THE VOICES IN YOUR HEAD

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

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

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

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

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

"SUSPICIOUS ACTIVITY," AKA THE INCIDENT REPORT IS BACK

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"

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

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

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

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

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

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devotionals for deer hunters

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