White House

Sitting at an airport in Boston waiting to go home, have 2 hours until takeoff, there is some kid sitting across from me playing with an enormous Rubik's cube that lights up and squawks in this robot woman voice and counts and says incomprehensible shit, with his other hand he has a yo yo that he has let fly off his hand twice under my seat, sometimes he puts it down and swings this enormous stuffed bear around and shit, his lisp is killer, his brother just I think tattled on him because he was trying to get him to take a picture of his dick.

People have children everyday.

The parents of these two are dope, one is a dude who calls the kids 'dude' and has on a Godsmack tee shirt and is eating from under his nails and looks sort of like Henry Rollins but not well spoken.




If it were not for this $7.95 internet connection I would was would going to have to kill to kill a person, etc.




My last 5 days have been very long and very fun and very composed of things in thinging, I have thanks to Justin, Mike, Claire and Jeff who housed and transported me, and many others, I wish I could think better.



If this kid hits my laptop with his yo yo or his bear I am going to take his mother by the very large hunk of hair she has whooped up in a lock over her forehead, you will know that this has happened if this post ends somewhat abruptly, or maybe I will come back.




While I was in NY I read for Luca Dipierro and Michael Kimball's new 60 WRITERS 60 PLACES series, which is seeming amazing, Time Out NY wrote it up, here is a trailer:




Justin read in a pastry shop, it was fun. Justin also posted pictures from Thursday night here.

There were lots of readings.

Reading with Gary Lutz and Robert Lopez, Gary was very kind and quiet but funny when he talked, he had a turtle neck and stood up when he shook my hand, I wish Derek and Jess would return to America and live down the street, they are too good.



William Walsh is a very kind and quiet man, the Keyhole release was very nice, if already in my daze mind, I get tired in like 3 days of movement now, it is easy to feel erasers.







Here is another video from when I was in Balitmore, Adam is reading a very excellent drunken poem, which I defeat in power competition, this is before or after I poured water on him?, there was magic, Michael Kimball's filming and editing makes me peas and carrots in my hair:







In Amherst Mike Young did intros for people with a xylophone, it was in the fun room, I read from the gross book Sean and I are almost finished with, we read in a public deli and so it was rather awkward I think, * I pushed ahead * I said the naughties into the room and at first people were laughing a lot and by the end it was dead quiet, I think they started getting quiet during the part where the father is building the replica of the Holocaust in candy, all the readers were really good.

Bradley Sands is one of my favorite new people to listen to talk, I like the way he talks. Rachel Glaser is a good listener and funny, things are made of $$$$ in air

TTB and Mike Bushnell came through for a couple, Mike gave me a psychedelic portrait of Jesus, they disappeared quick.

Brian Foley is really funny and fun

I can't think anymore, i like all of all of so many people, I bought a ton a books n stuff, n stuff

tired




The kid is asking his mother about her blood, while rolling around in the floor with chocolate milk, 'how many windpipes do you have?': I am going to ask this kid to cowrite a book with me soon, I wonder if he has gmail.

Sorry, thanks to everyone who came out to things and talked about things to me and helped me, thanks to the kind nice peoples and to the mean peoples too, if there were some, I didn't find them.

Crush the shitty magician

No one knew who we were for Halloween.

*Dan Wickett wins*







In this photo I really had the look down, I think:



Peewee passed the Bar the other day, first try, good job Josh.




Dressed in such manner, I realized I talk and think like this character a lot on a daily basis, especially while driving, which then encouraged me to think I should reevaluate how I act.

3 other things:

1. 'Shithead' is a fun thing to say loud.

2. Hair gel sucks dick.

3. I will abide by the bolo tie in the future, for sure.






Got a galley of Brian Evenson's LAST DAYS in mail today, all other things in life will be put on hold. New Brian Evenson is probably top of my list of things I get excited about.

I have a short piece that will be on the Underland site soon, it had begun as the beginning of a very violent novel that I stopped writing for now, I will come back to it maybe.







