT REPORT IS BACK

2010-09-03T18:48:00.001-04:00

At last, the Park Rapids Enterprise, my hometown newspaper and former employer, is back in my mailbox twice a week! How I have missed you, Incidents report! Here is a double-dose to make up for lost time. Just to set the tone here, the headline on the August 28 issue was A LONG HOT SUMMER: AGGRAVATION AND ALCOHOL, with sordid mug shots of four mothers busted for DUI with kids in the car. (Inside the issue, lighter fare: "RU ready 4 Gr8 high tech angling?")

Here we go, a selection of the finest:

Miscellaneous: Aug 23: Three females were "possibly smoking pot" on the Akeley beach; A Park Rapids caller reported someone pounding on her bathroom window; Someone appeared to be breaking into a garage in Park Rapids, call canceled, a bridal shower just concluded and they were throwing something a way; A Laporte resident stated she was in the Twin Cities and asked individuals to watch the house, advising them not to throw any parties, she now states there have been parties at the residence [Shocking! —ed.] with underage drinking [ibid.] and she wants everyone removed; A gun was found in a Park Rapids shopping cart; Aug 24: A toddler was on the highway in front of Bullwinkle's in Nevis, callre removed child before mother came to find child; Juveniles were reported breaking bottles and laughing in Park Rapids; A Park Rapids caller let her dogs out and heard a gunshot in the alley behind her house, saw two males running and a truck window shot out; Boys in a vehicle were driving by, threatening caller, her animals, and fiancé in Lakeport Township; Screaming was heard in Arago Township, responding officer requesting another squad for a search; Aug 25: A possible Internet scam via e-mail was reported in Rockwood Township; A Lake Emma Township caller reported the neighbor running a boat about 15 feet from the dock at high speeds while they are swimming, "they are having other issues with the neighbors and are in a civil dispute"; A Park Rapids caller reported receiving a phone call telling her she won $5 million, he called again and said he would come to her house and show her the check, she is afraid and told him not to come; A Park Rapids caller thinks a male is taking pictures of kids and downloading them on a computer; A Park Rapids caller reported receiving threatening text message from her daughter's boyfriend's extranged wife; Animal related: A Guthrie Township caller reported the neighbor may be letting the horses out; A bear was hit on Highway 2 just inside Hubbard County, bear left the scene, minor damage to vehicle; Car vs. deer was reported in Lake Alice Township.

Whew. That is only one of them, and only the half of it. I left out all the standard cell-phone fights and problematic dogs and restraining order requests and reckless trucks. Are you ready for more, reader? I am. One week earlier...

Miscellaneous: Aug 16: A caller reported people putting firecrackers into mailboxes, when she let her dog out they were scared off and it now appears they locked their keys in their car that's running in the middle of the road.

Really, why go any farther? That one stands alone.

Okay, just a couple more:

Neighbor kids were reported hitting the side of a trailer house, "she has yelled at them to stop but they won't," parents aren't home; A Crow Wing Lake caller reported "suspicious activity, someone taking empty dog food cans and using them for target practice"; A Park Rapids caller reported a young child and an open bottle of liquor in a vehicle in Park Rapids; A tape deck and medication were reported stolen from a vehicle in Park Rapids; A Park Rapids caller thinks someone stole a vehicle and brought it back; A Park Rapids caller reports she has asked the neighbors to keep their dog on a leash, now the neighbor's dog is "stuck" to her dog that is tied in the yard, dispatch suggested she throw cold water on the dogs.

And people think small towns are boring.

"PAINSTAKING WEEKS TO EXCRETE A SINGLE SENTENCE"

2010-08-23T14:07:00.005-04:00

David Mitchell on his process:

Mitchell: When you’re 27, you’re more apt to be like: “Oh God, I need to do this two-thousand-page scene before I go to bed.” “OK, well. Let’s do it, then.” And you do it.
Rumpus: And you think it’s brilliant and you don’t want to change a word.
Mitchell: Precisely. Now it can take painstaking weeks—God knows—to excrete a single sentence. It can be like having a hemorrhage, but one hopes the quality is superior the greater the excretion.

It's a great interview. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet isn't yet seizing me the way Cloud Atlas did, but I'm into it, so far.

WRITING ABOUT READING WHILE I SHOULD BE WRITING

2010-08-21T13:03:00.003-04:00

The great writer and guitarist Sara Jaffe has a blog and you should read it. Her posts are seldom but deep. My hope is that if her statcounter blows up she will post more. Post more, SJ! (There are strangely a lot of Sara(h) Jaffes out there who make music, but this is the one who used to be in Erase Errata and who coedited The Art of Touring.)

Incidentally her profile picture is a painting of Denton Welch, whom you should also read if you can find his stuff. English writer and painter of the 1930s and '40s who died too young. I love his short stories. Darkly funny and discomfiting, they emanate queerness in that way that repression, so terrible for the soul, can be channeled so deliciously in art.

Here's what William S. Burroughs had to say about him, via a charmingly '90s-style Denton Welch fansite:

He's only got one character and it's always him. Well, there are other characters, what it all pivots
around is an eternally 15-year-old boy. His writing was all done after his accident. He had this accident when he was riding his bicycle and some woman ran into him from behind. That happened when he was 20 and he was an invalid the rest of his life and died at the age of 33 from complications. ... Such a marvelous writer, the way he can make anything into something. Writers who complain that they don't have anything to write about should read Denton Welch and see what he can do with practically nothing.

While I'm at it, writing about reading before I get back to my writing, I have adopted (via CLMP) two literary journals as texts for my Poetry/Prose Workshop this semester, Tin House and A Public Space. I have no idea what we'll be getting, but I love both these magazines, I love that I got to write in the syllabus "Whatever poems turn up in A Public Space" or "Stories TBA from Tin House", and I love the break from ye olde anthologized pieces. (Which are amply represented as well.) The element of surprise and the element of Now-ness. Good for all of us.

FOREVER ANALOG

2010-08-03T14:56:00.001-04:00

I have never liked video games much. I find them immensely stressful: you chase some impossible quarry, and/or flee from something that wants to kill you, and always you die trying. Over and over you die. What a nightmare. Even Pac Man overwhelms me.

But I love old-school arcades, the way I love rinky-dink carnivals--the lights and sounds and dimness, the unlikely euphony of all those machines going at once, the mismatched machines and people--and I really love pinball. I love the friendly analog thunks and pings and dings that soundtrack it, I love pulling back the spring on the thing that shoots the ball out of the chute, I love that nothing is pursuing you, I love that you can score millions and millions of points. Pinball wants you to succeed.

So a couple days when we stepped into the Pinball Gallery in Lyons, Colorado on a rainy drive out of Estes Park, I discovered my personal heaven: an ALL-PINBALL ARCADE. The place holds someone's personal collection of machines from the 1950s to the present, ranging from 25¢ to 75¢ to play, all expertly maintained.

A prematurely lost ball cruelly doused my blazing run of luck with the Simpsons game.

No matter how newfangled and barky and gimmicky a pinball machine gets, it always comes down to a real ball and real flippers. Forever analog at heart. I'd move to Lyons to be near this.

SPACE BASKET

2010-07-11T15:55:00.001-04:00

How did you get here, Googlers of the world? Some recent search phrases that have (mis)led lost souls to ye olde Practice Space:

hockey player names that sound like food

are beagles supposed to eat Cool Whip

1950s housewife fetish

is my head an antenna

leaving a message listening practice (this one was from Berlin)

what could i get at walmart to practice deep throat

vibrating sounds gay

space basket

homoerotic wrestling stories

devotionals for deer hunters

pedal bumping girls

8 yr old using buoyancy in a sentence

stomach small girls video flet vacuum

are capricorn girls admirable

THERE WE ALL DWELL

2010-07-08T23:58:00.001-04:00

Quote of the day comes from an interview with David Shields in the Tin House Summer Reading issue (which really lives up to its promise, by the way--I've been reading it on the porch in the afternoon with cold drinks, and at night in bed with the fans breezing, engrossed):

"The great book...takes us down into the deepest levels of human insecurity, and there we find that we all dwell."

An elderly Steinway baby grand filled a third of the little cabin I was holed up in at MacDowell. When I was feeling stuck I sat down and hammered out some elementary chords to sing this lonesome song, which is the song for chapter seven, which takes place in Bemidji.

The Replacements, "Here Comes A Regular" (alternate version)

LIZ PHAIR GOES ALL JOAQUIN PHOENIX

2010-07-06T11:38:00.000-04:00

Has she lost her mind?

HERITAGE VS HISTORY

2010-07-04T12:00:00.063-04:00

I'm reading a fascinating new book called North Country: The Making of Minnesota by Mary Lethert Wingerd (just out from the University of Minnesota Press.) It's about (per the flap copy) "the complex origins of the state--origins that have often been ignored in favor of legend and a far more benign narrative of immigration, settlement, and cultural exchange." Specifically, it's about the dynamics between Native people and Europeans in the 200 years pre-statehood, up until the brutal U.S.-Dakota War in 1862, which she dubs Minnesota's Civil War.

Early on, Wingerd writes:

But heritage does not suffice as history. As scholar David Lowenthal points out, heritage is crafted to affirm what we wish to be true about ourselves, whereas history strives (albeit imperfectly) to discover the truth about the past. History, of course, is far more complex and problematic than heritage. History must come to terms with injustice and tragedy as well as achievement, asking hard questions that heritage, steeped in nostalgia, tends to obscure.

This is something I'm thinking about on the Fourth of July, an ambivalent holiday for me. Fireworks, pretty. Barbecued veggie burgers, fine. Day off, delightful. But the explosions send poor Emmett under the table trembling, and, when I'm inside soothing him and unable to see them, the sounds make me think of what it would be like to live in a place where explosions do go off outside your door, and how terrifying that would be. (Much sympathy to the PTSD veterans.) After all, they are mimicking war. And, to take it back to Wingerd's words, the Fourth is such a holiday of heritage, not history: a day when people celebrate what we wish to be true about America, what we want to believe about the nation and its origins. There's a wilfull innocence to the American independence narrative, almost teenaged in its naive the-students-take-over-the-school triumph (but now look who's the principal), and this must be the genesis of American love affair with the idea of the rebel. James Dean, teen movies, the cowboy, the so-called Minutemen at the border (a shame their fame usurps these ones), the rock-star figure, the Tea Party, figures that are almost exclusively white and male--they're all born from this.

And I too love the rebel figure, albeit in other forms than above. I just wish the collective American imagination could encompass all the people who protested and fought for freedom and the liberty to live their lives within these borders we made up, who were imprisoned, enslaved, cheated, banished to reservations, and killed for doing so. In America.

On a pettier tack, the other thing that gets me on the Fourth of July is that I can't stand the American flag, on a purely aesthetic level. For me: irredeemable. It makes me think of tacky straw hats and marching-band music. As a kid I used to look at the FLAG entry in our old World Book Encyclopedia and gaze with envy upon the bold, interesting flags of places like Aruba, Bhutan, South Korea, Swaziland. (The CIA factbook has them all on one page--almost all the Caribbean nations have really cool ones.)

Emmett Johnson: scared of fireworks.

IF YOU WANT TO TAKE A CHANCE I'LL LEAD YOU AWAY

2010-06-15T17:45:00.001-04:00

The song "Beautiful Things" by Quasi brings me pure pleasure. I listen to it every day. In Oberlin, I would listen to it on headphones while I walked the dogs down leafy streets in the bright morning, through neighborhoods both ramshackle and grand. Here in the woods I wake up with the light and it is the first thing I want to put on. I bike down the sunny dirt road from the library to my studio and it goes through my head the whole time as I wind around potholes and the breeze lifts my hair, which is maybe the best way I can describe what this song feels like.

It's the rare song that is truly genuinely happy without sounding cartoonish or twee or saccharine. It's a cover of song by the 3-D's, and from Score!: 20 Years of Merge Records: THE COVERS--which came out last summer, technically, but I'm declaring it my anthem for summer 2010.

Quasi, "Beautiful Things"

ANALOG TIME

2010-06-14T09:30:00.018-04:00

I had this thing last night where I felt a little mopey and left the party at 9:30 to come back and ostensibly work. People were playing Scrabble and pool and ping-pong and lounging around the big old leather couches drinking wine, but I felt conversed-out and unsure. Maybe I said I was going to work just to justify going home.

So I sat down at my desk and turned on the lamp and listlessly added and subtracted a sentence here and there, just to have done at least something before I went to bed to read. I was transcribing things from my notebook, and it felt like transcription. And stitching these pieces in there felt like labor: requisite transition, requisite image, requisite zoom-out shot of analytical prose.

I sighed and glanced at the clock. 10:22? I'd done more than I thought. That gave me a little puff of energy so I thought I'd just go ahead and do one more thing. The next time I remembered to check, it was 11:30 and I had three new pages.

Time is the thing I had been wrangling all day--well, in fact, the main thing I keep having to wrangle with, writing long-form for the first time. What is a novel but a massive undertaking in time measurement and management? And I didn't expect to find it at that hour, but my favorite thing in writing is exactly that feeling of losing time altogether. It's maybe one of the only actual unequivocably pleasurable parts of writing, being so present in the work that the world falls away.

Whereas when that happens on the internet, it's total despair. I tell you, life without the internet--here in my remote outpost, I only use it once or twice a day, at the library--is life with a totally different experience of time. The day seems so much longer, in the best way. If you're in a chronically wifi-ed environment, without the luxury of premillennial levels of disconnection, download MacFreedom and you'll see what I mean.

You know what else moves shockingly fast? A fox.

The Magnetic Fields, "When the Open Road is Closing In"

UNRULY HERD

2010-06-13T14:31:00.000-04:00

I wrote for six and a half hours yesterday. On ONE scene in chapter six. I wrote so hard I got mad. I got up from my desk at 5:15 to take a shower and spun around and walked right out of the bathroom and sat back down, I could not do anything until the damn scene was concluded.

By the time I collapsed into my seat at dinner I felt like a border collie that had been herding sheep all day. Exhausted from corralling all these wayward bleating misshapen things, ready to flop onto the floor panting and lie there for hours, also satisfied that I had at last fully done the work I feel wired to do.

A quote Wallace Stegner kept me going: Hard writing makes easy reading.
God let's hope.

By the end of the day, put me in a bucket, I'm done.

But that's still hours away. Half the chapter-six sheep are still out wandering, and the fence keeps moving. Back to work.

New Bad Things, "Josh Has A Crush on a Femme from Reed"

CHAPTER THREE

2010-06-10T15:50:00.008-04:00

...got seriously appended with some essential back story yesterday. Turns out it wasn't so finished after all.

Jónsi, "Hengilas"

SOUNDTRACKING

2010-06-08T17:12:00.024-04:00

I'm holed up in the woods writing and I won't say much more about that because a) I have to get back to it and b) you shouldn't talk too much about what you're writing or you won't want to write it. When people ask me what this novel is about, I have figured out the easiest thing to say is "people making bad decisions for good reasons," or "family."

Generally I write exclusively to the epic sweeps and dulcet murmuring of Sigur Ros, though Amiina and Múm work for me too--the magic combo of Icelandic + verbally minimal/incomprehensible leads me right to that clearing in my tangled brain, ever since that very first listen of Ágætis Byrjun.

