Rainy Day, Dream Away

The West End Restaurant near Columbia has removed all of its Beat Generation memorabilia from its walls. I sat near the open window eating a Cuban pork sandwich and watching it rain - everyone scurrying for buses & awnings. Then I wheeled a barrow of coins to the bank and was helped by a teller named Charisma. Commerce Bank doesn't take out a percentage when you bring in coins, which is an encouraging policy.

I thought it would be a good idea to ride around on the buses to stay dry and see a few things. And might have been, if not for the deadly trio of rain, construction, and rush hour. I bailed out on Fifth Street and ducked into the Museum of the City of New York where they had an exhibit on New Yorker cartoons pertaining to psychiatrists' couches. I got in for free because it was nearly closing time and had fifteen minutes to take everything in before they booted me out, so it became a little like that scene from Band of Outsiders where the characters race through the Louvre at breakneck speed. There was an exhibit on trade in New York, showing dioramas of the East River wharves in the 1800s. Seeing all the ship rigging and wooden barrels made me feel I missed my era.

More wandering in the rain. In Chelsea I saw a sign which read "for Time Machine, ring 2nd floor bell." Something about New York instinctively makes me want to eat healthier. Often find myself grabbing apples from corner delis. Some people smoke cigarettes on rainy streetcorners, other people eat apples. Maybe some do both.

Haven't found any good leftover furniture along the sidewalks yet. I'll keep an eye out tomorrow. Stands to reason there should be some good loot in Morningside Park territory. I'd like to find a halfway decent table and chair for writing purposes, and the thought of actually spending money seems laughable.

Box of Corn

Alright, not so impressed with the New York library system so far. It seems to be quicker to subway around to the various locations to collect what you're looking for than to rely on the interlibrary loan system. Fortunately this is a lot easier to do in New York than it would be in Boston, where the public transportation system is more limited in comparison. Also disappointed to discover they only had one of the CDs in the Bonzo Dog Cornology box set. I did pick up a collection of Harold Lloyd shorts on DVD and a documentary on Magritte.

I sat for a while in Bryant Park, daringly reading in the shade of a tree. A pigeon did his business a few feet away, which made me glance up nervously. The pigeons here are street savvy. I imagine they coo in a Brooklyn accent. "Hey, you gonna eat that or what?" Buses passed heading for exotic-sounding places like Eltingville and New Dorp.

Wandering around 14th Street, I encountered the world's skinniest man outfitted in tight black lycra and PVC boots. He looked like a biker stork. I passed two or three playgrounds for dogs and a children's garden (though I spotted no children growing there). I was even smiled at by a few women in the East Village. That never happened in Boston, where eyecontact is banned with penalty of jailtime. I spotted a high ratio of attractive older women here (hub of the MILF scene?). There also seems to be a high tolerance for diversity here. Not necessarily out of virtue, but because there's so many people crammed in here & no one has the time to spare for intolerance.

Oh, I also met a peanut-sized shitzu named Snorkie, whose human was struggling to stuff him into her handbag.

Squeegee

Not a lot of activity, city-wise. Mostly just walking around locating the groceries and laundromats. Walked all up & down Amsterdam & Broadway looking for a squeegee on a stick - you know, where the soap is stored in the handle. Finally found the last one at a pintsized market on 125th Street. I'm incapable of washing dishes without a squeegee on a stick, so a heavy sigh of relief was breathed.

Having visited New York often in the past, I'm not really feeling the frenzied need to find out what's around every corner and above every subway stop, the way I did when I first moved to Boston. It's more of a relaxed Arthur Fonzarelli feeling. "Hey, I live here now, no hurry."

I do have my NYPL library card already, let it be known. I've got my priorities on straight. I've already ordered a box set of the Bonzo Dog Band & plan on heading midtown tomorrow to pick that up & give this library system the onceover.

The Big Onion

Day one of the New York experiment.

I've been keeping my eye out for signs. Am I on the right track here, was moving from Boston to New York a good idea, have I displeased the deities, have I innocently flapped the butterfly wings that will lead to catastrophic results further downwind, that sort of thing.