I think finished a draft of RICKY'S ANUS yesterday, it is long, I put it in the think box, I know when I begin the 2nd draft it will grow by another 20-30% probably, unless maybe it shrinks by up to half, I have not decided, I am not going to open it for a while, I like the way I am thinking about it, 'it will likely never see the light of day.'

Immediately after finishing RICKY'S ANUS I decided it was time to write something more planned, something 'not me,' I started another novel, I am trying something completely different this time, something more structured and planned, out of the mode of the last year of writing, 'challenging myself n shit by playing by more rules n shit.' I will not say any of the words I say all the time this time. I will 'have some idea.' Let's see what happens.








EVER is almost done. Final proofing, finishing cover, wrapping that bitch up. Put it on your Christmas list, I think. I am making some things to go with it. More there soon.

A Calamari Press night is planned for March 5 with me, Robert Lopez & Gary Lutz (!!!) @ Word Bookstore in Brooklyn, mark it with a B.

I just thought for a long time about whether to capitalize the 's' in the last sentence of this post

I should probably be in a good mood but I'm still not.

A really good thing is happening, it seems. I'm not going to talk about it specifically for a while.

It concerns things that will manifest themselves almost one full year from now. It concerns words and time with words and like that.









I don't know, I wonder if I will get to a point that I do enough or have done enough on any given day that I feel satisfied or relaxed. I don't even know what I am looking for, I have found threads of it, and yet the more I do my nature seems to stay in one point, when it comes to certain things.

That is very vague.

All of this blather is vague-ish, I should probably delete it.











Things right now are very good.

I should feel gracious.

I really do, it is only in myself that I feel misaiming, or like every day is so short, or that I haven't found the button that slows the slur speed or something.











Today I reread a lot of Gary Lutz's STORIES IN THE WORST WAY. It'd been too long. On a sentence by sentence level it is probably one of the most pristine and wise books ever written. You could really take almost every single line and put it on a page by itself and show it to someone and have them be taken aback a little, or at least look and remember the words a while after, even out of context, more so than other words.

If you haven't read it, read it, move it to the top of your list. If you've read it, read it again. That's good advice.

I am a purple colored cistern.










I don't know what to do when I realize certain things.










Nice boy good boy.

There is a new issue of DIAGRAM up, I always get a little giddy when they put up a new one, I read it all, I usually click through and find the fiction or things shaped like fiction then I read the contributor notes then I read the poems, I like the author notes they let authors supply that illuminate or deviate from the text.

This issue has the fabulous Kathy Regina and Atlanta brethren Benjamin Solomon, both of those pieces are really strong and make me want to write.

Diagram, maybe that's the best thing about them: they make me want to write.

Sometimes I will keep certain texts on Diagram open on my browser behind the MS Word while I am writing and peek back and forth at them, I like the shapes of the texts.










I like the show I LOVE MONEY, I can't help it, I have watched every episode, some several times, when I miss one I feel anxious, I look for it to appear on ON DEMAND, I check sometimes often to see if they will update and put the new one on there, I can't help it.

WHO WANTS TO BE A MILLIONAIRE? has a new format, they tell you the categories of the questions now all in advance, and the contestants now have limited amounts of time to answer, it makes me sad.

I really don't watch that much TV, except when I feel bloated or it is very late and I have written all day.











I had a sentence in my head in the car today and I forgot it, that sentence was going to be a book

Every day I could probably make several sentences that would become a book, it's not an issue

I feel haphazard and giddy

I forget everything unless I write it down or don't forget it

Each snardvunt is a palimpeses in my gunt.











I am writing another book now, I can only do a couple lines a day on it, the lines are very broken up on the page, it about a woman who works in a grocery store, I think I am ripping off David Markson again, I don't care, it is going to take me a long time to write it I think, I want the book one day to be 450-550 pages of mostly single sentences or small sentence clusters making up each paragraph, I like reading books like that, I want it to be my semi-minimalist version of THE TUNNEL

THE TUNNEL is the greatest accomplishment in literature, as is also INFINITE JEST

suck my dick

Thoughts while editing/revising novel: HOW MANY FLOORS DOES THE NIGHTMARE HAVE?