But making soundtracks and theme songs for characters and stories is irresistible. A tool of both procrastination and characterization, equally fundamental parts of the process.

Today I restructured chapter two and here is its song.

Judee Sill, "The Kiss"

ONE-SENTENCE MUSIC REVIEWS WHILE DRIVING TO CLEVELAND TODAY

2010-06-04T22:28:00.001-04:00

The New Pornographers, Challengers
ME: They are the indie rock Muppets.

Vampire Weekend, Contra
COMPANION, with slight frown: This is a little bit too Lion King for me.

SNOOZE

2010-05-31T22:31:00.005-04:00

May was really tiring. But in a good way.

Back on it shortly.

LOGGERNAUT NOW AND THEN

2010-04-28T10:10:00.001-04:00

I'll be in Portland this weekend to read at the Loggernaut 5th Anniversary party. I read at the very first Loggernaut back in April 2004 with Charles D'Ambrosio and Alicia Cohen--it was in the back room overlooking the patio of the restaurant Gravy on Mississippi Avenue, and by the time Charlie read it had gotten so dark in there that he had to perch a votive candle next to his manuscript, and we all listened raptly in the dark, his face lit by the tiny flame. I had read first, the baby shower scene from my long story "Your Heart Is A Piece of Tape." (Are baby showers not the weirdest feminine ritual ever? Everyone turns into babies, cooing and clapping. Maybe tied with bridal showers. Any shower that doesn't involve a direct spray of hot water is trouble.)

The series really took off--these readings were always my favorites to attend in Portland. They take place every other month, with three readers who read for an attention-span-friendly 15 minutes each, with a theme. For this one the theme is "Now & Then" and I'm going to read some nonfiction about kitchen haircuts, inappropriate relationships (not involving me), and small town weirdness, flipping back and forth between half my life ago and now. I'm still writing it. Come if you want to hear how it turns out.

It's at Urban Grind on NE 33rd and Oregon Street, this Saturday, May 1, at 7:30 pm. Also reading: Arthur Bradford, who wrote Dogwalker and directed the series How's Your News?, the eminent Barry Sanders who blew my mind when he read about ghosts and Sarah Bernhard for Loggernaut a few years ago, and poets Rodney Koeneke and Mary Szybist. Plus, they say, a super-secret special musical guest. Plus cake!

THIS IS OUR YOUTH

2010-04-26T09:05:00.004-04:00

This bleakly hilarious report from the future arrived at Publisher's Weekly, courtsey of one Marjorie Butternook, MLIS, also known as Gary Shteyngart (who, incidentally, is one of the funniest readers I've seen.) Book Expo America 2004: Reading Lives!

She told [eight-year-old] Download he had to keep his Brain Nozzle on standby. “Read a little,” she said, “and then every once in a while try closing your eyes and entering the mind of the author.”
“What's an author?” Download asked.
“It's someone who's not you who wrote the book.”
“But I'm special,” Download said.
“I know you are,” Ruthie said.

Roger Conover, editor of MIT Press, told an anxious Q'er at his talk here last spring that people in publishing love to work themselves up about the apocalypse, that their own Imminent Doom has always been a favored conversation topic. Maybe it is essential in all the arts—we have to / can't help but believe the art is dying, irresistibly (and maybe grandiosely) drawn to the anxiety of immortality. Which is any art-maker's secret impossible hope.

DON'T YOU KNOW I BREATHE IN FIRE

2010-04-06T08:09:00.005-04:00

The great thing about seeing bands at the tiny 'Sco is that you couldn't be more than a hundred feet from the stage if you tried. Also, subsidized by the institution, shows are nineties prices. And also, the students sometimes really cut loose and shake it, a refreshing switch from the rigor mortis of Portland audiences, where nodding is a dance move. The crappy things about seeing bands at the 'Sco: the mounting smell of poor hygiene cooked to the surface, plus students yammering at high volume through the whole thing, only pausing to raise the plastic beer cups in their red-stamped fists and holler whoo before turning their attention back to the more pressing matter of Where Is Harper I Thought She Was Coming With James. (Actual conversation overheard at length.) Unless you squeeze into the enthusiastic first few rows (caveat: see hygiene), you're stuck with the live Banality Remix version of the song and trying to suppress some intense Mad Librarian impulses.

What one really needs in this situation is something so loud no one can holler over it, something that immobilizes people in their tracks and drives away the tourists. Thank you, Talk Normal.

When Talk Normal kicked in to their thing, the first thing I scrawled in the dark on the back of a student's manuscript (it was all I had on hand) was SCARY. I meant that in a good way. This was super-loud, heavy, distorted, reverbed, squalling noise. You wouldn't guess it, looking at them. Talk Normal are two smallish youngish women. The guitarist has a Thurston-like vibe of effortless slouch and overgrown bangs. The drummer hits heavy on the tom and bass. Sometimes she flips her drumsticks around and hits with the blunt end and it sounds huge and stern, ferocious and focused on her small kit. Sometimes she rests a guitar on the drumkit and does cacophanous things to it while she pounds and sings.

I rarely listen to noise at home. I only like to hear it live, or through headphones while I'm walking. I think it's music you either listen to upright or flat on your back. It is not sedentary. It has to be all or nothing. I like how noise makes me feel what it feels and at the same time sounds like how I feel. Does that make sense? It's more about feeling than listening, for me. The same way that poetry can feel truer to raw thought—fragmentary, splintered, spliced—noise is like deep feeling, disordered and surging.

All of which is to say Talk Normal kind of made my night.

I've had Tune-Yards' Bird-Brains for a while and I like it a lot, despite my knee-jerk loathing of toggle-case, which reeks of whimsy. (I refuse to reproduce it here.) But seeing her live, I flipped to love. The lo-fi production on the record (all done with a digital voice recorder) makes the music sound odd, clipped and flattened, and that works in a way, but live the songs become big and radiant and and warm. Not discomfiting little curiosities but exuberant feel-good dance songs, expanding to fill all the space around around her ukulele, elemental drum and vocal loops (the girl sure knows her T1).

During the last song the girl next to me started swinging her very long hair and after a few mane-lashings I escaped and watched from the doorway. I didn't stick around for Xiu Xiu--I don't care enough, and I have a one-and-a-half band attention span, and Talk Normal and Tune-Yards got it all. Gladly.

RISE UP

2010-03-22T09:51:00.001-04:00

I've been on a serious baking kick since the new year. "Baking" has unfortunate and unfair connotations of Betty Crocker and checkered aprons, but a) my apron is a hot black-and-white abstract print with a red and pink trim, and b) not a brownie nor mix has crossed my spatula. What I am obsessed with is whole-grain breads.

The first whole-wheat loaves I baked were when I was eighteen and stepped into it as a co-op job. This particular eating collective eschewed anything refined (no sugar, no white flour) (yet there was someone who believed that cinnamon had a rightful and prominent place in spaghetti sauce, and made it that way regularly), so I dutifully churned out big whole wheat logs with the Hobart, sweetened with soy milk and brown rice syrup. They came out chewy and dense, and cooled into blunt instruments.

This is not the case with today's bread. This hardcore Peter Reinhart book (a gift from my clever enabler/beneficiary) tipped me over the edge, and now I'm all, autolyse, biga, soaker, enzyme strands, and does it pass the windowpane test? The making of a single loaf spans days. I have made 100% whole-wheat, endless combinations of multigrains, naan, paratha (plain and aloo-stuffed), wheat thins both herbed and plain, focaccia, and scores--literally--of pizza crusts.

(On the right there I'm brushing garlic-chili oil over a brand-new naan; below, stuffing paratha with potatoes before rolling it flat again and cooking it on a griddle.)

But the winning loaf, the most exciting yet, was the SPROUTED WHEAT LOAF I made this week, which took longer than anything yet, and involved
1) soaking wheat berries for 24 hours
2) rinsing them and leaving them for another half-day until
3) they started to sprout tiny white tails and then
4) grinding them to a pulp, which tasted amazing, the texture of steel-cut oatmeal but cool and sweet and with a fresh faintly grassy flavor,
5) and finally baking that into a bread, which came out like this

and tastes beautiful.

I'm seriously one step away from getting a grain mill to grind my own flour. Then all I will have to do is start up a little wheat patch in the yard, and it's Willa Cather time.

THE RESULTS ARE IN

2010-02-28T18:32:00.000-05:00

I went to the Park Rapids Enterprise homepage to renew my subscription, suffering severe Incident Report deprivation, and found that not only has the Akeley (pop. 412) bank been robbed, but there is an important poll for readers to answer.

Guess which one is winning? I will draw back the curtain in the comments.

I ____ NEW YORK

2010-02-25T20:51:00.003-05:00

These were savvily placed side-by-side at McNally Jackson bookstore in New York. I went to New York for a week in January to meet up with my friend Mona. (She flew from Cairo, I flew from Ohio. New York seemed at least metaphorically equidistant.)

In the first few hours before Mona arrived, I browsed McNally Jackson for a while and then went to find a seat to write at Housing Works Used Bookstore Cafe. I wondered, How did I ever live here? Did I love it? I know I did love it. I mean, there's a lot to love about it. But everyone in McNally Jackson's cafe looked roughly the same, and everyone in Housing Works looked roughly the same. Different ethnicities, sure, but the same scuffed polish, bookish stylishness, turn-of-the-thirties, knowledgable and aspiring. Basically they all looked like they had MFAs, were getting their MFAs, or aspired to an MFA. I'm not exempting my own MFA'ed ass here. But it was totally disconcerting to be among such a blatant Demographic, and it gave me not the feeling but the reminder of the feeling of panic and self-doubt and competitive anguish I used to feel when I lived in New York and tried to comprehend My Future As A Writer.

I think it's good to have a handful or two of writers in your everyday life but too many might mess you up. This is one reason why the Stegner program was way easier on the soul than Iowa. This is also why I like to keep company with people who make other things. Scholarly research, videos, music, art, advertisements, movies, coffee, drinks, photographs, baskets, hand-hewn cross-country skis*, whatever. I feel a lot calmer now than I did back when I lived in New York and was supposed to be in the Center of It All. It didn't stimulate me, it distracted and paralyzed me. I have only written one story ever that took place in New York, about my very first job at the very strange magazine Opera News, and it's an oddly-structured mess. I can't even revise that story because every time I go back into it I come out feeling disconsolate and unmoored all over again.

But anyway, then Mona showed up and the rest of the trip was more like this.

And this.

I have known Mona since 1996. She was one of my best friends in Oslo. I used to wonder, Who are the people I will know my whole life? Sometimes I am surprised at the ones who fell off, or my younger self would have been, but more and more I love how the answers become clear.

*I'm not just making this up. My polymath woodsman brother Nate made me a pair of cross-country skis by hand for Xmas. It blows my mind too.

A FEW LANGUAGE PET PEEVES

2010-02-16T09:46:00.000-05:00

1. When people call coffee "java."
(Endemic to quippy newspaper and magazine articles where the writer apparently believes it's a faux pas to use the word coffee twice, and to the names of bad coffee shops. No coffee shop with "java" in the title is any good.) Runner-up: "joe." Who in real life calls it "joe," honestly?

2. The term "gal pal."
(Again, common to bad magazine writing.)

3. The word "gal" generally.

HOWARD + JD + FOREVER

2010-01-29T12:32:00.000-05:00

My friend and Portland neighbor Nicole Georges has posted this drawing she did for a magazine a couple of years ago.

And you kind of can't beat the The Onion's obituary for J.D. Salinger.

CORNISH, NH—In this big dramatic production that didn't do anyone any good (and was pretty embarrassing, really, if you think about it), thousands upon thousands of phonies across the country mourned the death of author J.D. Salinger, who was 91 years old for crying out loud. "He had a real impact on the literary world and on millions of readers," said hot-shot English professor David Clarke, who is just like the rest of them, and even works at one of those crumby schools that rich people send their kids to so they don't have to look at them for four years. "There will never be another voice like his." Which is exactly the lousy kind of goddamn thing that people say, because really it could mean lots of things, or nothing at all even, and it's just a perfect example of why you should never tell anybody anything.

On the one hand, it's terrible to lose two greats on the same day. On the other hand, as long as you've got to leave this life, why not go hand-in-hand, temporally speaking, with another luminary? I'm fascinated with these accidental pairings: Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett. Zinn and Salinger. Who else?

HELLO AVERY 5

2010-01-20T14:57:00.001-05:00

The brand-new issue of Avery Anthology arrived yesterday with one of my stories in it. One of the great things about Avery is that it is gorgeously designed, with elegant font choices and illustrations for every story (why do so many literary journals look like they were laid out in Word, with a discount abstract postcard for cover art?) Another great thing is that it's only ten dollars. Another great thing is that I really love the fiction they publish. So I'm stoked to be included. My story is called "Devices." Here's the first paragraph:

Once there were an artist and an inventor.
The artist and the inventor live together in the first floor of a building that used to be a saloon in the 1800s and now has been painted dark blue with purple and red trim so it looks like a saloon in a traveling carnival. They are right up next to the sidewalk, and the inventor is always drawing the curtains shut and the artist is always opening them. The artist needs light. The inventor needs privacy. In other words, they are deeply in love. But both of them are a little bit more in love with the artist.

I originally wrote it to be read out loud, so on the page it is a brisk read. If you want more, here's where you can get this Avery 5, which also contains Steve Almond* and Claire Hero, in whose company I have not been since 1989, when we were in eighth grade together in Northfield, MN. True! I have no idea if she remembers me, but her name is caught forever for no reason in my memory, which has a remarkable retention of useless pre-millennial trivia and arcana and alarmingly vast gaps ever after. (I want to blame the brain-destroying recalled aerosol grout sealer I bought from Home Depot when I tiled my bathroom floor. But it's really probably the internet.)

(*Here is Steve Almond deconstructing Toto's "Africa" at the Tin House tenth-anniversary reading in Portland last summer. I was there and it slew me.)

BLUETS

2010-01-19T22:19:00.004-05:00

This evening I read Maggie Nelson's book Bluets by the fire, all the way through. It's a beautiful little book, only 95 pages, lyric nonfiction, an exploration of the color blue, sight and perception, memory, and heartbreak. I don't know if these excerpts will convey how lovely the whole of it is, but flipping back through, here are a couple of parts I re-read even the first time:

36. Goethe describes blue as a lively color, but one devoid of gladness. "It may be said to disturb rather than enliven." Is to be in love with blue, then, to be in love with a disturbance? Or is the love itself the disturbance? And what kind of madness is it anyway, to be in love with something constitutionally incapable of loving you back?

37. Are you sure--one would like to ask--that it cannot love you back?

38. For no one really knows what color is, where it is, even whether it is. (Can it die? Does it have a heart?) Think of a honeybee, for instance, flying into the folds of a poppy: it sees a gaping violet mouth, where we see an orange flower and assume that it's orange, that we're normal.

And later:

193. I will admit, however, upon considering the matter further, that writing does do something to one's memory--that at times it can have the effect of an album of childhood photographs, in which each image replaces the memory it aimed to preserve. Perhaps this is why I am avoiding writing about too many specific blue things--I don't want to displace my memories of them, nor embalm them, nor exalt them. In fact, I think I would like it best if my writing could empty me further of them, so that I might become a better vessel for new blue things.