So far the unsupervised annoying wriggling kid seated next to me on the Chinatown bus puked up his cranberry juice at my feet. A little got on my bag. It's a classy way to enter a new city with stomach acid scars on your bag. Then there was a flash thunderstorm over Astoria that lasted all of five minutes, while the sun never stopped shining, which gave the effect of one of those old solemn religious paintings. Afterwards venders in the street were standing ankle-deep in water as they grumpily packed up their wares. Finally, back at the pad, a glass of 7-Up spontaneously cracked of its own accord with a sharp "pop," but held its contents. Unsure of what had happened I lifted the glass, resulting in a puddle of 7-Up. I suspect either poltergeists or telekinetic tomfoolery.

We're off to a baffling start.

A Fistful of Ink

Thursday's featured authors at the Brookline Booksmith were Steve Almond and Daphne Kalotay. I came in midway through Daphne's reading, and so missed much of her tale of familial psychosis at a wedding. Steve read from his epistolary collaboration with Julianna Baggott, entitled Which Brings Me to You. The concept is of a series of letters exchanged between a lust-tinged couple determining whether or not to get involved with each other. Steve's excerpt concerned one such letter which the male character penned while in a vulnerable state of inebriation, and a followup letter recapping his comi-tragic exploits in attempting to recover the first letter from the postal service. Pepper spray and a dinner roll were involved.

I've heard Steve read a few times now, both fiction and non (which in his case are not far removed), and he has always been excruciatingly entertaining. And I admire his daring. I plowed through his first collection of short stories called My Life in Heavy Metal, which is much more nuanced than its title might suggest. Emotionally his stories are a punch in the chest. As a writer he has an impulse to charge fearlessly into squeamish territory. And he knows exactly how to defuse tension with humor, which is how he pulls it off. He has no trouble blurting out things which others wouldn't dare mention out of politeness or fear or lack of notice. And there are some withering realizations. "There is a point you reach when you are just something bad that happened to someone else."

Almond has been in the news lately for resigning his post at Boston College in protest of Condoleezza Rice being invited to be the graduation commencement speaker. He addressed this hastily during the Q&A portion of the evening. He'd expected to come under fire from the rightwing, but was disappointed that the leftwing didn't use the publicity as a launchpad to attack Rice and expose her dishonesty. To those who applaud his efforts, his response is "well, thanks, but that doesn't really help the issue."

"Jazz is not dead. It just smells funny."

Tonight guitar legend Allan Holdsworth played a set at Johnny D's. Cover was pretty steep, especially for those in the crowd with their heads craned to watch the ballgame on the corner television. The guys beside me were discussing the span between Holdsworth's thumb and pinkie. Behind me an older fellow in a bandanna was lamenting to a silent father and son how cheap tequila used to be in Mexicali back in his day. Aside from the waitresses, there were no single women in the entire joint.

Here is my relationship to jazz: I love practically everything from Louis Armstrong to John Coltrane. After that it gets a little dicey. Mahavishnu Orchestra were really good. And some of Tony Williams' stuff. But by and large, post-Coltrane jazz sounds very safe and sterile to me. There's a certain danger aspect to Charlie Parker hunched on some cellar bandstand struggling not to keel over into the kickdrum from all the heroin in his blood. The sound of those acoustic instruments being emotionally pummeled and sucked into the cheap little microphones gave it such vitality. Once electricity - particularly electric keyboards - were introduced to the equation, it just doesn't seem to contain that same sense of rage and despair. It just contains a lot of notes.

Alright, so Holdsworth. Indisputably a great instrumentalist. But the music never seems to start until he steps on the fuzzbox and starts playing runs. Before that it's nothing more than a string of arbitrary "jazzy" chords. In a way it reminds me of heavy metal in the late eighties where you had a lot of stock guitar riffs (generally derived from Ace Frehley) and throwaway lyrics about boobs and authority, and the musicians in the audience would wait patiently for the interlude, at which point the guitarist would kick the singer aside and whip through his arsenal of heavily practiced twiddly bits. Afterwards you'd think, if that's the exciting part, why bother even having a song around it? Holdsworth is in a class far above all that, of course. I'm familiar with him primarily through his 1985 album Metal Fatigue, which features a placid singer who always made me think of the sort of featureless crooners you find in Holiday Inn lounges in places like Iowa. And the music wasn't too interesting until he was booted aside and Holdsworth took over. There was no such singer present tonight, however. The trio was comprised of Holdsworth, one-time Zappa drummer Chad Wackerman (whose name still makes the adolescent in me smirk), and Jimmy Johnson on bass.