1. Footnotes are addictive. I started with a couple here and there for an intended purpose and now am approaching the Wallace-ian (well not quite, there are none that go on for pages, just a couple that are paragraphs thank god). As of now there are 60. There is something immensely pleasing in adding extra info to the text without having it definitively mannered in the flow of the graphs. I do not recommend getting started with these, as it's hard to stop. (Sidenote: When I saw DFW read several years ago in Boston, someone asked him in the Q&A about his excessive footnoting and I swear he blushed a little, and said he'd had a problem, and he was mostly clean now, thanks.)

2. Though I think I like the original title now, part of me wants to call the book: READ THE CHILD THIS BOOK OR IT WILL SUFFER, which is a phrase that appears a little too early on in the narrative for me to be okay with using that title, though I think it would be kind of neat. Neat.

3. Esp. in early drafts I like to put one paragraph or set of graphs on a page by themselves so they can breathe and I can better see how to add or subtract from them, which is something I started doing in the other novel I wrote earlier this year. I have found it much easier to generate a lot more 'healthy feeling' text in this fashion, though now I have grown too fond of the graphs on their own pages to put a lot of them back together. SAMEDI THE DEAFNESS was the most recent book that made me want to write like this, though I think I read an interview with someone else, like maybe William Vollmann, who said this helped him a lot. It might have been DFW come to think of it, but I don't think so. Nicholson Baker? I can't remember. Oh, maybe Gary Lutz?

Actually I think it was Don Delillo.

Probably a lot of people do that.

4. Switching voices is fun but I think there usually needs to be at least some discernible reason for doing so ie: perspective, collision, etc., maybe something more than just a new voice, otherwise it disrupts more than it adds I think. This novel has several voices though they tend to play off each other and are set up in various parts of the novel distinctly to add to that section, then are not repeated. The hardest part I'm having in revision is there is a voice at the end of the novel that goes on after the last 'palpable action' occurs and kind of deals with some of the energy left at the end, I think I like the way it works, though I am having trouble making all the words fall in line. Funny how you can write carefully, with attention to every syllable, and then come back the next time and look and say, 'What the fuck was I thinking?' Certain kinds of writing are all about mood, I think. I've been in a lot of weird moods lately.

The worst example in me of this is I was writing a novel about a guy who tells his son he's got a job at Disney World so his son will be more happy and excited about moving to Disney World, then he locks himself in his den and starts destroying all his old records. At that time I was reading Gordon Lish a lot, I read like 4 or 5 of his books in a row, and I went back and tried to add a scene where the guy leaves the den and gets in his car and decides to kill himself by parking on the highway in the fog and getting hit, then he gives up and goes to a diner and sits there and some guy at the counter orders him a full enormous steak dinner with everything and demands he eats all of it, then makes him come out to his car and get in and sit. The scene ended like that. It sounds better now recounting it than it was when I tried to insert it, trying to write somewhat like Lish, god it was terrible.

5. Reading Aase Berg's REMAINLAND while line-editing certain things has added a lot of visceral elements to the mind of the book: I felt close to those words anyway, but specifically looking at the phraseology each Berg poem between revising my own lines is interesting in its collision.

6. I think this novel could be considered a sister novel to the one I wrote in ten days earlier this year, though I'm not sure how to say why, nor should I.

7. Advice from a very drunk Tom Bissell while I was at Bennington, advice I have cherished since (this is an approximation of how he said it, though he said it better I am sure): "People say in writing you have to kill your babies. Don't kill your babies! They are your babies. They want to be there. Nurture them. They are what is most you."

8. I would love to use this image turned vertical for the cover of the novel now. I can see the bold font on there massive. So me. It would probably work for anything of the books I've been submitting come to think of it. Scare the customer.



9. More later.