... 195. Does an album of written thoughts perform a similar displacement, or replacement, of the "original" thoughts themselves? (Please don't start protesting here that there are no thoughts outside of language, which is like telling someone that her colored dreams are, in fact, colorless.)...

I looked down to find that I was dressed all in blue--sweater, jeans, scarf, even socks. My favorite blue is the blue of winter light, specifically in the evening, specifically with snow, and the blue I've seen in Norway, both in the winter when the sun barely rises and in the summer when it hardly sets. My least favorite blue is the wedgewood-ish blue of the kitchen in a Victorian shotgun apartment I once lived in; all the way back, it was the saddest room in the house. Never paint a kitchen blue. (This one came that way.)

WANTON PLEASURE

2010-01-07T16:45:00.004-05:00

My New Year's Eve indulgence. I have only ever seen this treat at Minneapolis restaurants, but they all seem to have it. The Vietnamese places, the Taiwanese places, the Chinese places: they've all got the cream-cheese wontons on the appetizer menu. That is right: deep-fried and stuffed with nothing but cream cheese. This may be the Minnesota equivalent of fusion cuisine.

Served with a glossy red dipping sauce that seems to be part ketchup, part sweet-n-sour, part cherry Kool-Aid. My love for them is equal only to my subsequent regret.

FORWARD HO

2009-12-31T08:08:00.008-05:00

Everyone is reflecting on the decade and I guess I should too--holy cow, what a boom-and-bust decade, for me and everyone else, in every sense. (Happy to report I'm currently in boom mode, and not taking it for granted for a second.) On January 1, 2000 I was standing around a giant bonfire at Amy and Aaron's house in the woods, where they have solar panels and an outhouse, hiding only half-jokingly from Y2K. Then I flew back to New York City, where I lived. I lived there ten years ago! In my $750 one-bedroom apartment on a cozy little mafia corner in the Gowanus trough of Brooklyn. It had an eat-in kitchen and a bathroom with a tub and a hard bristly stick-on carpet and a living room and a large bedroom that faced Third Avenue. Tiny little baby roaches would race for the drain every time I came home and turned on the light. Foot Foot would sometimes catch the bigger ones and try to play with them. It was my first apartment all my own. I loved it. I was the research editor at Out and the merch person for the Magnetic Fields and had very short bangs and had not yet mailed in my application to Iowa.

But I am too impatient to think back about the last ten years because it wasn't until a few days ago that I suddenly actually realized it was the end of a decade (again? already?) and the thought overwhelms me. What I really want to think about right now are two forthcoming albums I am really excited about:

1. The Magnetic Fields' Realism arrives in January. I anticipate a perfect January album. (Every year I end up listening to some album on constant repeat in January; always a month of writing, solitude, solace. Then that album becomes forever a January album, evoking snow and woodsmoke, long drives, long nights, lamplight. Distortion shared it with Trees Outside the Academy in '08. Last year was the Blood Bank EP. ) This one: in the style of orchestrated '60s Brit-folk. "I can't stand the sound of an acoustic guitar for more than three minutes at a time," says Stephin. Well, bring it.

2. Quasi's new one comes in February on Kill Rock Stars. I've heard these songs live a few times now and they are the kind of songs that sound like classics on the first listen. A gentleman called Brewcaster put up several videos from their excellent June show at Disjecta in Portland. Check out "Little White Horse" and "Never Coming Back Again" and "Bye Bye Blackbird." Agh! I love them! To the point of teenaged hand-waving incoherence.

For the neoennial occasion: "Merry X-mas" by Quasi (from the unjustly overlooked When the Going Gets Dark.) Oh how do you do?

INCIDENT REPORT #12

2009-12-30T16:02:00.007-05:00

I'm home in Park Rapids, day nine of ten, perched at the Bella Caffé (sic). When I grew up here (insert creaky voice and waving of cane) we didn't have a coffee shop. How different things would have been. Now there are two: Bella, which serves fair-trade coffee and has a lovely sun room full of absurdly robust plants (e.g. a five-foot tall geranium) contributed and tended by my friends' dad in exchange for free coffee, and Jackpine Java, which has a fireplace and where all the tables and chairs are hewn from pine logs, and where half the space used to be a taxidermy joint but now features Tanning & Scrapbooking. By taxidermy joint I mean it was a veritable frat party of stuffed northwoods creatures, lounging and awkwardly socializing around more hewn-pine furniture for sale, including two buck heads mounted for corner display, facing each other with their antlers locked, and a fake pond scene with an improbable congregation of stiff grouse, raccoons, rabbits, a fox, and an upright black bear with a surprised look on his face, holding a bird feeder between his paws.

You can kind of see the sign here behind the snowplow pickup.

I am here to grade portfolios, but first I had to pick up the new Park Rapids Enterprise and turn to the Incidents report. Here is today's selection.

Mailbox and Christmas light damage was reported in Helga Township;

A couch was left on railroad tracks in Farden Township;

A Park Rapids store requested an officer for a party who's asleep/passed out in the store;

A Park Rapids caller reported he left his vehicle to be worked on two years ago and it has not been returned, "may be a problem to get back";

A 911 Park Rapids caller reports a male "assaulted her old man, has a wrench";

Suspicious activity was reported on Central Avenue, "possibly running a business out of his home, several cars late at night at this residence";

Exhibition driving was reported in Park Rapids;

Harassing text messages were reported in Park Rapids;

A Nevis vehicle was rummaged during the night;

A female reported going to a male's house in Helga Township to retrieve property and he answered the door with a baseball bat;

Two children were reported locked in a vehicle in Straight River Township;

Mail was opened and moved to another mailbox in Akeley Township;

A Lake George Township caller reported his ex calling three times, he has an order for protection;

A four-wheeler was reported towing four kids on a toboggan on city streets in Hubbard Township;

A male was reported rolling around and yelling in Park Rapids;

A Hart Lake Township caller reported two young guys with slurred speech stopping by her house, looks like they've been four-wheeling their truck in ditches and she thinks they are stuck, reporting party called to say they are now running over fence posts;

A Farden Township caller reported hearing a gunshot, back window has a hole in it;

A party was refusing to leave in Henrietta Township;

A person was reported kneeling by the side of the road in Nevis Township;

St. Joseph's reported a man was assaulted with a willow stick;

A deer was reported caught in a fence on CSAH 36, extricated but now it appears unable to move;

Four horses were reported out at a Helga Township intersection;

A Park Rapids store requested an officer as they are terminating an employee for theft but the employee is claiming he was being threatened, which is why he didn't ring up the items;

A caller reported putting her truck in the ditch on the east side of Highway 71, she thinks she can drive it out, requesting officer for traffic control.

Home sweet home.

BRING IT

2009-12-22T18:34:00.000-05:00

I'm back in the Minnesota northwoods and my parents' house is full of activity. Bread baking, soup on the stove, wine and aquavit poured, people sprawled in a post-cross-country-ski post-sauna comfort-slump. Family friend Brita Sailer, standing in our kitchen, just now: "Has anybody heard about the storm? Are we gonna get any, or is it going to just go south of here?"

My mom: "I heard that we are going to get six inches."

Brita: "Well, I guess that's better than nothing!" [Face lights up, rubs hands together.]

FRANK, FUNNY, AND SO ON

2009-12-15T21:51:00.004-05:00

The semester is drawing to a close and with it comes things like having your students over for dinner, which I did for my nonfiction worskhop, as I always do for my upper-level workshop. These twelve were particularly fabulous—adventurous, candid, going to some pretty real and raw places without sentimentality or self-mythologizing, but instead tough and clear-eyed writing. And, best of all: hilarious.

My friend here pointed out that I use the word "funny" as my default appreciative term. She asked me why that is. I had to think about it for a second, but this was my answer: It's not that I'm a sucker for the easy laugh, or need the instant gratification of humor. I think wit--sharp wit--in writing is a sign of intelligence and depth. I especially like wit when it's the searing agent for the rawer redder stuff that is anger and sadness. It spikes everything. It makes the sad stuff sadder and the dark stuff darker. It gives it complexity. Not everyone can be funny, I know, but all my favorite writers are deeply sad and deeply funny.

So. I assigned David Foster Wallace's A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again to my nonfiction workshop this semester, and the final thing I had them read was the title essay. It's 97 pages long, as engrossing as a novel and as funny in its obsessive detail as anything I've ever read; this is my third go of it, I think, maybe fourth.

The first time I read it, when it came out in 1997, I dreamed about David Foster Wallace for a week. I had one dream that he was hanging out with me in my room in Brooklyn and started trying to climb the blinds. I had another dream I was making him pancakes on the kitchen counter with an iron. That sort of thing.

The second time I read it was in 2001, in my second year at Iowa, while I was taking Frank Conroy's workshop. Again I dreamed about it/DFW all week. But what struck me anew this time was the section in which Wallace quotes Conroy, who shilled for Celebrity Cruises by writing a quasi-literary rave about his experience on board ("I prostituted myself," he told DFW). This section (it's section 8) deconstructs Conroy's essay for a full six pages along the lines of

Conroy's essay is graceful and lapidary and attractive and assuasive. I submit that it is also completely sinister and despair-producing and bad.

Extensive and detailed examples follow. Pages of them. Yet Wallace also says that Conroy was "frank and forthcoming and in general just totally decent-seeming about the whole thing" in conversation, and that Stop-Time "is arguably the best literary memoir of the twentieth century and one of the books that made poor old yours truly want to try to be a writer."

So, at the end of the semester, Frank invited our workshop over to his house for dinner. Maggie, his wife, was there, sparkly-eyed and lean and cool, and his teenaged son ducked in and out, and their big yellow lab Gracie whose name I heard as "Crazy" obligingly traveled among our petting hands. For dinner they served a vegetable stir-fry on noodles, covered in a delectable sauce whose secret Frank revealed with relish: "Add half a cup of tahini near the end!" We sat around a big beautiful old table, and I remember the light was warm and low and comforting, and I remember that we--or at least I--well, I'm pretty sure all of us--got quite drunk, not least of all Frank, and I had just read the essay that week, and at some point in dinner I could not resist any longer and I asked him about what he thought of the David Foster Wallace essay.

Frank was very magnanimous about it. Others at the table had read the essay too, of course, and of course we wanted to know what he thought of David Foster Wallace as a whole. After all, he'd spent the whole semester drilling MEANING! SENSE! CLARITY! into our heads, ruthlessly and publicly tearing apart our sentences, proclaiming "You must write prose which cannot be bent!" and generally delivering edicts with verbal exclamation points (one of which was that you only get seven exclamation points to use in your lifetime, per Henry James.) And here is DFW, unwieldy and knotty and verbose and uncontainable.

But Frank liked him. He said he was wonderful, and "wildly inventive," and hearing his praise was a surprise and also a relief. And it was, peculiarly, a thrill to hear this writer speak of this other writer in this firsthand way: my actual teacher, addressing my actual very favorite writer at the time (I was a real headbanger for DFW in those still-pretty- sparse-internet days, tracking down every little piece that came out in every literary journal, etc., dying for the next book.) I don't know why it mattered. But it did, for some reason, to me.

Now Frank is gone. David Foster Wallace is gone. I miss them both. I miss knowing they are in the world. But reading "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" I hear Wallace's voice so distinctly and remember how hungry I was for it in my twenties, how much I could love a writer, a voice, a book. And as December kicks in strong and the year and semester wind down, and now I am the one opening the door to my students bundled in scarves and hats, I also remember the rest of that evening at Frank's, when we all retired to the living room, and inspected his little Grammy up on the shelf (for writing liner notes for something; it was small and old and looked much more modest than you'd expect), and Paul played a song on the guitar that was about Steve Marlowe, and then Maggie brought out baskets of musical instruments and we embarked upon the funniest sort of dozen-person impromptu jam session. My oddest and by far favorite moment was when Frank handed me the melodica and said, "You blow! I'll play!" And so I put that long ribbed plastic tube in my mouth and blew, and Frank played the little keys, eyes wide and wild behind his wire-rimmed glasses; I blew and blew and kept blowing even though it made me dizzy, even though it was ridiculous and a little embarrassing and I wanted to laugh, I had to keep the air going, I had to keep it going for Frank.

YOU WANDER AROUND IN YOUR OWN LITTLE CLOUD

2009-11-15T11:18:00.003-05:00

Happy birthday to Petula Clark, seventy years old today, who sings one of my favorite songs ever, "Don't Sleep in the Subway." Although it was a modest chart hit in 1967, I had never heard it until a few years ago when I was making a New York City mix for two friends who were about to move to Brooklyn. I looked for songs with "subway" in the title and it popped up. Listening to this song for the first time (the first several times, actually) was a delight-ambush: it starts off perfectly enough, with its brisk, cool, bustling first verse, but then it suddenly switches up into a grandiose orchestral cry, and then, whoa!--a steep dropoff into the minimalist chorus, like a reverse Pixies, all hush and pizzicato.

I played it again and again and again.

Nothing else in her oeuvre sounds quite like this or grabs me like this. But this is so perfect I couldn't ask for anything else.

Petula Clark, "Don't Sleep in the Subway"

PHONELESSNESS

2009-11-14T14:39:00.002-05:00

I have joined the esteemed club of Owners of Depocketed iPhones. Specifically, the ones that make their suicide leap from back pocket into the sparkling waters of the toilet bowl. The same ingenious design that makes the iPhone so sleekly delicious to the touch also makes it treacherously slippery.

Confession: I've had my iPhone for a year, and I am afraid that I am one of Those People: an iHole. I reflexively touch my pocket to make sure it is there; like a tamagotchi pet, it must be tended, stroked, checked upon every few minutes; I can mobile-upload a moment before it's even over, no, before I've even experienced it; I have been known to lie in bed post-contact-removal, myopia be damned, holding the thing three inches from my face as I scroll through my horoscope or tap my way through Word Wars. Sitting three feet from the door, I pull out the iPhone to check the weather. I know! Look, I'm coming clean here. Don't judge.

And now, following its watery plunge*, it has lain dark and still for two and a half days, tucked in a bag of rice.

Which supposedly sucks the moisture out. No sign of life yet, but it's also possible the battery has run out. And I dare not plug it in yet for fear of braising the innards.

After a few initial anxious hours, I have not only adjusted to phonelessness, I have embraced it.**
a. Whomever I'm with, I'm just with.
b. A radical concept: making a plan and then carrying out that plan as planned.
c. Punctuality is once again not merely a general area of time, but an actual point. (A punct?)
d. I am not fondling my back pocket all the time, which must have looked weird.***

Today my friend and I drove down sunny roads through corn fields to the bulk-foods country store, phone-free and listening to an old R.E.M. tape. In my 1996 Honda. And time was totally itself again.

Let's not worry for now about the nightmare I had last night wherein a girl was violently thrown off the roof of Harkness in front of me and had blood shooting out of her thigh and I, phoneless, could not call 911, only yell it.

* Clean waters, for the record.
** For now.
*** See also: revelation when I removed my nose ring after nine years of fidgeting with it.

HELLO SAILOR

2009-11-05T11:29:00.001-05:00

Here's a link to download the Liz Phair Girlysound demos. Although strangely, many of the songs that I have on my double-disc bootleg-traded version I got several years ago do not appear here, like the afore-posted "Sometimes a Dream (Is What Makes You A Slave)," unless it's retitled here, and some songs (like "Hello Sailor" and "Ant in Alaska" were not on my version.