For a supposedly cerebral form of music, the response to showmanship was noteworthy. It seems pretty easy to get a roar out of the audience by using a handful of gimmicks. Usually a lot of fast runs culminating in a high repetitive figure will do it. Sweeping arpeggios high on the neck are also reliable crowdpleasers. The drummer too can get the crowd excited by a lengthy fill featuring a fast circular pattern on the toms. Meanwhile the bassist can grab a lot of attention for himself by deploying a few fleetfingered hammer-ons, especially if done while quickly ascending or descending the fretboard.

I generally found the music to be meditative. I would pay close attention to the intricacy of certain sections, then find myself sooner or later drifting off into abstract thought. I don't think that was the same as being bored.

Smut for Dummies

Circlet Press has just unleashed The Erotic Writer's Market Guide upon an unsuspecting public. It contains plenty of helpful advice about writing erotica, submitting to markets, fighting self-censorship, the use of pseudonyms, tax tips, and of course lists of hundreds of paying publishers and magazines in the field of erotica. (And yes, as a matter of fact I did help to edit it.) Grab y'rself a copy and start getting your homebrewed smut out there to the world. It's doing no one any good hidden at the bottom of your sock drawer.

Might vs Write

The, ahem, best American fiction from the last 25 years has been established for us by the New York Times. Awfully decent of them. Beloved by Toni Morrison comes in over the finish line in first place. Delillo's Underworld and Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian come in hot on its heels. And twenty-two ran. I haven't read Beloved, and now I'm strangely tempted not to. Underworld is a good'un, though I think I prefer White Noise. It's more concise, more of a deft rabbit punch of satire. But it's Philip Roth who dominates the list with a total of six novels. I guess that means that while Morrison wins for speed, Roth triumphs for pacing. Or something.

I get awfully uncomfortable when literature merges too closely with athletics. The sight of scorecards in the literary arena makes my neck constrict. I think the urge to determine a first place comes from a bad place in the American psyche. The word "bully" comes to mind.

The Modern Library's list of 100 best novels gives me a similar twinge, although I'll admit I do glance at it occasionally when looking for something new to read. And the discrepancy between the board's list and the reader's list is telling. There's a suspicious amount of Scientology and Objectivism heading the reader's list. And high atop the board's list is Joyce's Ulysses, which, though one of my favorite books of all time mostly because of the sheer magnitude of it, isn't one I'd necessarily recommend to all that many people. Whereas book number two, The Great Gatsby, is more likely to affect a greater amount of readers.

What I'm feebly getting at (I think) is that making a list of the year's best whatevers can be constructive - but numbering the list is not.

Them's Good Grammar

The singular they: I'm all for it. I use it frequently. I've heard no other eloquent alternative suggestions, except possibly to recast the sentence in a way that avoids the need for it. But that isn't always effective. I'm going to continue to use it when I see fit, and I don't want to hear any whining from the Prescriptive wing. I'm not going to gripe that your he or she is about as eloquent as a frog fart, so you can just as well keep respectfully silent when I bandy about my singular they.

Can one be a Prescriptivist and still embrace Shakespeare and Joyce? I'd like to hear someone reconcile that.

I caught a split infinitive in the New York Times today: "While Mr. Jackson began to routinely rotate through different teams of advisers in the 90's..." I don't particularly care - why shouldn't the English split an infinitive just because Latin was incapable of doing it? Out of reverence? I just wonder if this is a case of ignorance or defiance.

I stand in favor of defiance. Why should we be bound by arbitrary rules some ornery schoolteacher came up with three hundred years ago? There's no order to English - it's the result of linguistically raping and pillaging every other language it came across in its spread. Why pretend it was carefully constructed in some germ-free laboratory? Embrace its chaos. That's what makes it such a great playground for writers.