Either way, totally worth it: go get 'em, tigers.

MISMEMORY

2009-11-02T09:18:00.008-05:00

Stephen Elliott came here on Friday to read from his new book The Adderall Diaries. I'd known him from the Stegner mafia, though not well--he's a person whom it's easy to know a lot about (for the obvious reasons) without really knowing. But his visit proved to me once again the pleasure of having houseguests. I know, I know! Houseguests: people often dread them. But I love them. I have this place that's sort of too big for me, and I have a guest room, and I'm incorrigibly social, and I live in a town of eight thousand people. One of the most interesting things in Oberlin is the people who come through, the visiting artists and writers and editors and critics who have nothing to do with our everyday student-o-centric college life and everything to do with the whole rest of the world. New faces are so exotic here. We get excited and spend hours drinking too much wine with them at the Feve or Black River or in our living rooms and talking their ears off. Stephen is a great houseguest. I recommend him to anyone. Emmett will back me up on this.

I dragged Stephen along to my radio show and we played songs and bantered a lot between them. Stephen talked about how publishing is the least fun part about writing a book--the writing is fun, and the time between finishing the book and its publication is really fun, and then when the book actually comes out, it can make a person miserable. We know people who have suffered this, lots of them, great writers with great books that do well. Then we played "Johnny Sunshine" by Liz Phair and we realized that Liz Phair went through something similar. Exile in Guyville was one of the greatest albums ever and she could never quite recover from it. So I followed up "Johnny Sunshine" with my favorite song from the unreleased Girlysound demos, "Sometimes A Dream (Is What Makes You a Slave)." Which I think says it all.

The way Stephen does his readings is he reads a little, then he takes questions, then he reads more, then takes more questions, then he reads more and takes one last round of questions. I think every writer should consider doing this. One thing he talked about is how people are weird about being written about. They may say, "Sure, you can write about me," but what they really mean is you can write about two things: 1) their good side, and 2) their bad side. What freaks them out, what they don't want to see in print, is a side of them that they didn't see in themselves--the things you see that don't fit with their own perception of who they are.

Another thing he talked about was memory. The only rule of writing memoir, he said, is that you can't intentionally lie. Memory is what you've got. And it's not always going to match up with someone else's. He cited as an example one of his friends from the group home recounting a story of the two of them that Stephen is pretty sure never happened. But what can you do? he said.

Here's a funny related moment. Stephen's been writing up notes from his book tour and publishing them on The Rumpus. Here's the one he wrote about Oberlin, including this moment in my dining room:

I started to talk about a girl that wasn’t really my girlfriend anymore, and a note I had sent to a few people, not many, asking them to link to my book on their Facebook pages and encourage their friends to purchase it. I imagined this girl purchasing twenty copies of The Adderall Diaries on Amazon.com and pulping them because money and books don’t mean enough to her. I was leaning against the entry to the living room where Chelsey sat at the table. I couldn’t quite bring myself to say it. Instead, I said, “You know when you try to do something with integrity, and you just fail?”

And it's so true: we both busted up laughing and he was wiping tears from his eyes with the napkin and I said I had just the very day before told my students to take note of when people use the second person to mean not you but one or I or not-just-me-right?. But in my memory what he said was, "You know how you try to do things with integrity, and sometimes you just fail?" Of course exact words are always elusive; neither of us could remember it exactly even when we were trying to recount it an hour later. What amazes me is that I swear, swear he was sitting across the table from me. Not leaning against the entry. And he wrote this less than 48 hours later. But which one of us is right?

Memory! Such a slippery critter.

Liz Phair, "Sometimes A Dream (Is What Makes You A Slave)"

INCIDENT REPORT#11

2009-10-31T10:04:00.007-04:00

Has it really been six months since I posted an incident report from the Park Rapids Enterprise? Well, trust me, it was worth the wait. The newest edition spread out before me on my dining room table is a gold mine.

I present to you the full gamut of what the males and females of the greater Park Rapids, Minnesota area were up to in the mere four-day span of October 15-18. Enjoy the theft, drugs, nudity, noise, bad wedding behavior, snowmobile capers, and mysterious moaning and ice cubes.

Miscellaneous: Oct. 15: A small black car was reported traveling at high rates of speed on a Nevis Township Road; A domestic was reported in White Oak Township; A brick was reported thrown at a window in Park Rapids; A fight between females was reported in Park Rapids; A Park Rapids caller reported waking up to find a younger male sitting at the dining room table moaning, ice cubes are all over the floor; A possibly abandoned car was reported in Park Rapids; Oct. 16: An Akeley caller reported "having problems" with a male's items being stored in his garage, the male is in jail; A Lakeport Township caller reported he was going to dispose of pain medication for his mother, who died, and himself and he found them gone; Several speed and other warnings were issued in Akeley; A driver was reported to be repeatedly crossing the center line in Helga Township; Citations were issued in Nevis for speed and lack of proof of insurance; Park Rapids caller requested a welfare check on a young boy, 8 or 9, who's in a parking lot on a bike talking to people in cars; Oct. 17: A Nevis Township caller reported to speak to a deputy about a vehicle she and her husband may purchase from Craig's List, some things appear to be fraudulent; A vehicle was vandalized in Park Rapids; Snowmobile windshield damage was reported in Todd Township; A caller reported her ex-stepmother has her two children in Minnesota (Lake George Township) without her permission, Florida authorities told her she had to contact the sheriff's department here for assistance in retrieving them; Two trucks were reported mudding on Helga Township property; Identity theft was reported in Akeley; A hitchhiker was reported in Fern Township; Gunshots for more than an hour were heard in Rockwood Township; Oct. 18: A Helga Township caller complained of a driver "messing around by his property"; Lakeport Township caller reported she and her husband are "having issues" and he is letting the air out of her car tires; A caller reported trespassers on the land he leases from Potlatch in Hart Lake Township; A Helga Township caller reported that two males who smell strongly of alcohol have been in his bathroom yelling for over five minutes; A naked man was reported coming out of the woods in Farden Township, crossing Highway 2 and heading back into the woods southbound; A party with loud music was reported in Farden Township; Loud music was reported in Park Rapids; A small amount of drugs was reported in Park Rapids; A Park Rapids caller asked for officer assistance in retrieving "stuff" from an ex-girlfriend; Squealing tires were heard in Park Rapids; A vehicle was reported all over the road in Park Rapids, vehicle pulled into a parking lot and a male got out yelling; Possible smell of drugs was reported coming from a Park Rapids apartment; Animal related: Oct. 15: Straight River Township caller reported cows in the yard are destroying hay bales; A "dog call" came from Nevis Township; Deer shining was reported in a Clover Township field; A dog was reported barking through the night in Hubbard Township; A German Shepherd was chasing deer in Park Rapids; Oct. 16: Dogs were running in traffic in Akeley, taken to the animal shelter; A deer was hit in Todd Township; Oct. 18: A black Lab was "hanging around" in Hubbard Township, neighbors were feeding it but now they're gone; A barking dog was reported in Park Rapids, "happens every weekend;" Burglaries, thefts: Oct. 15: Theft from a residence was reported in Park Rapids; Oct. 17: A shed break-in was reported in White Oak Township, a refrigerator, microwave, and other items were taken; A Todd Township caller reported two males were hired to steal her boyfriend's snowmobiles, caller states she received a call from a female who's a family member of the alleged thieves who states the males were getting a truck and trailer to pick up the snowmobiles; A pole barn break-in with a generator taken was reported in Henrietta Township; A residential break-in was reported in Akeley; Oct. 18: Theft of a tip jar was reported in Lake Emma Township, male suspect is part of a wedding party, they have it on camera; A vehicle window was broken and a CD player stolen in Park Rapids; Fires: Oct. 16: A grass fire was reported in Henrietta Township; Oct. 17: A vehicle was on fire in Guthrie Township, everyone safe and out of the vehicle; Accidents: Oct. 15: A rollover was reported in Park Rapids; Oct. 16: A rollover was reported in Henrietta Township, vehicle's on its roof but driver is out.

Hides for Habitat drop boxes at the Two Inlets Country Store, last November.

COLUMBUS CAN BITE IT

2009-10-12T14:27:00.003-04:00

In dishonor of Columbus Day, here's an essay by Paul Metcalf that we're reading in my nonfiction workshop tonight. I'm pairing it with a Sherman Alexie piece, "Captivity," that I didn't scan for here, but you can read both in The Next American Essay edited by John D'Agata (Graywolf Press.)

Or was he—for all the mysteries, the obfuscations, the clouds of black ink that, like the squid, he oozed out around the facts of his life—simply put, an outrageous, wholesale liar?

Metcalf finds him uncannily, literally Quixotic. If only Columbus had merely been jousting at windmills rather than chopping off Haitian people's hands for fun.

Read: "...and nobody objected"

FEMALE TROUBLE

2009-10-09T11:25:00.004-04:00

That's the name of my radio show on WOBC. I'm on Fridays, noon to one (EST). I play music made by/with women (and girls.) I'm about to head over to the station for round four.

A moment of anxiety hit after show number two or so when I thought, Oh no, I'm going to run out! I'd already played many of my favorites, the songs that made me go who is THIS? the first time I heard them. And I never want to be the DJ who plays all riot grrrl and/or the same handful of bands every time. Especially '90s Northwest bands.

The good news is, I am never going to run out. There is so much weird, inventive, great music made by female musicians across the last century. And I have become obsessive about digging through eMusic and Amazon marketplace etc. I can't stop listening to the Brazilian all-woman postpunk group As Mercenárias. I really like the High Places, especially "Storm" and "Gold Coin." Bettye Swann's "Don't Touch Me" runs through my head all day. I remembered about the Bush Tetras. I'm keeping my eye out for a Las Ultrasónicas album that's under 20 bucks.

Incidentally, if anyone has the Thompson Twins' "This Is A Foxy World" you could make my day. (My gmail moniker is chelseyjohnson.)

Over and out, off to play! Today all I know is there'll be some Mo-Dettes, Sharon Jones, Jenny Hoyston, Antietam, Twinkle, Pens, and maybe the Chiffons "Nobody Knows What's Going On In My Mind But Me."

A DOG CALLED RAISIN

2009-09-18T22:51:00.003-04:00

This is simply to show you a picture I took last year. I took it with my old LG cellphone camera so the quality is, you know.

This is Raisin.

Raisin belongs to Jo Jackson. This is at a gallery show that she and Chris Johanson curated in Portland. Raisin is a real, actual dog. Though its planetary origins are, to my knowledge, unverified.

WAKE-UP OPTIONS.

2009-09-15T00:42:00.000-04:00

1. KIKI, my parents' cat. (Née Isaac and male; since moving in with them, his name has turned from Kitty to Kiki and sometimes just Kkkhhh, and his/her gender is in constant flux.)

2. At the Nelson Bros truck stop in Clear Lake, Minnesota, this new invention: "GO-nuts." As described in the picture:

Option One was a great one this morning. Option Two I'm trying on the way back down to the cities, though I worry it might be a little disappointing á la those peanut-butter-and-jelly-in-the-same-jar products.

ADDIE FOREVER

2009-09-12T10:27:00.000-04:00

The last time I saw my grandmother was August 21. She was sitting at the kitchen table in my parents' house. The oxygen tubes were out for the moment and my mom had persuaded her to wear the wig that she said itched her head, where the chemo had left her with birdlike tufts. She'd been saying some weird things, drifting back and forth between past and present, herself and her inventions. She applied lipstick, shaky but sure.

My car was packed up and Emmett was following me around with an anxious gaze, wagging tentatively, don't leave me. "I'm taking off now," I said, bending to kiss her. "I love you."

Her cheek was very soft. She put a hand on my face. "Love you too," she said. "We'll see you at Christmas."

And I almost believed it--even though I knew better and she usually did too--that the next time I came home would be Christmas and she would be there at that same spot at the kitchen table, where she always holds court.

My grandmother Addie loved her kids and grandkids and great-grandkids, going to the lake, Reba and Dolly, reading Vanity Fair and People, eating Mexican food at Compañeros, dancing, and the sun. She had great legs. Her parents were Norwegian and she spent her whole life in northern Minnesota. My grandfather claimed proudly that she was "tougher'n boiled owl." To her great shock, she discovered at age 65 when she went to sign up for social security or something that on her birth certificate, her legal name was not actually Adeline but Leigh Camilla. "Why did they call me Adeline?" she said over breakfast at Perkins on Paul Bunyan Drive. "I would have liked to be Leigh!" But Addie she had been, and Addie she stayed. Seventy-seven years.

Here is one of my favorite pictures of her, dancing with my cousin Ben, from my cousin Sarah's wedding just eleven months ago.

And this was just January, with her great-grandchildren Ava and Addie, her namesake.

This is how I'll always know her: vital and warm and with her arms around one of us.

ROLE REVERSAL AT THE RACK

2009-09-07T22:32:00.000-04:00

My friend Matilda (Tilly, you witty brainiac, why aren't you a blog writer?) pointed me toward the site of one Kat and her dry, funny, compulsively readable stories about working at Portland strip clubs and the general weird politics and culture of stripping. Like,

My psychiatrist regular paid me to talk to him about my love life, which is our usual thing. He never buys dances or sits at the rack, he just hands me $20’s to talk to him while he drinks gin and plays video poker. I try to make stuff up that is loosely based on the truth.

Now that you can't make up.

TASTES LIKE THE SUN

2009-09-04T10:57:00.001-04:00

In the perfect convergence of my favorite chef and my favorite newspaper, Amy now has a food column in the Park Rapids Enterprise. Behold, Recipe-phile!

Already she has written about making wild raspberry syrup, broccoli pesto, green bean salad with spicy cherry tomato vinaigrette, swiss chard pie (I had that one when visiting a few weeks ago, it was amazing--olive oil crust!), and kimchi, for starters. Park Rapids has come a long way since we entered kindergarten there together.

The latest is one I've had chez Amy before, and it is simple and mind-bendingly good: fresh corn soup. Golden and hot, it tastes like the sun. I'm going to head down to a roadside vegetable stand and get the ingredients right now so I can make it for fast-breaking tonight at Kazim's. Kazim has been fasting for Ramadan (and blogging about it for the Kenyon Review), and I love the small impromptu dinners we've had when the sky grows dark. He lives right across the street from me now, and it's such a pleasure to cross over to his huge old house and sit down around the table with a handful of friends and neighbors. The dinners are lush with summer vegetables, hearty and generous, and even though Kazim has to cook without tasting them, they turn out absolutely delicious every time. Good ingredients, good hand on the spoon. And their two hilarious kittens wrestling gymnastically before melting sleepily into our laps.

IN THE SHADOW OF BOOK TOWERS

2009-09-02T22:58:00.001-04:00

Up to my ears in nonfiction. Literally, if I could stack this all in one tower, not to mention the other books I already returned to the library, I think it would go up to my ears.
Putting together my nonfiction workshop, I've been reading nothing but. I'm really into it.

Discoveries:

• I like Dorothy Allison's essays better than her short stories.

• I love James Baldwin's fiction, and I have discovered I like his essays just as much and maybe more. Here's what he says about writers, in "Alas, Poor Richard":

...it is extremely difficult to deal with writers as people. Writers are said to be extremely egotistical and demanding and they are indeed, but that does not distinguish them from anyone else. What distinguishes them is what James once described as a kind of "holy stupidity." The writer's greed is appalling. He wants, or seems to want, everything and practically everybody; in another sense, and at the same time, he needs no one at all; and families, friends, and lovers find this extremely hard to take.

• The New Kings of Nonfiction, edited by Ira Glass, is a disappointment. For one thing they weren't kidding when they said "Kings"--all but two of the contributors are dudes. (And the one Susan Orlean piece is a meticulous character study of a ten-year-old boy.) Maybe I'm just an impatient reader when I'm panning for teachable gold--but I'll more likely assign segments from the radio show.

• I've long held a candle for Jo Ann Beard's stunning essay "Undertaker, Please Drive Slow," which originally appeared in Tin House and is now anthologized in their nonfiction reader Cooking and Stealing; now I have also read "Werner," which appears in Best American Essays 2007 (ed. DFW) and that too has blown my mind. I was literally balled up on the edge of my seat with bated breath as I read it; and then, well, you just have to right now read "The Fourth State of Matter," available in full here on the NY-er, which is about a lot of things, but crucially, about the unwittingly life-changing decision to leave work early one day. Unbelievable, I want to rave, incredible, but those words are the opposite of her stories' flesh-and-blood truth.

What she's doing with this fusion of other people's stories and her own imagination is pretty astounding. It's the kind of thing where I can't wait to get to that point in the syllabus so my students can experience it.

• I am hard-pressed to name a single literary anthology that does not contain Jamaica Kincaid's "Girl." On hand I have no fewer than six.

This is what it looks like if I lay my head on the table. Which just maybe I sometimes have to do.

THIS HEAT GOES TO ELEVEN

2009-08-08T17:13:00.000-04:00

At the peak of the triple-digit temperatures last week, I found myself hunkered down on the floor of a tiny windowless practice room at rock camp every day, earplugs jammed in tight, listening to four 13-to-14-year-old girls figure out how to write a song from scratch together. 107 degrees and no air-conditioning, just a few strategically placed fans, and the volume turned up loud enough so that my fellow band coach could hear the keys, bass, and guitar over the drum kit that was two feet away. Every forty-five minutes we'd break to go grab handfuls of ice cubes or run outside and stand under the misting hose in the parking lot, then head back in for another attempt to hammer out the breakdown or a raucous six-minute jam.

It was awesome.

By Friday the song was finished, and the launch into the chorus--Deisha's lone eight kick-drum beats followed by Vivian's pulsing keys and Zoe's delicate guitar riff and Keziah's nodding bass and sweet voice--never failed to put a lump in my throat and tears in my eyes. (Sleep deprivation also took its toll, I'll concede.) Casey Parks came out to visit during the last band practice and interviewed the girls about their process at camp, then posted a great article and video at the Oregonian. Watch it! (The below photo is Casey's, not mine.)

Though this was my seventh summer at rock camp, I'd never before managed a band. It seems I've done just about everything else--since 2003, I've done the morning and afternoon assemblies; since 2006, I've been on the board of directors; last summer, I assisted Tara with her noise-making and pedals workshop. I love all those things. But nothing before has matched the pride and love I felt when Jellyfish Rave took the stage at the showcase. I knelt on the floor front and center and the beam from my heart could have lit them as bright as the stagelights.

SONIC HEAT

2009-07-30T00:12:00.000-04:00

Last night I saw Sonic Youth. By the time I disembarked from the MAX and walked through Old Town, it had cooled to 99 degrees. I don't mind the heat. I like extreme temperatures. They sharpen the experience. They make you feel something.

The show was hot. The band were hot, glittering sweat shaking off Thurston's soaked hair, Kim in a silver lamé dress, guitars going haywire. The intense human zoo aroma made me wish for a snorkel but I didn't even mind the sweat rolling down the backs of my legs. It felt good to be engulfed in sound and the heat became a physical element of it; dissonance is a hot sound, friction. Lots of Kim songs, lots of Lee songs, most of The Eternal, light on the hits, heavy on dude-roars for the hits, a crowd-surfer beamed in from the '90s, two encores, I would have killed to hear "Schizophrenia" but it wasn't in the lineup. Is it ever?

I like The Eternal a lot so far. It's solid. But live, I cannot even tell you how thrilling the song "Antenna" was. To approximate it, turn it up and up until you feel it in your whole body, and then when it gets to that single unison repeated eighth note, da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da, turn it up steadily louder and then at the pause, hold your breath for a second, and at the crash, flash all the brightest white lights on stage so the whole room seems to explode. It was like that. Pure pleasure. A thrill to the bones.

Here's "Antenna".

THE SEETHING STATIC OF EVERY PARTICULAR THING

2009-07-23T12:20:00.000-04:00

David Foster Wallace, in the intro to the Best American Essays 2007, has this to say about writing nonfiction.

Writing-wise, fiction is scarier, but nonfiction is harder--because
nonfiction's based in reality, and today's felt reality is
overwhelmingly, circuit-blowingly huge and complex. Whereas fiction
comes out of nothing. Actually, so wait: the truth is that both genres
are scary; both feel like they're executed on tightropes, over
abysses--it's the abysses that are different. Fiction's abyss is
silence, nada. Whereas nonfiction's abyss is Total Noise, the seething
static of every particular thing and experience, and one's total
freedom of infinite choice about what to choose to attend to and
represent and connect, and how, and why, etc.

I am always gonna miss this guy.

THE MUSE IS A STALLION

2009-07-22T21:02:00.003-04:00

When a baby horse is born, it is said to be by its sire and out of its dam.

As in, Secretariat was by Bold Ruler, out of Somethingroyal.

In other words, the father authors the foal, the mother simply expels it.

This strikes me as a little sexist.

But it also reminds me of that timeworn writing trope wherein the author claims to be the mere vessel for some kind of divine authorial force.* You know what I'm talking about: "The words seemed to write themselves," "This character came out of nowhere and all I could do was sit back for the ride," et cetera.

In this context the writer becomes mare, and the muse the stallion.

Which is at least a satisfying switch of their classic gender assignments.

*a.k.a. "the Muse." I detest "the Muse."

BRING OUT YOUR VIVIAN GIRLS

2009-07-17T15:47:00.003-04:00

The Builders and the Butchers music video I worked on had its premiere on Monday night at Mississippi Studios. It was like a reunion. Kristin was wearing some crazy Australian leggings that were part plastic. Rachel concocted plans for a "celestial voyage" to central Oregon to see the Milky Way. At first I did not recognize Lacey outside of her Vivian Girl costume, so sleek and brunette and grown-up was she in real life. And Alicia was showering us with drink tickets.

We watched the video five or six times that night. It was like Teletubbies: Again! Again! and someone would hit the play button. I personally am quite taken with it, no less enchanted for having witnessed its construction behind the scenes. Maybe more, in fact. That one-second underwater moment means a lot more once you've seen your friend immerse herself in a thick green pond to get it. (The "pondcam" aka "scumcam" shot.)

Today the video premieres on Spinner.com. Get your Darger on.

We filmed at the beautiful barn and property of Mike Midlo, whose charming musical project Pancake Breakfast is playing on my speakers right now.

CORE SAMPLE

2009-07-12T17:58:00.005-04:00

The Waypost feels both open and cozy on an uncharacteristically gray July day. They're serving Stumptown's Panama Carmen Estate, subtle and delicious enough to drink black. The barista is taking it easy, sweeping, chatting. Low-key cello music and the hiss of espresso steam. This is what it's like here all winter, a good reminder of what I've left behind. One of the guys playing guitar outside is in buffalo plaid, the other is someone I played with in the Extreme Guitar Orchestra a few years ago. (I think his band is Sexton Blake?) It feels familiar, comfortable, brooding and gentle, productive and slackerish. It feels like my life again.

Trying to unpack that statement only leads me down a thorny path of how much "life" is the narrative you make it.

This morning I pined for the brilliant blue skies and river-ready sunshine Portland summers overcorrect with, but bunkered down here now I appreciate the introspective cloud cover. A gray blanket pulled over our heads. Good for closer reading and writing, taking stock, figuring out where the narrative is headed and what this twist is really about--as I pester my students, not just about, but about.

The word nostalgia comes from the ancient Greek nóstos (a return home) + álgos (suffering, pain). A suffering to return home. When I returned to Portland last month, the first week back was nearly unbearably good and painful. I ached, peculiarly, for the place I was already in. For leaving it, for returning home to it, with the knowledge I'd leave it again at summer's end. I think most of us tend to think of nostalgia as a softer twinge, sentimental, golden and hazy, but this was a sharp and difficult feeling, true to the root.

M. Ward "To Go Home"
("I'll be true to you forever or until I go home")

READER, I BOUGHT IT

2009-07-01T19:48:00.006-04:00

I am now the proud owner of How Do You Want Your Hair Cut Today? from the wonderful Lesbian Art Show by my beautiful and talented friends Mary McAllister and Asza West. When I saw it online I thought it was cute, and then when I actually arrived in Portland and felt the enormous relief and joy and love of being among My People in such great numbers, and then saw it in person, big and beautiful and real, I knew I had to take it home with me to Ohio.

On Friday, driving through the Columbia Gorge en route to a video shoot, I listened to Mary and gallery co-owner Leslie Miller talking about the show on KBOO. Mary talked about the hand-painted barbershop posters that inspired her, and how hair is such a cultural marker, and the ways "lesbian haircuts" are both stereotypes and meaningful signifiers. I felt moved hearing my friends' voices on the radio, broadcasting real truths about queer art and life and culture. It's only when you actually do hear it that you realize how little it shows up on the mainstream radar.

The conversation hit me in an unexpectedly deep place, and the stunning stretch of the Columbia River I was on made everything feel epic and meaningful, and the second the show ended I called up Leslie and said, "I want it."

The Pacific Northwest in the summer is so beautiful I literally cry a little or at least feel that swelling in my chest every time I really look at the world around me. The green here is so saturated, so dark; in the winter the evergreen-covered hills are almost black, gothically so, but in the summer the golden light coaxes out the richest deepest green ever, stippled with the lighter-green of the deciduous trees that spring up between and in the clear-cuts. Red and gold cliffs jut out of the green, and the Columbia River is even bluer than the impossibly blue sky, and Mount Hood is sharper and whiter than ever by contrast, no mist or clouds to hide it.

I spent all weekend out on these mountainsides working on a video shoot for the Builders and the Butchers' new song "Golden and Green." The days were incredibly long and sometimes arduous, and most of us were working for free, but what better place to spend the weekend than in the sunshine in a place like this? Alicia Rose directed with meticulous attention to detail and a 20-person crew, and it's going to be gorgeous and spooky. (Henry Darger meets Deadwood!)

For really amazing shots, check out the Flickr sets of Casey Parks and band member Brandon Hafer.

TEA FOR TEETH

2009-06-20T17:01:00.005-04:00

Whoa! I am reading already tonight! I'm reading a true story, which is something I never ever write anymore--I infinitely prefer to invent and distort. But this is the piece I started to write for Portland Queer and never finished in time--as in, it was due around this time last year and I am finishing it today.

Every bone in my body leans toward fiction but there is no better time, place, or audience to pull out the Portland Queer story. It's about when I lived here in the summer of 1995, the brokest and toughest and most coming-of-age period of my life. (Also a lot of fun.)

The reading itself is a benefit for my marvelous and talented neighbor and friend Nicole Georges, self-descibed in a recent advice column as "someone with a 'cool' job who hasn't eaten a tortilla chip in over a year based on my lack of dental coverage." Here's the whole story:

And here's the flyer for the event, which also features the incomparable Michelle Tea, the hilarious Dexter Flowers, the witty and raunchy Hope Hitchcock, a queer puppet show by Nicole and sts, and live advice-giving from Michelle and Nicole.

YOU REST YOU RUST

2009-06-06T00:27:00.006-04:00

This is Vi. She's probably around eighty--"a spry eighty," guesses my dad. Vi lives in Texas in the winter and up here in Minnesota in the summer. She has a bountiful organic garden and sells vegetables and other relics and products out of her garage, hours: whenever.

Everything you see here is for sale, from glass bricks to flowering cactus. Swollen plastic jugs of honey: $7.50. Jars of beets she grew and pickled herself: $4.50. Old well-seasoned cast iron skillets: $5-10. Assorted glassware: 10 cents to a buck. Poplar logs: ask. Huge bottles of pure vanilla extract brought back from Mexico: $11. Radishes: she charged us 50 cents for a generous handful.

This is her garage refrigerator.

When I was growing up here, Dolores Nepsund (wildly creative cake baker, multi-grandma) had a perpetual garage sale out of her garage in town. In warm enough weather, she just left the garage door open, and you'd go in and sort through the heaps of donated clothes on the tables and racks and if she wandered in, you'd pay her, and if she didn't, you left the money in an honor system contraption. I wore a green wool duffel coat from that garage for seven years, from Ohio to Norway to New York, until it was threadbare at the hems and all the toggle-loops had broken.

Across the road from the lake, there is still an honor-system vintage shop set up in a little refurbished camping trailer parked in Iva Thielges' front yard. Inside, you find old picnic sets and paint-by-number horse portraits and dolls and embroidered dish towels etc., and a little hinged box where you write down what you bought and leave the money.

I prefer this kind of economy, run by old women and based on trust.

TEENAGE DEVIATIONS IN AN IDEAL WORLD

2009-06-04T00:50:00.007-04:00

I am very happy to be in northern Minnesota right now, watching minnows startled by my foosteps shoot out from under the dock, biking in the cool evening air by the birch trees whose delicate round leaves jingle like green coins in the breeze, past a dairy farm with shockingly clean black-and-white cows snacking on towering fluffy haystacks, toward a burrito at Compañeros that is hiding midwest-style under a thick blanket of melted cheese and sauce, looking up to see a waxing moon emerging bright in the still-blue sky, chopping up tart fresh rhubarb stalks for a homemade pie with my dad, and eating the pie with ice cream, and etc.

But if there were any other place I could be tonight it would be Portland, for the preview opening of my friends Mary and Asza's collaborative art show at Fontanelle Gallery. It is called, succinctly enough, "Lesbian Art Show," and it opens for real tomorrow and if you live in Portland you should go see it. If not you should click on "Lesbian Art Show" and flip through the pictures. Some of it is tongue-in-cheek, some of it is really vulnerable and sharp, some is Dada, some of it has a Chris Johanson-esque vibe I like (maybe it's the hand-lettering and the townscapes), some is all these things at once. I can't wait to see it in real life. (Next week!)

Here are a few of my favorites, at least as translated via the world wide web.

"Teenage Deviations in an Ideal World"

"A Map Mostly About Opinions"

"Styles of Lesbos" (just because Aubree and Torrence look so cute)

"Lesbian Art Show" itself

On a side note, I struggle with the strange fate of the word "lesbian"--it's been so misappropriated by straight porn and shock jocks. Decontextualized, it risks sounding lecherous and fake. (To clarify, I am not talking about "Lesbian Art Show" and other such specific projects and contexts, but the more generalized use of the word.) In case we can't ever fully reclaim it, at least in The Larger Culture, I wonder what will take its place? I would love to find a word that a) encompasses a broader sense of genders and b) doesn't conjure images of long-nailed girls gone wild frenching each other lasciviously with one eye on the camera.