Bang a Jong (Get It On)

Alright, so I just finished reading Erica Jong's seminal Fear of Flying, inspired by hearing her speak recently. I read it once eons ago and considered it a firmly raised middle finger to moral stodginess and a spirited celebration of freedom. This time, while still regarding the sexual and emotional candor as laudable and the Isadora Wing's contradictory impulses well-examined, I found that the actual prose and dialogue became increasingly more frustrating as I read. All the gobs of literary allusions come across like unabashed namedropping - as though Jong is eager to impress us with an inventory of her bookshelves. There must be an average of at least one literary reference per page, and Isadora gets awfully smug when a character doesn't catch one of her referential quips. Not to mention the dollops of self-righteousness where the narrator gets to tell off the assorted pompous characters who engulf her on her journeys. Jong repeatedly sets up straw men in order to knock them down and the whole thing reeks of a rigged fight. Example: the snooty bastard with the docile wife on the train who starts a conversation with Isadora about the collapse of standards in education for no other purpose than to get his feathers ruffled when she vehemently disagrees with him. The scene is conveniently placed in the story to occur exactly when she has set off on her own and needs to prove her newfound independence. It feels staged and I don't buy it.

Another gripe - far too much ink is wasted on her continuing struggle to write. There are few things more tedious than listening to a writer lament about not being able to write. I have very little patience with writers writing about writers writing, or such as in this case, writers not writing. That approach is very limiting in scope and smacks of self-importance - the tortured artist syndrome which is mostly of interest only to fellow tortured artists. It seems like a relatively recent phenomenon. To my knowledge, authors prior to the twentieth century rarely made writers their central characters (Knut Hamsun's Hunger being a singular exception) they just wrote about people.

It's easy to imagine how Fear of Flying burst onto the scene in 1973, kicking down doors which had long screamed for kicking down. And that aspect of the novel is still very potent and reason enough to keep it alive. Isadora Wing is at her best when being brutally honest with herself and at her worst when trying to convince us of how clever she is. It sounds strange to say it, but I think she suffers from having read too much during her formative years. Balance is a healthy thing. Once in a while you really should just put down the book and go outside to skip some stones.

The Dresden Dolls Ain't Nuttin Ta Fuck Wit

Friday night was the Boston CD release party for The Dresden Dolls' new album Yes, Virginia... at the Orpheum Theatre. As an emotionally-stirred Amanda Palmer remarked while surveying the nearly packed 2,800-seat theatre, they've come a long way since trying to lure audiences to come see them play the coffin-sized Lizard Lounge. (If that paragraph doesn't sound like archetypal newspaper article fodder, I don't know what does.)

The audience, it should be mentioned, consisted of a high volume of striped clothing, bowler hats, guys in dresses, pagan princesses, pancake makeup, elves, living statues, and strangely enough, even some normal streetclothes now and again. The nefarious Dresden Dolls Brigade lurked outside in the alleyway, drawing chalk figures on nearby surfaces and generally behaving outlandishly.

First act on the bill was Porsches on the Autobahn - essentially a DJ, some highly caffeinated guys in suits armed with mikes, and a steamer trunk's worth of props. Their shtick seemed to be campy kung fu dancing and German translated badly into English. The only song I caught the lyrical gist of concerned the urge to have sexual relations with a girl's retina. During the final song the Dresden Dolls pounced onstage for some high energy boogying.

Inscrutable swordswallower Tyler Fyre played master of ceremonies between sets, introducing sideshow attractions such as a floozy who did a striptease while swinging a hulahoop and a frizzyheaded mad scientist and fraulein duo who told fractured fairy tales, then hurled toast at the audience.

HUMANWINE was the second musical act, bringing their wineriddled gypsy punk manifestos to the masses. Holly Brewer looked so diminutive when she first stepped onto the vast Orpheum-sized stage, but when the band exploded into "Big Brother," her formidable lungs let no one down. Drummer Nathan Greenslit must have bribed the soundman, because every nuanced brushstroke was audible, not to mention a kick drum like a heart seizure. They offered us "Rivolta Silenziosa," "Script Language," "Fattest Thin" (the stomping ogre singalong), and a few new numbers that sounded like a progrock band getting ambushed by razorwielding hoodlums. Amanda and Brian joined them onstage for the finale of "Wake Up," banging on a hodgepodge of bangable things.




Alright then, the Dresden Dolls. This seemed like a dressed-down event for them, though the trademark bowler hat and striped stockings were present. They opened the set with "Sex Changes," sort of the aural equivalent of a drill through the groin. In the best possible way, of course. The set list was heavily tipped in favor of the new album, which is to be expected, and we were treated to scalding versions of "Back Stabber," "Dirty Business," and "Mandy Goes To Med School."