BIRCH WATER AND OTHER DELIGHTS

2009-06-02T12:48:00.011-04:00

I left Oberlin at 3:45 pm Sunday and arrived in northern Minnesota at 5:15 pm Monday. Turbo trip! My speedometer works approximately twice a month, and on neither day of this drive. The needle just hangs out at 20mph, going or stopping. So I had no idea how fast I was going, I would get myself into a comfortable car sandwich and go with the flow, figuring that if we were speeding outrageously the highway patrol would target the leader or the end of the line. Worked!

Emmett was an agreeable companion but no help driving.

On day one I blazed through Indiana and Illinois without pause. On day two I did the final 400 miles in a single shot, not even stopping for gas or restroom or Twizzlers. I just wanted it to be over. The right side of my body was numb by the time I arrived. Fortunately my dear and loquacious friend Melissa called around the time I was passing through Staples and we talked through the last hour-plus, 'til the phone grew hot and I had switched arms several times. This, I fear, is the point at which one's brain is being microwaved, but it made the time fly by.

Things I saw and heard on my drive, in order of appearance:
• a trio of glossy chocolate-colored mules, grazing
• a sign for FANGBONER ROAD
• an abandoned farmhouse collapsing backwards, overgrown with ivy
• speed metal on the radio while driving through rural Wisconsin at night, including a song called "Corey Feldman Holocaust"
• heat lightning over the field in Madison where my friends and I were running around with Emmett at midnight
• at least a dozen dead deer (which bear a disturbing coloring resemblance to Emmett), one of which had a neon-orange X spraypainted across its bloated and stiff torso in the dark
• two small crosses perched on a hillside next to 94, each decked with flower garlands and topped with a blaze-orange hunting cap
• a billboard for a place called Crystal Cave whose website is acoolcave.com
• an Adopt-A-Highway section sponsored by Minnesota Atheists
• girls walking through Menahga in shorts and flip-flops, it felt like true summer

Home at last, I went to Amy and Aaron's for dinner out in the woods. Amy had made homemade butter with local cream, which she sprinkled with pink Hawaiian sea salt. Delicious!

The leftover buttermilk she turned into a delicious cool cucumber gazpacho, which also featured pureed almonds and some kind of oil (walnut? olive?) and, best of all, juicy halved green grapes swimming near the bottom like little sweet treasures. This, along with tender mellow radishes from the garden and ciabatta and cheese and wine, is just the pre-dinner snack. Then we had a Spanish vegetarian feast, replete with shitaake mushrooms and sweet scallions grilled over the fire and homemade mayo and garden greens and chickpea stew and things whose names I cannot remember! And ice cream with cloudberries for dessert.

Then after dinner Amy pulled out the birch water. When the sap was running in May, she and Aaron tapped some birch trees and collected gallons of the gushing water. They boiled down some of it to make birch syrup (it takes 70 gallons of birch water to make a gallon of syrup, compared with 40 of maple), but they kept a lot of the birch water just to drink .

The taste is so delicate and subtle I can hardly even describe it; all I can say is that birch water is the purest, cleanest, most delicious water I have ever drunk in my life. It tastes clear and alive. Amy declared that she wanted to drink it until she replaced every ounce of water in her body with it. Sign me up!

P.S. You should see the crazy car cake she and Aaron made for their son's second birthday. And also, the cooking classes she is going to offer out in their deep-woods paradise.

"AND THE TYPOGRAPHY IS ALL DONE IN THE SAME TYPEFACE AS MONEY"

2009-05-19T10:16:00.009-04:00

This makes me want to read God Says No, James Hannaham's debut novel:

"There are a lot of novels out there that make you think America is England, you know?" responds Hannaham, describing the type of fiction he deliberately didn't write. "That book is sort of—it's dark green, and there's a very sort of sensuous but depressing-looking cover: a photograph, there's like a blurry thing in the distance. It's a beach maybe, and the title describes a relationship between a mother and a daughter, or a mother and a father, or a father and a daughter. And the typography is all done in the same typeface as money, and the interior is all about small lives lived in a small way. I've often felt like those books don't have much to do with the way life is actually lived in America." (— interview in the Village Voice)

Funny and true! If I remember correctly from meeting him in Austin at AWP a few years ago, he's also the man behind Revolting Sofas, a blog of terrible sofa pictures harvested from Craigslist with accompanying mini-stories by various authors. I tend to skim the stories and gawk at the sofas, some of which are merely trashed and some of which give me a weird crawling feeling just looking at them.

It's hard for me to even have that one sofa there. I feel like its creepy pale ripply surface is contaminating the whole post. I have to tip the balance by putting in more photos. Such as:

an overweight hedgehog (thank you Gail), my childhood dog Shady (1985-1998) swimming in the lake,

a rock that looks like a monster at the Oregon coast, and my beloved friends Brock and Nick after breakfast in Portland.

That feels better.

Here too is the cover of James Hannaham's book, which officially hits the shelves next Tuesday.

DERBY REDUX

2009-05-18T10:31:00.011-04:00

A friend with an inside connection contests some of my criticisms of below, and since yesterday's post I've mellowed on the subject. Update: many participants were bike co-opers who put together the bikes themselves, and the kids cleaned it all up. I'm still not into the final outcome of a burning pile of wrecked bikes. But I can understand and appreciate the desire to keep the anarchic spirit of the Bike Derby alive.

Here's my final thought on it. I think that traditions and rituals worth holding onto are also worth adapting and reinterpreting. Whether it's marriage, Christmas, pedagogy, the Bike Derby, or whatever, I believe it's important to figure out what long-standing elements are worth keeping and what elements need to evolve to fit the times and one's own personal/political/ethical beliefs. I would love to see future organizers take the raucous, performative, and physical elements they love and make the Derby their own, in a way that speaks to the present and the future, not just the past.

Not that this matters to anyone outside Oberlin, I suppose.

Onward!

Here is Bernard in his well-worn ANC T-shirt from 1991.

That's radical.

BACK FROM THE GRAVE... AND REVISED

2009-05-17T16:00:00.039-04:00

When people ask if it's weird to be back at the same place I went to college, I usually answer that what's weird about it is how not weird it feels. My old coffeehouse is now a bar, but same owners, and I order the same things I used to make when I cooked there; nearly all of my mentors and professors are still here, now my colleagues; my fellow alums are everywhere, teaching and administrating and running restaurants and just living. Not much changes in a town of 8,000 people. From the day I arrived, I felt at home, and if Guided by Voices comes up in the shuffle I sometimes have to remind myself what decade it is.

Today, though, I felt the schism between my two lives here. What happened was that some students here revived an O.C. tradition that originally ended in 1993, the Bike Derby, but has been picked up off and on again over the last couple of years. The Bike Derby was an annual demolition derby on bikes, with costumes, in front of Harkness Co-op, but that doesn't begin to describe the gleefully destructive punk mayhem that it was. You can get a pretty good sense of it from this two-part video of the 1992 Derby:

The enterprising students involved in today's Derby apparently sought to recreate the whole thing from YouTube, down to every live-music and throwing-buckets-of-compost detail. But it's like when you try to clone a pet. It just isn't the same animal. Or maybe it's just that I am not the same animal.

Originally I posted a longer detailed report/critique, a viscercal reaction written in the heat of the post-Derby moment. A day later my feelings have cooled off, and I've got more information from people involved directly and indirectly, and accordingly I've come around on several of the things that bothered me as an observer. [See REDUX, above.]

Don't get me wrong, the costumes and the spirit of the thing were great.

The part where they torch the bikes still bothers me and is the part I believe is worth rethinking.

It was particularly ironic to see a pile of newly-destroyed bicycles set aflame, black smoke billowing from the burning tires, before the backdrop of the state-of-the-art new environmental studies building. In that moment, I couldn't help thinking the whole stunt could just as well have been a demonstration by Republican wingnuts.

Amazingly enough, the whole thing was apparently cleaned up within the hour. So props for that. Over and out.

EUROVISION!!!

2009-05-16T19:29:00.010-04:00

The blog's been quiet for a while, I know. I have been working very hard. Now I am relaxing very hard: soft-serve blackberry ice cream, lazy afternoons playing Catan on the porch, whiskey-ginger ale-maple syrup cocktails in mason jars, forays to community rummage sales and state parks, dance parties, even an hour-long massage I "won" (i.e. bought impulsively) at a benefit. (Totally worth it.) My small-town life has gone from teeming hive to sunny vacation lifestyle.

Today I spent the afternoon watching the Eurovision song contest with two Russian professors and an authentic Pole. Have you seen this show before? It is so ridiculous and campy. (America should have a 50-states version.) Musical representatives from the twenty-five finalist countries perform outrageously tacky songs; then the audiences in each of the 42 participating countries get to vote by phone, on the condition that they cannot vote for their own country.

Highlights:
• Since Russia won last year, this year's contest took place in Moscow. Earlier today, Moscow gays assembled a pride parade, at which the police promptly arrested 35 people. The towering Swedish (p)opera diva Malena--she of the four-octave range and arms that make Madonna and Michelle O look like saplings--declared in solidarity, "Today, I am gay!"

• Ukraine got shafted in the vote but was one of my over-the-top favorites. Granted, at first I guffawed at the bizarre hamster-wheels-from-the-future set, lit up in green and black like a commercial for an energy drink, the singer wriggling in her sequined-stiletto-knee-high-boots, and the men's tiny sex-gladiator outfits that really made them look like silver-painted Marvin the Martians. The song: "Be My Valentine! (Anti-Crisis Girl)." The lyrics make as much sense as the title.

But then a drumset appeared on the stage and Svetlana abruptly hopped off the gladiator she was mounting, took the throne, and pounded out several bars, and I loved her. It happens at 2:47 in this video.

• Albania, what on earth was this guy about? When he wasn't Krishna-ing behind the singer, he was doing elementary somersaults off to the side. Turquoise? Sequined? Full-face hood? And it's not even a unitard?

• The German guy wore skintight silver glittery leggings. Not even the gracious Dita Von Teese tickling her riding crop up his chest could salvage his heterosexuality. (If he ever claimed it.)

• The Danish "rock band" gamely made the most of their performance, which by venue seems inherently doomed destroy their rock credibility forever. The tight-trousered guitarists strutted like C.C. DeVille and swung their lank locks as if they were playing an actual rock show and not international karaoke camp. The drummer wore sunglasses. Someone had on a cowboy hat.

• The weird thing is that once it comes to the final voting, all the long-simmering rivalries instantly melt and an inexplicable, almost provincial neighborliness kicks in. Finland votes for Sweden; Bosnia-Herzegovina grants its highest score to Serbia; Ukraine's top vote goes to Russia; Cyprus loves Greece.

(Exception: Armenia gave not a single point to Turkey.)

• Norway won! It was a little ridiculous, this "Fairytale" song, and I wasn't into the Disneyish pink princess dresses--you can't wear that kind of thing if you're blonde, you just look tacky--but I liked that the little guy sang and played the violin and wrote the music and the lyrics. And he won by a landslide--387 points, with second-place Iceland at 218 points and Azerbaijan with 207. (Who knew Azerbaijan was Europe?)

Trivia: In Norway, they call the contest Melodi Grand Prix. I have no idea why.
More trivia: Alexander Rybak (the little guy) is originally from Belarus. He moved to Norway when he was four.

• Finally, what is a Eurovision recap without a nod to ABBA, who, as true scholars will know, got their big break in the contest with "Waterloo" in 1974. Agnethe's boots/pants combo is fab. Poor Frida, is all I'll say about her look.

FOREST PARK HAUNTS ME TOO

2009-04-27T23:30:00.003-04:00

It is important to always remember that at any time you think of it there are people being kept in buildings when they want to go outside.

—from My Abandonment by Peter Rock.
I highly recommend it.

RICK PRELINGER'S 14-POINT MANIFESTO

2009-04-24T16:05:00.000-04:00

The esteemed archivist and champion of artistic re-use Rick Prelinger came and gave a talk here a couple months back. If you don't already know about the Prelinger Archives, check it out. Prelinger and his people collect and save and offer for free public use more than 60,000 (and growing) archival films, from advertisements to instructional films to public service announcements. The reels of vintage television commercials are totally absorbing.

Next time I go to San Francisco I am excited to visit this place in person.

Here's my notes from the PowerPoint presentation Rick gave.

REVISITING THE VALUES OF EXISTING MATERIAL, A 14-Point Manifesto

1. Why add to the population of orphaned works?
"We're in the world capital of ephemera," says Prelinger. And: "We cling to the absurd idea that products of our mind become property the instant they're born."
2. We assume the new is better than the old.
3. Honor our ancestors by recycling their wisdom.
"I don't like eternalizing the present," he says, because we don't know now what will be meaningful later.

4. The ideology of originality is arrogant and wasteful.
And here he inserts a graphic of the hydrologic cycle.
5. Dregs are the sweetest drink

6. And leftovers were spared for a reason.
The library he runs is "a library filled with bad ideas... I like to joke that it's 98 percent false consciousness." And this is important, he says: "You can't judge the past only at its best--you need to confront the contradictions" and what didn't work. He compares it to the finding that farm kids suffer fewer allergies, possibly due their exposure to manure and dirt, and that rooting around in the archive can have a similar effect, building up your immunity to bad ideas.

7. Actors don't get a fair shake the first time around, let's give them another.
What he calls "reincarnation through reuse." He says: "We should use copyright homeopathically, not as a tool of shock and awe." (That's right, U2. Leave Negativland alone.)

8. The pleasure of recognition warms us on cold nights and cools us in hot summers.
"Rivers are like information--they route around obstacles, and rivers are most exciting at their bends."

9. We reach the future by typically roundabout means.
"Storytelling as we know it is not an absolute." Rather, we're conditioned to favor a particular kind of storytelling, character-based with a certain narrative arc that in documentaries in particular depends on a predictable formula of character with a problem --> character surmounts problem in second half. "We value it for wrapping new skins on old skeletons." And the dominance of this template is "tyrannical."

10. We hope the future is listening, and the past hopes we are too.

11. What's gone is irretrievable, but it might also predict the future.
This was the part that really stuck with me. Here he talked about those old films from the 1950s that are about behavior and manufacturing etc. and how there was a wave of fascination and interest in them in the '80s (and into the '90s too, judging from my own college experience.)

The problem, he says, is that people tended to see these old filmstrips as purely funny or kitschy, or be caught up with the style, the color, the voice, the funny rigidity of the mannerisms. But, he urges, "Don't see them as antiquated but as predictive"--and points out with frightening accuracy that all those movies of perfect controlled schoolchildren in the 1950s did not actually reflect the free-roaming ways of kids then, but in fact looks a lot more like today's suburban children, who are far more restricted and controlled in their movements than children anytime in the 20th century.

12. Access to what's already happened may be easier to get than access to to what's happening now.

13. Use justifies archives.

14. Make a quilt, not an advertisement.
"Quilting is an early form of sampling."

Here's a sample from the archives: "Are You Popular?" (1948), "a scream and a sobering document of postwar conformity" (and it features an actress named Bunny Catcher!)