"Coin-Operated Boy" was gotten out of the way early on, and included some deadly doublebass peddle action during the interlude. Surprisingly nothing caught fire during a hyper-accelerated "Girl Anachronism." In fact, at the end of "Necessary Evil" an overenthused Brian toppled over backwards, knocking equipment left and right. Amanda took the moment to introduce him as "Brian Viglione on the drums and the floor."

There was a round of cover tunes as well, notably Jacques Brel's "Amsterdam," the Maurice Sendak/Carol King ditty "Pierre," and Leonard Cohen's "Dance Me to the End of Love," which they intended to record for a friend's wedding, but ended up struggling with the harmony. After a few amusing false starts they nailed it on the fourth attempt.

There were guest appearances as well. Holly Brewer crept out of the shadows for some soaring backup vocals on "Delilah" against a rather apocalyptic backlighting. The Dolls also brought onstage a cluster of feather boa-toting thirteen-year-olds known as Sparkle Motion Girl Authority for a schoolgirl rendition of "I Love Rock and Roll." They fucked that one up too, but I doubt anyone minded. They fuck up charmingly.

Amanda introduced the encore by bemoaning the lack of energy at modern day concerts, notably audiences who watch with arms folded and heads nodding, as though in fear of expression. "Something died in the nineties." And she admired the energy issuing from the crowd on Brian's roadfood Iron Maiden CDs. (Brian flashed devil's horns.) With that they launched into "Sing," during which they were joined onstage by a HUMANWINE and Girl Authority chorus for some quality group ahhing. Many contributing audience members did their best to make Amanda proud. A sappy yet stirring way to end the evening.

I Saw Regina Spektor Tonight & You Didn't

I'm a relative newcomer to the wondrous Regina Spektor. A NYC friend told me about her, then I borrowed Soviet Kitsch from the library & was hooked. I always figure I'm the last person to get into an act these days, & by the time that I do everyone else is already scoffing at them as Old Hat (see Modest Mouse). I figured this would be the same with Regina Spektor, but I still get a lot of blank looks when I mention her name. When they ask what sort of music she plays I usually describe her as the prankster daughter of Tori Amos & Woody Allen - which makes perfect sense to me, but I'm not sure how informative that is for the uninitiated.

Her show at the Axis was sold out, but thanks to my friendly neighborhood craigslist, I managed to secure a stray ticket. Axis, it turns out, is a crappy place for a musician to play. Especially one whose music is as subtle as Ms Spektor's. It's a small venue - more or less a back cloakroom to the much-larger Avalon next door. Every time a staff member opened a side door which separated the two venues, very un-Spektorish house music leaked in, which contributed nothing to the softer numbers. Ms Spektor kept her cool when this would happen, charmingly grooving along to the intrusive music between numbers. "There's a giant pink elephant in the corner," she said at one point, "but I'm just going to treat it like this is our house & the neighbors are throwing a party."

She played all the crowd favorites from Soviet Kitsch - "Carbon Monoxide," "Ode to Divorce," "Us," "The Ghost of Corporate Future," & "Poor Little Rich Boy," during which she whacked a stool with a drumstick in her left hand while playing piano with her right. She did however leave out my favorite tune from the album, "Chemo Limo." Also on the playlist was a jaunty ditty about finding a statue of baby Jesus in the window of a 99 cent store, one about a skeletal Ezra Pound asking if she could spare a pound of flesh, & another featuring Delilah reflecting upon her hirsute relationship with Samson.

For most the show I stood on a side platform (near the bar) overlooking the crowd. At one point there was a sea of illuminated cell phones held aloft, just like the swaying cigarette lighters of yore. I couldn't help ruminating that analog fire has now been replaced by the digital glow of technology.

Her opening act was a singer/guitarist named Jenny Owen Youngs who was funny & flirty, & possessor of a wicked right hand strum technique. Unfortunately she tended to remain stage left, which meant a structural column mostly blocked her from my line of vision unless I leaned far over the balcony railing. Which I did.