• "Perversion for Profit" (1965), produced by Citizens for Decent Literature

TWO CENTS

2009-04-24T15:21:00.007-04:00

As social networking becomes more an intrinsic part of real life, I have a couple suggestions to make it even more like real life.

1) Twitter should introduce the option: "Pretend To Follow This User."

Maintains the socially comfortable illusion of mutuality while liberating you from [tedious Twitter peeve of your choice].

2) Here are some other responses Facebook could add to its comment options.

INCIDENT REPORT #10

2009-04-23T12:26:00.002-04:00

I can't believe how long it's been since I last posted selections from The Park Rapids Enterprise's incident report. Here are some recent happenings.

A male party was reported passed out in a truck in Arago Township, First Response arrived on the scene to learn he was taking a nap while waiting for a tow; A Rockwood Township caller reported her 18-year-old daugher is "out of control"; A Park Rapids caller reported being assaulted outside a Park Rapids bar, but the responding officer says the reporting party (RP) does not recall the assault and the manager is now calling about the RP being loud; A car eastbound on Hwy 34 was reported to be turning headlights on and off; "A lot of shooting" was reported in a sand pit in Rockwood township, caller found a considerable amount of litter when he arrived; A Fern Township caller reported neighbors dumping garbage in his driveway; A Farden Township caller reported "her uncle is drunk and out of control," he grabbed a knife, went to the back bedroom then outside; A Todd Township caller reported receiving harassing text messages from her children's father's new girlfriend; A Henrietta Township caller complained of a flashing light on a radio tower; A Park Rapids caller reported four small children in the backseat of a Neon, concerned with lack of carseats and seatbelts; A Park Rapids caller reported someone broke into her apartment while she was in jail; A Todd Township caller reported being slapped by his girlfriend, she left on foot, headed towards Park Rapids; A Park Rapids caller states "neighbor's footprints are in his mom's yard"; All the mailboxes on CSAH 32 to Highway 71 were open in Arago Township; Footprints were reported circling a Park Rapids yard, party appears to have been looking in windows; A Park Rapids caller reported a group of kids in the store are staggering, seem to be intoxicated; A Park Rapids caller reported someone breaking into their home, could hear scratching and pounding and saw hands; A trophy was stolen from an Arago Township residence, caller believes her ex-husband stole it; A little blue car "coming in from the west" was reported traveling at a high rate of speed; Gunshots were heard at the old Deer Town; A Park Rapids caller reported someone put something in her mailbox, would like to speak to an officer.

GHOST SQUIRREL

2009-04-18T10:41:00.003-04:00

My dog has taken a deep scholarly interest in squirrels. Our walks have become characterized by the pause, paw lifted and ears pricked, followed by full-throttle barreling toward some distant tree, where he then rises on his hind legs, one paw resting on the bark, and gazes longingly upward at his chattering, taunting quarry.

But nothing thrills him more than these guys, a long lineage of whom inhabit the town square.

The albino squirrels here are leisure squirrels, well-fed and publicly adored. With Emmett as their main threat, they can look forward to long and happy lives.

Most albino and leucistic (another white-skin condition) animals are not so lucky. In the wild, they're vulnerable to sunburn (!) and easier for predators to target. Hunters are the worst of all--strange how humans place an enormous monetary value on a white animal ($60,000 for the chance to shoot a white tiger) that is less about the animal and more about the thrill of killing it.

Paradoxically the animal is much rarer alive than it is dead. The population of skinned and stuffed albinos surely outnumbers the living (and continues to grow).

Astutely put: "It is an incredibly Victorian attitude that if something is unusual your response is to kill it."

That's right, little guy. Beat your retreat.

By the way, a Google image search of albino animals yields a pretty mind-blowing gallery. Gorillas, kangaroos, peacocks, giraffes, moose, pink dolphins...

DIRTY MOUTHS IN THE FAR NORTH

2009-04-13T23:40:00.004-04:00

Swearing at the Friday night meat raffle in Nevis (population 400) made the front page of a recent Park Rapids Enterprise. Wild times!

MIAMI IN RAINBOW FORM

2009-04-12T22:06:00.002-04:00

That was a great vacation.
(Click to see the up-close.)

LIVE AND ALIVE

2009-04-11T11:37:00.006-04:00

In the last couple of weeks I have been feeling pinned and wriggling, and what it makes me crave more than anything is live music. I want to plunge into a loose crowd in a dark room and feel only the sound and the moment.

It touches the little ache of longing I feel lately for my other life, my Portland life, where I associate shows with bear hugs and shouting greetings and cheering on friends. I also just need the relief of seeing other people making their art, live and in the moment.

Last week the Mountain Goats came, in solo form. There's a little student nightclub here that's actually a great venue, dark and intimate with good sightlines and a sprawling beer list--in my youth I saw countless bands here, the 90s playbook (Guided by Voices, Tortoise, Velocity Girl, Tsunami, Shellac, Come, Gaunt, Cibo Matto, Labradford, the Jesus Lizard, Run On, Ui, Tribe 8, and many more fallen through the memory gap.) The kids packed the place for the Mountain Goats, sitting adoringly on the sides of the stage and singing along loudly and fervently as a tent revival.

John Darnielle is a great performer. Of course he is funny and energetic and a gifted songwriter, but also he is not afraid to be weird, ugly, strident, hit a curdled note, make strange faces, double over, sweat, pull his glasses off and put them on again a second later. It's good to remember: you have to be embarrassing and awkward in the service of art. It's part of the process. It's real.

A couple of nights ago Des Ark came through, also solo, and played to maybe fifty people. The intimacy suited her stripped-down songs and aching voice. She played mostly newer material--no "Subtleties of Chores and Unlocked Doors," my favorite--but closed with an encore of "Lord of the Rings and His Fascist Timekeepers," where she broke before the last verse to resituate herself on the steps of the stage, unmiked, inches away from us, taking it to the next level of close.

GLIMPSE

2009-04-10T23:49:00.003-04:00

[foot-stomping at Des Ark] [evening walk in snowfall 4/06/09]

MEET "BOOBU"

2009-04-01T01:22:00.004-04:00

New ThunderAnt, with my favorite guest stars yet.

For the record, no one has punched me in the face. (Yet.)

MIAMI BRIEFS

2009-03-23T01:32:00.007-04:00

1. The last time I was in Miami was 2003, when one of my enterprising traveling companions wrangled us fancy hotel rooms by pretending to be the management of a famous band. Half a dozen years! I cannot believe how long that sounds.

2. The airplane from Orlando to Miami was the ricketiest vehicle I've ever been on. It made the Mesaba flights from Minneapolis to Bemidji seem like luxury jets. The flight attendant was the co-pilot, a tall and brusque man with stern eyebrows, a heavy accent, and not a wasted word. "PLEASE BUCKLE YOUR SEATBELTS," he shouted down the aisle. "WE ARE GOING." Then he went into the cockpit and closed the loose sliding door as much as he could. It didn't close all the way.

My seat, the glamorous-sounding 1F, in fact had no window. To my right and in front of me were nothing walls of grimy beige plastic. To my left, the closed door with its metal staircase folded against it. The sensation was that of traveling in a large carton, perhaps one stashed in the back of a covered wagon.

An hour in I realized I had to close my New Yorker and my eyes and try to imagine myself anywhere else. I have only thrown up once on a flight, ever. It was a tiny bush plane, in Churchill, Manitoba; the pilot at one point turned the plane perpendicular to the ground, and when he righted it, I lost my lunch. But this flight came close. When we landed, the co-pilot burst out of the cockpit--"OKAY, WE'RE HERE," he hollered with a mighty clap--and I tottered down the steps to the tarmac to wait for the baggage handlers to roll my suitcase from the cargo cubby to where I stood about twenty feet away. They had to duck under the wing.

3. Miami temperatures in the mid-70s. The air is downy and warm. I could cry at the sheer gentleness of it.

4. At the Turkish restaurant, my dish was called "I'm Crazy About Tomato!", or, as the waiter called it for short, "Crazy Tomato."

5. Miami men wear fitted button-down shirts with the sleeves rolled up just one cuff-length, untucked over narrow yet loose jeans, and flip-flops or loafers. The women wear tiny dresses and shorts and impossibly high heels, but their walks betray them, tottering on the shoes, holding a boyfriend's hand for support, or hunching and crossing their arms across their chests as they duck around the slow walkers. I have not seen so much cleavage since the Renaissance Faire of 2002.

6. The beach at night was vast and pale and empty, the ocean vast and dark and empty. I admire the ocean but it will always make me feel uneasy in some way--I don't like not being able to see the other side. And it has that intense smell. It smells like life and like death. But I was very, very happy to see it.

I keep picturing a map and myself as a tiny fleck on that map, down at the fingertip of the U.S. In my mind's eye the map is a biological one, not political, no roads or city dots, just green. I'm reading Karen Russell's book St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves and the stories are about the super-weirdness of Florida and especially its dark swamps and critters. That interests me much more than Beyonce's mansion. Manatees over celebritees.

MINING & FORGING

2009-03-15T13:07:00.004-04:00

The difference for me in writing stories and writing a novel comes down, maybe, to this: In writing a story, you take one element and blow it up. Writing a novel, you take every element, everything you know, and try to distill it into one thing. This task is staggering.

At some point in my freshman or sophomore year of college, I started conflating my writing notebook and my personal journal--no longer separate, just everything in one notebook, as it came, the invented and the real all mixed up and sometimes overlapping, and I continue this practice to the present day. But holy mother, is it making the novel mining a crazy experience. It turns out I started taking notes on what would become this novel (I thought it was a story then) in two-thousand-fucking-two. So I am digging back through seven years' worth of life, or rather lives, to pull out sentences and notes and ideas I'd forgotten. This is about twelve or thirteen journals of all sizes--Moleskines, spiral-bound sketchbooks, big 8x10 art books and little square ones and all shapes and sizes in between, a couple of them dog-chewed in the corner so the pages are hard to turn.

The journal-mining is dangerous work. I have to stay on task and resist the pull of my own past lives. Retrospection is a bitch, and the periods of doomed euphoria are a harder tug than the moments of immediate darkness. It is intense (and I'm not saying this with wistfulness or nostalgia, just clear sight) to realize how different a life can be and how rapidly it can change, over and over. And it's sometimes shocking to realize how much I've forgotten--I'm not an avid chronicler of events, more ideas--and it makes me glad I wrote down what I did, and wonder what happened between those pages that I wish I had access to now.

Through it all, multiple characters and stories pop up, some of them later realized, some abandoned. Little flags and post-it notes. The elements of this thing I'm working on. The constant is that I was constantly making things up in the middle of living the real thing, and often the fiction has the real truth and the documentary leaves it out.

All of it fuels the story, but it puts me into a strange cloud where I feel like I am perpetually on the verge of a sneeze or tears.

I think DFW had it about right with his extended analogy of DeLillo's hideous hydrocephalic infant. It does feel like this.

MAKE WAY FOR WAO

2009-03-14T13:25:00.004-04:00

Two trends I have noticed in undergraduate short stories.

• The office is the new courtroom. AND OR, the office is the new unhappy suburban home. TBD.
• Oscar Wao is the new Holden Caulfield.

Both these developments cheer me.

The office-as-setting is no less inspired by television and movies than the courtroom, and just as vulnerable to familiar tropes and cliches, but at least there's a significantly better chance the writer has actually spent time in one. (And no "you can't handle the truth!" moments.) I am also noticing a marked drop in unhappy-married-people-in-the-suburbs stories, and I wonder if the office is also the new unhappy home, the locus of thwarted ambitions and entrapment and mortal dread. Prickly exchanges have moved from the kitchen table to the break room table, the loneliness-in-company of the bedroom transferred to the loneliness-in-company of the cubicle.

Re: Caulfield vs. Wao, I think it's high time for the know-it-all prep-schooler to clear some space for the persecuted-yet-indomitable, longing, lovable geek. Is this another ripple of the Obama effect? Either way, I'm down.

ALL ATWITTER

2009-03-02T09:26:00.005-05:00

I can't tell yet if Twitter is going to be like Facebook, a thing that seems superfluous and creepy until it seems inevitable and fundamental. (Or cellphones, for that matter--I remember when I used to take mine out sheepishly and try to answer it discreetly out of sight of my grad-school colleagues who were smoking on the Dey House porch. I felt like a pompous tool with it. This was 2001.)

So far I have found Twitter's potential exceeds its actual pleasure yield. Personally I am more in the school of "Entertain me with your pithy wit, my friends" than "Tell me every move you make" (or "Sell me every move you make.")

But I'm starting to figure out how to make it useful and not just a thing I look at on my iPhone when I'm standing in line. Poetry Magazine sporadically sends thought-provoking little lines and images (Living is a meatloaf sandwich. --John Ashbery.) Today I learned via Publisher's Lunch that

Deal for DFW's PALE KING from "tentative" to official; a partial work of "several hundred thousand words" plus notes, outlines, and more

Which led me to the full explanation via AP. I feel both excited and sad about it. I wonder if reading this incomplete novel will be an amazing illumination of David Foster Wallace's writing process, or puzzling and impenetrable, or just heartbreaking. Or all of the above, more likely.

And in the world of living writers, my friend Pauls Toutonghi is going to be serializing his short story "Tourism" via Twitter starting today, here. Already off to a banging start!

1. AMELIA EARHART DIED BEFORE IMPACT. She saw the shimmering water and the way it opened upwards. Her eyes were open.

The tank was almost empty; Howland Island invisible. And so she stopped her own heart. She could feel the sun on the back of her neck.

As far as Twitter-born stories go, Douglas sings the praises of Dame Jetsam, a fictional character created on Twitter around whom a whole storyline and world have sprung up--it involves a shipwrecked lady and a fusion sensibility of olde-tyme + modern vernacular--with other people joining in as Sir Flotsam, Doctor Detritus, etc. Their emerging adventures are collected here.

But of course, the medium is bound to also suffer some Totally Unnecessary Twitter Narratives. A while back I Twittered (tweeted? I don't feel that verb) about a Mad Men binge I was on, and was instantly friended by the surprisingly web-savvy "Betty Draper." "Betty Draper" churns out frequent updates, which unfortunately follow vapid 1950s housewife cliches that anyone could manufacture based on a cursory familiarity with 1950s stereotypes, and that in their period-fetish glee sail completely over what makes her character on the show so tense, complex, and sad: "Put a casserole in the oven. I wonder when Don will be home." Perhaps it's just a testament to verisimilitude--even a brilliantly-crafted fictional character can be dull and overshare.

(It turns out that "Betty Draper" also maintains a blog of similarly surface-level artifact fetishism, if a bit anachronistic--a Sterling-Cooper business card with a web address?! I'm fascinated by the fanfic phenomenon. In a way, maybe these inconsistencies and oddities are more interesting than a seamlessly-executed homage.)

I feel inconclusive. I like the challenge of filtering and distilling an idea to the most compact form possible. But it isn't easy, and while my handful of Twitter friends turn out funny and interesting tidbits, most of the random Twitterers I've browsed through are beyond boring, oversharing their tedium into the ether. Seriously, people, who needs to know your laundry plans? (Or the status of your fictional casserole?)