A beautiful show, despite the setbacks. But I'd like to advise Ms Spektor's booking agent to snag her a gig at the Paradise next time, where she can ply her trade without fear of aural competition.

Mah Jong

Tonight I trekked down to Brookline to catch the infamous Erica Jong reading from her latest outing, Seducing the Demon, which is an autobiography (of sorts) of her literary life as liberator or pornographer, depending on where you're standing. Jong was intelligent, articulate, & strongly opinionated. She steered frequently into the realm of current events, which is clearly a sensitive topic for her. The attentive audience filled the windowless basement of the independent bookstore to capacity, with many members spilling onto the stairs. They even remembered to shut off their cell phones at the outset, a surprisingly considerate gesture.

Jong mentioned "the zipless fuck" early on, perhaps just to get it out of the way. It sort of deflated any tension from those wondering whether to expect feminism or smut. A little of each perhaps? She didn't have to worry about anyone leaning over & whispering cautiously "now Ms Jong, you know this is a family program, right?" Everyone seemed to know what they were getting themselves into & I spotted no emergency escapes.

Beforehand I'd heard several mentions of Fear of Flying bandied through the crowd. Obviously that is still the yardstick she is measured by. A mixed blessing. Is the rest of her oeuvre subpar to that notorious novel, or simply not as sensational? As a prospective artist, the thought of requiring a media blitzkrieg to attract any sort of serious attention for your work is disheartening.

The writer's role, Jong claimed, is to present truths. She paraphrased Norman Mailer that if a writer isn't pissing someone off, they're not doing their job. She insisted that censorship is still alive & well, just that it's craftier these days & harder to spot. She pointed out that most of the media in the country is run by six conglomerates, who filter the information they distribute according their political agendas. She targeted Murdoch in particular.

She lamented the low number of readers in our culture, & pointed out that "if people would read Herodotus they'd realize this Iraq situation is business as usual. Historically the people in charge always go to war with pretenses of correcting injustices while really doing it for profit." She also mentioned the "death of the middle class" in which fathers have to work too much, mothers have to work too much, children need to be shipped off to child care. She suggested this is a deliberate condition, to keep people too busy for activism.

Alas, this was the converted she was preaching to. I was ultimately disappointed in the audience, who didn't appear very inclined towards critical thought, at least not the more audible ones. The chatty woman beside me seemed more concerned with critical reception of the new book than in its contents. "What are people saying about it?" I overheard several accounts of "I liked it. It was interesting." Opinions rarely seem to venture past the point of "it was interesting" these days. Maybe I'm just eavesdropping on the wrong people.

The Q&A which followed the reading was mostly pointless. Many didn't actually have questions to ask, they just wanted to snag a platform to voice their opinions, which were without exception echoes of what Jong had already said. The woman beside me did a generous amount of ahhing & nodding, as though engaged in a private conversation with Jong herself. One older couple passed notes back & forth on a notepad as if they were in school. I couldn't read what was on the pad but it looked like mathematical formulas.

A provocative evening in many ways. In retrospect, however, I wouldn't have minded a little more smut.

A Whirling Skirmish

I jabbed a penknife into the bicep of the football hero. He won't be throwing with that arm again anytime soon. He smelled of unwashed gorilla genitals. I snuck up behind him while he slouched on the bleacher, gazing up at a cheerleader's underpants which were blue and white striped. When she saw what I had done she screamed, then laughed, then screamed. She yelled that she was going to report me to the coach. I didn't know who the coach was and he didn't know me from anyone. The football hero started to sob and begged me to call the field doctor. I told him I was a Christian Scientist and his injury was due to erroneous thinking. He evidently wasn't familiar with the writings of Mary Baker Eddy. I asked if he had a library card, but he wasn't paying much attention to me at that point. These damn self-absorbed athletes. The field doctor was located and diagnosed something about a severed tendon. I tried to sneak away but two other footballers cornered me. They looked ridiculous in their enormous shoulderpads and small heads. Like ants on steroids. They took turns beating on me with their fatty knuckles, then wiping the blood off on my shirt. When they dropped me to the grass I plunged my penknife into the foot of one of them. He wailed like a little girl lost in a supermarket. The other one punched me hard in the back several times. I think he was aiming for my spine. Their kind are all about punching and shooting. It never occurs to them to cut or stab. Even when he broke two of my fingers to wrest the penknife away, he didn't use my own weapon on me. No sense of irony. I certainly would have bludgeoned him with his football helmet if given the chance.

JT LeRoy is Alive & Well

JT LeRoy has returned. In an hour-long interview with Charlie Rose, LeRoy describes why he faked his own literary hoax. "I didn't believe in myself," he explained, tears welling behind his sunglasses. "I was going through an emotional crisis and I didn't think anyone else should have believed in me either." Critics have charged the reclusive wunderkind with drumming up rumors of his own nonexistence as a publicity stunt for Asia Argento's filming of his short story collection, The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things. "People are so cynical," LeRoy countered. "They always expect the worst from you." The film version of Heart Is Deceitful is scheduled to open in Cambridge at the Kendall Theatre in late March, although charges have recently been lodged by Boston Globe investigative reporter Kirby Brickbat that the film does not actually exist. Brickbat claims audiences who turn up for the premiere will instead be treated to the latest outing from actor Steve Guttenberg, who reportedly organized the deception in an attempt to revive his own sagging career.

Scrod

With rubbery grin & saltlick hair he wheels through the frozen fish section, a veritable whirlpool of waterlife. He coughs on the thick stench of coral reefers, poolsharks packed in like sardines. He comes to rest on his hunches as sweet mermaid Marian bats an eyewink. "That's one hell of a grotto booty," he smirks in thought. "Say," she counters, "is that a dorsal fin on your back or are you just happy to..." et cetera.

She lures him on with wiggle of tail, back to her penthouse aquarium where he flounders in conversation, nervous with jellyfish in his belly, a barely concealed yearning to harpoon her. Champagne uncorked with lobster claw, he strokes her fins as rain treacles down the pane.

Morning on the seabed, the sunlight makes her crabby. He bids her farewell & crawls back into the slime.

Alice Down the Well

Extended Spam Haiku

hour allow speak
My look begin
will have fit
Be wakeup stand
Not study play
It begin wakeup
night dance shut
those explain drink
you wait draw
close open finish
incredible speak cancel

The Spamcaster Museum

A village girl was raped by city maniacs under the dry sick stars. What will you pour the open cosmetic porters in before Julie's scolding ticket? And if Sheri happily believes it too, will she wander the raw river eternal? One more thin kettle and she'll superbly nibble everybody. The shirts will behave, otherwise the powder in the dryer might kick some pathetic tickets. Don't fucking scold tamely while you're sowing to a quiet sauce.

Chuck was a wide painter who climbed easily along the highway of pumpkins with his wandering cup. This explains the raw tyrant in front of the shower. If the wet balls can pour monthly, the shallow pen may rattle more ventilators. Let's join the poor monoliths, shall we? I don't care for the distant pools in their solving bowls. One more blunt stupid ulcer from my fear of smog. Sheri changes the sauce behind hers, which surprisingly helps. Dream plates of furious eggs inside the polite candles.

"Hey, go irritate a dose!"

You should always behave the butcher. You won't dye me receiving at your difficult mirror. Angry grasps within dark tired deserts. Lisette laughs, then hourly burns a cheap frame in front of Cypriene's bedroom. Jugs play with fat squares, unless they're noisy. The younger carpenters hate the easy drawer. They won't attack the wrinkles. The jackets, pears, and jars are all closed and pretty. Every hollow teacher departs, aching around Chester's open weaver. She'll look the dry tape over. She'd rather talk weakly than taste Maggie's lazy potter. But who wouldn't?

"You won't expect me through your hollow doorway." This in a crinkly voice.

There are no sad codes against the rural morning, recollecting in the lean night. They pull deep oranges from beneath the humble easy window, as butchers cook the grey cap in the answer kettle. Some jackets smell and burn. Others nearly creep. Tired grocers with their old egg answers get out their lifting jars. Lots of fat elder dryers steadily creep as the strange raindrops explain. Hardly any sad empty porters will walk among upper dry cafes. A raw dog nibbles on a clever carrot.

"Martin, have an outer coconut. You won't play it."

He sat dreaming of lazy caves. Just dreaming among a tree about the highway was too pretty for Sheri to climb it. Her wrinkle was dirty, clean. She converses with inner sunshines on a sweet pathetic morning. The boats, coconuts, and candles are dull and tired. The ugly frames jump with the blank mountain before the old rain became the solid ocean.