Few of my friends are on Twitter yet, and I imagine it will get more fun when (or if!) more of them (you!) get on board. Holler when you arrive.

NEW HEROES

2009-02-23T20:15:00.007-05:00

DUSTIN LANCE BLACK

[Thanks to a list of people] for taking on the challenge of telling this lifesaving story. When I was 13 years old, my beautiful mother and my father moved me from a conservative Mormon home in San Antonio, Texas, to California, and I heard the story of Harvey Milk. And it gave me hope. It gave me the hope to live my life, it gave me the hope to, one day I could live my life openly as who I am and that maybe even I could fall in love and one day get married.

I want to thank my mom who has always loved me for who I am, even when there was pressure not to. But most of all, if Harvey had not been taken from us thirty years ago, I think he’d want me to say to all of the gay and lesbian kids out there tonight who have been told that they are less than by their churches, or by the government, or by their families, that you are beautiful, wonderful creatures who have value. And that no matter what anybody tells you, God does love you and that very soon you will have equal rights federally across this great nation of ours.

Thank you. Thank you God for giving us Harvey Milk.

SEAN PENN

You commie, homo-loving sons of guns!

I did not expect this, and I want it to be very clear how hard I make it to appreciate me, often. But I am touched by the appreciation and I thought enough that I did want to scribble down so I have the names in case you are commie, homo-loving sons of guns. [Thanks a bunch of people, ending with] there is no finer hands to be in than Gus Van Sant.

Finally, for those--two last finallys--for those who saw the signs of hatred as our cars drove in tonight, I think that it is a good time for those who voted for the ban against gay marriage to sit and reflect and anticipate their great shame and the shame in their grandchildren's eyes if they continue in that way of support.

We've got to have equal rights for everyone.

[Then shoutouts for electing "an elegant man President" and Mickey Rourke: "he is my brother."]

I remember something Sarah Dougher said onstage at the PDX Pop Fest in 2004, in the heat of Oregon's Measure 36 fight: "Gay people cannot get equal rights without the help of straight people."

Thanks for stepping up, Penn. And thanks, DLB, for the shout-out to your good mom (moms everywhere, listen up!) and that stellar parting line. Usually award winners thank God for their own success, as if he personally cast the overriding vote; I wish more people thought to thank him for Harvey Milk.

And guess what? You can behold the real deal himself in the superb 1984 documentary The Times of Harvey Milk in its entirety, all 88 minutes, right here. It's stunning and moving. A must-see.

ANIMAL ENCOUNTERS

2009-02-22T17:38:00.013-05:00

Snowshoeing with my brothers and a friend in the woods that surround the house, I spy red flecks in the snow. We tromp off the trail toward it and find a deer bed spotted with bright red blood. But here is the mystery: it snowed all night, but not since morning; the deer bed has only very recently been vacated, as evident in the freshness of the imprint and the surface-level of the bloodspotting; and yet there is no sign of the deer nor any tracks, human or animal, leading to or from the bed.

Despite our best clomping-around detective work, aided by Emmett's avid snowplowing nose, we can't figure it out. There is no explanation for what injured the deer or how it left or if it lived. Despite the evidence of warm, pulsing life--red blood and a bed just slept in--the thing itself is gone, and it's not for us to know.

Emmett chews on some bloodsicles. We shake the snow off our mittens and cut back to the trail to head down the hill.

...................................................................................................

A young deer--just past fawn, not yet recognizably buck or doe--appears in the driveway and stands in the pool of light from the garage light, which gleams extra-bright on the white snow. You can tell the deer is young because it walks right into the spotlight and gazes directly our way, no hesitation or trepidation. I've seen this before with baby skunks, baby woodchucks, baby mice--young animals will just sit there and look right back at you, stupidly, adorably bold.

The deer nonchalantly scratches its ear and looks around, and then it wanders casually back down the driveway. We are just a pack of humans standing out in the cold, bald bipeds, woefully underequipped, peering into the dark where it disappeared.

...................................................................................................

Horses impassively watch us cross-country ski by as snow gathers thickly on their backs. My feelings about horses are changing. I was obsessed with them as a girl: wrote novels about them, drew them obsessively, wore red cowboy boots, read Black Beauty over and over, even tended for a year a rotund black lazy mare who was the equine equivalent of my cat Seven. (For real.) Now I look at them and they seem less like my youthful fantasy of a long-lashed thousand-pound soulmate and more like very different souls altogether, which we saddle and ride with metal bits in their mouths. I wonder, what makes you happy? Do you like being ridden? You are approximately the tenth smartest animal--what do you think about? What do you think of us? Do you like us?

When I was ten or so, a crafty four-year-old Appaloosa mare pulled the inflating-belly trick, puffing up while we buckled on a riding pad, then exhaling so the strap was comfortably loose. I gave her a heel-kick, she broke into a trot, and the pad began to slip sideways with every bumpy step. I was quickly shaken loose like the pesky burr I must have been to her, deposited on the ground uninjured but stunned. In retrospect I can't really blame her.

...................................................................................................

A group of wild turkeys are wandering across the road on the outskirts of my small Ohio town, from woods side to farmhouse side. I slow to a stop and watch them cross the road, leisurely yet purposeful. They are so big, sturdy and pragmatic, modest dark feathers and discreetly rouged faces.

I think that in these times of belt-tightening and nuts-and-bolts, it would be appropriate to switch from the imperious bald eagle--that high-flying loner with a head as white as the founding fathers' wigs--to the modest wild turkey, a ground-dweller who prefers company and knows how to live on what it can find beneath its feet.

JUST KEEP TALKING AT THE SOUND OF THE TONE

2009-02-08T14:06:00.003-05:00

Listening to "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me" yesterday morning--a show I have actually attended live--I thought of how much I did indeed want Carl Kassel's mellifluous voice on my home answering machine.

Then watching the performance of "Homeland" in Cleveland later that evening, I upgraded to the absolutely unbeatable fantasy of having Laurie Anderson's voice on my home answering machine.

IF YOU SHOULD GO DRIVING ON THE THIN ICE OF LIFE

2009-01-30T13:42:00.004-05:00

Well. I fell into a January torpor, fingers numbed by deep subzero temperatures, brain numbed by too much free time, and pleasantly distracted by books and travel and a very hot log-fired sauna.

Many posts in the hopper, coming soon.

In the meantime, here is a tip, in case you decide to drive on a lake.

Make sure you drive with your door slightly ajar. That way, if your car falls through the ice, you can hop out right away.

You won't necessarily have time to roll down the window and swim out. True story, per my Dad: Someone drove over a place where the ice had cracked and the crack had then branched. When his car hit this spot, a third crack connected the previous two to form a triangle, which broke and sank beneath the weight of the vehicle. This guy, whose door was prudently ajar, jumped out just in time to see
his car plunge through the hole;
and rapidly sink;
and the thick triangle of ice bob back up and snap right back into place like nothing had happened.

This made my breath come short. The thought of looking up at that impenetrable ice ceiling, and the light illuminating it where the snow was washed off.

You can bet that if I ever drive on a lake--I have walked, snowshoed, skied, and dogsledded upon them, but never motored--I will be that annoying person who insists on holding the door open despite the -46 windchill. And I will not budge.

DISPOSABLE LIVING

2009-01-11T23:56:00.000-05:00

Suburb followup. I think where the suburbs get interesting is where they diverge from what they're intended to be. My colleague Julia Christensen embarked on a fascinating project exploring how abandoned big-box stores get repurposed.

America is becoming a container landscape of big boxes connected by highways. When a big box store upsizes to an even bigger box "supercenter" down the road, it leaves behind more than the vacant shell of a retail operation; it leaves behind a changed landscape that can't be changed back. Acres of land have been paved around it. Highway traffic comes to it; local roads end at it. With thousands of empty big box stores spread across America, these vistas have become a dominant feature of the American landscape.

Basically, she explained at a recent reading I attended, it's cheaper for Wal-Mart to build an entirely new building, so they can turn the lights off at the first and on at the second simultaneously, than to simply add on or renovate. But the abandoned Wal-Mart is sold under a strict covenant that it cannot house anything that remotely resembles the original tenant--not so much as a potato chip may be sold there, or anything that would compete with Wal-Mart, which sells pretty much everything. So people have gotten creative and turned old big-boxes into churches, go-kart tracks, charter schools, museums... you name it.

See some examples, or better, peruse the big beautifully-designed book.

Today the New York Times mentions her project as well as the general problem of abandoned half-built suburbs and exurbs. ("What Will Save the Suburbs?") Mere raze-and-salvage isn't going to do it; the building materials often aren't even good enough to be worth saving. A commenter makes an astute point that the soil beneath the tracts is more valuable than the buildings will ever be--I've seen houses sprout up like weeds all over the rich fields surrounding Fargo, ND and Iowa City and Beaverton, OR. Farmland is too easy to develop--already flat and cleared, and the only farmers who can make money from growing food are the ones hooked into the agribusiness mega-naut.

I've got to finally read The Geography of Nowhere, which my brother gave me for Christmas a couple of years ago and I've put off reading because I was worried it would depress me.

KNOWING YOUR PLACE

2009-01-08T13:33:00.000-05:00

My childhood home, which you can't even see for the trees.

I am not a great driver. I just don't like it much. I had a two-car accident in 1995, exploding airbags and all, that has forever made me conscious every time I get behind the wheel that I am steering a multi-ton metal death machine. I have no fear of flying, but every time I sneeze on the freeway I'm convinced that single shut-eyed second is the one where I'll crash into my death. I keep my hands at ten and two on the wheel.

Yet there is one area in which I am a better driver than most people I now know: on snowy and icy roads. This is no innate talent, but a necessary skill, like swimming and knowledge of hypothermia, that you need to survive in northern Minnesota. I realized it as I came to the end of my three-day drive homeward a couple of weeks ago, turning off the highway for the final mile of road that leads to my childhood home. Though it's twisting, hilly, and uniformly white with thick-packed snow, a road that visitors tend to creep along hunched over the wheel, I sail right down it like a rollercoaster, confident and steady.

I simply know it so well.

There have been times when I ached with envy at the opportunities my friends and college classmates who went to posh suburban high schools or private academies enjoyed. (AP classes? A black-box little theater? A glass-blowing wing? Cutting class to lounge in a coffeehouse or go shopping?) There were times when Park Rapids felt like the smallest, most boring, most disconnected place in the world. No music venue, no coffeshop (then), no bookstore (then, except in the corner of the Radio Shack), no gays, no underground culture, not even a mall for sixty miles, and of course no internet back then, just a three-block Main Street lined with pickup trucks and keggers at remote gravel pits and long drives through the country to get to each other's houses. My friends and I spent a lot of time hanging out in each other's basements and garages and the parking lot of Subway. Some of the boys formed cover bands that would play at the bowling alley or the building that housed the hockey rink when it was thawed for the summer. Sometimes for fun we would just go to one of the 24-hour grocery stores late at night, make up a list of weird things to find, and roam the aisles, pushing each other in shopping carts.

But now I feel lucky that I grew up in a place that that is so much itself. Fewer and fewer Americans live in rural places, only 21 percent now, and I am glad that chance and parental choice landed me among that shrinking number. In fact I think my upbringing outside the city limits plants me in the 16.4% who the census says lived "not in place." No place at all. Yet nearly every story I write emerges from a setting in northern Minnesota. The place is as much a part of the story as the characters.

The problem with the suburbs as story settings is that although they provide ample social commentary fodder, there is a certain uniformity to all of them, no matter where they are. I know some suburbs have become increasingly diverse in recent years, but though their human contents have changed, their layouts and physical presence largely have not. I generalize a bit here, but so do suburbs, so let's call it even. Unlike the cities they face and the countryside at their backs, which tend to have distinct personalities and eclectic structures and the possibility of surprise, most suburbs are designed for homogeneity and comfort, built on proven patterns and templates and plans. This placelessness tends to translate into fiction, too. I feel like when I read a suburban story, I am likely to encounter similar themes of ennui and tedium and social sniping and class aspirations and anxious parenting and stifled marriages. But it doesn't matter a whole lot if it's suburban New Jersey or suburban Minneapolis or suburban Phoenix. The foliage may be different but the suburb's character is pretty similar.

Of course there is infinite mystery in the human mind and heart no matter where you are or where you live. And being from a small town or from a big city does not automatically make you more interesting or a better artist. As Wallace Stegner said, Anyone who has lived through childhood has more than ample writing material to work with. I just feel more deeply connected to writing that has a strong sense of place, more wildness and uncertainty in the surroundings, where you can turn a corner and come upon something never expected.

Related reading: the fantastic article "No Place Like Home" by David Guterson in Harper's Magazine, originally published in 1992. The then-brand-new gated community he describes is so stunningly controlled and rigid that it swings far enough to qualify as great fodder for fiction--something fabulist and terrifying.

I AM SO IN MINNESOTA

2009-01-05T20:45:00.001-05:00

HOW IN THE WORLD DID YOU END UP HERE

2008-12-26T17:47:00.018-05:00

I hit the thrift stores of Park Rapids today with Amy and my brother Nate. My favorite store in the world is Rich's Antiques, which consists of two neighboring white houses joined by a connecting addition, all of it stacked floor to ceiling with weird and awesome junk/treasures. It is miscellaneous heaven.

I found some great midcentury dinner plates, a hefty, crusty Griswold cast-iron skillet ("Buy it!" Amy commanded, and I listened, she is the chef), a small snowy painting, and a pair of handmade birchbark lampshades.

But the real find of the day was at Bearly Used, the thrift store a block away on Main, where I uncovered not only a quilted flannel for two bucks and a Pendleton shirt for four, but a T-shirt jammed into a crowded upper rack. Grabbing the soft brown edge of it and tugging it into view, I glanced at it indifferently before I realized what I was looking at.

It was a Swan Island T-shirt.

The late great Swan Island was my friends' band. They were based in Portland. Who in Park Rapids had a Swan Island shirt? They played only one national tour, and it was a couple of years ago. They never came anywhere near here--the closest they got was probably the Twin Cities, 200 miles away. The band didn't print a whole lot of those shirts. And, strangest of all: I designed that shirt.

Funny to stumble upon this artifact from my life that was relatively recent--the summer of 2006--but seems so distant now, in both time and place. That was a time when it seemed I saw Swan Island play every week--Mississippi Pizza, Holocene, the Wonder, basements, wherever. I drew that volcano design in black ink on white paper in my unfinished, cluttered garage (which Melissa dubbed my "man-shack"), during a hot week in August, with the garage door rolled up to open a wall of outdoor light, the pear tree in back heavy-limbed with fruit. I did not even have Emmett yet to curl up on the couch behind me. I was living on the last money left from my Norway job.

After making a good go of it, and a couple of great videos, Swan Island played their farewell show last January. The garage is now finished, transformed into a luminous pine-walled studio, and I am thousands of miles away from it. My life in Portland semi-exists still, but tenanted, tenuous.

And stranger still to be faced with my own design, lines drawn by my hand, staring back at me, somehow transported from my adopted hometown to my original one. The nostalgic pang surprises me; it's a shock to realize that something so recent is already gone. The shirt has been worn and washed many times, it's soft and a little shrunken and fading around the seams, but the gold ink still glitters.