"I am freely clever, so I kick you," she lied.

"It's very raw today."

Chester's carrot pours through our draper after we laugh over it. He wants to clean healthy raindrops from Sheri's canyon. A boat for the bathroom.

"You won't burn me living without your stupid planet," he said, but not without hope.

Felix eerily kicks them too. We usually irritate his polite enigma. Shirts nibble outside younger mountains, unless they're sad. Urban bandages pull toward a satellite as the dog combs beneath their forks.

Let's believe in the clean evenings.

She Said She Said

The current stance in literature, apparently, is to frown upon using any verb other than "said" as dialogue tags. I've heard this from a few different so-called authoritative sources recently. Now, I can understand developing writers getting carried away in their haste to be unboring, & going overboard with their tags. And I can understand the inclination of exasperated educator-types to stifle said sophomoric excess. But it distracts me to no end in a story to encounter endless lines of "he said," "she said," "he said," "she said," ad nauseum. It gives me the impression the writer has a limited vocabulary. So I respectfully disagree with this verdict. I say the key is to have exactly the perfect word for the situation at hand. With any description, really. Nothing excessive, nothing superfluous - just BANG, the precise word that nails the situation right through the forehead. If it's a shrug instead of a said, so be it.

I'm not a big fan of barebones writing, I might add. I want my authors to sweat for their art, & discover things in the mundane I never realized were there. The less I am told by the author, the more information I end up filling in on my own. And the more I fill in on my own, the more inclined I feel to expect a certain percentage of the publishing royalties for having to do so much of the work myself. At least to get a sizeable refund off the cover price.

Spinach on the Brain

I'm Popeye the Sailor Man
I'm Popeye the Sailor Man
I'm strong to the finich
Cause I eats me spinach
I'm Popeye the Sailor Man

Am I the only one who, as a cabbage-brained little tyke, puzzled over what the hell a "finich" was?

The Giant Bat

In Market Square, a giant bat was hung on a lamppost, its wings spread outwards, its tiny vermilion eyes scanned across the angry mob. It hissed in defiance as torches were cruelly thrust into its side. The herdlike townsfolk milled about, curious children in shabby dress stood on tiptoe or climbed atop wooden benches or stone walls to peer over the heads of the adults at the proceedings. A nobleman distinguished from the rest by his groomed attire stood at the head of the throng, poised to speak. The swarming crowd was subdued to murmurs as he addressed the imprisoned creature in a controlled voice.

—We hereby charge thee with acts of terror, the spreading of ill-merited grief, nocturnal prowling and stalking, provoking fear and horror in the hearts of the innocent, and stealing the souls from the good people for your own villainous purposes. Your pronounced sentence is death.

The onlookers roared in agreement. An armored guard, stationed beside the beast, lifted his edged halberd from where it rested and, upon command from the nobleman, thrust it deep into the belly of the forlorn creature. The giant bat hissed angrily, fangs bared. Bloody spittle sputtered from its black lips and its wings quivered violently. Then the outburst quickly died away in its throat and its form grew limp. The square grew quiet as the fearsome head fell to one side, lifeless.

There were cheers and cries of celebration, victorious laugher, women spun in the arms of their husbands, children dashed amid the tangles of legs, elders looking skyward. All the while, a black ominous vapor spewed from the stabwound, thickly gathering in the torchlight. The onlookers ceased their merriment and turned their attention to the bewildering sight. The impenetrable mist quickly filled the square, choking the townspeople, stinging their eyes, burning their throats, biting into their flesh with unseen teeth. Dreadful screams escaped their lips. Their eyes bulged and they retched violently, the vile stench of vomit filling the nostrils. Some clawed at bleeding faces, wrenching out eyes with trembling fingers. One woman, seeking escape, slit her own throat with a ragged thumbnail. When at last they had all fallen, the deathfog began to lift. The tattered bodies lay horribly over one another, with twisted limbs and terrible wounds, ghastly faces of immortalized terror.

And in the center, the giant bat was gone. In its place lay the dead nobleman sprawled outright across the pedestal base of the lamppost. His grimy fingers were curled into a talon still quivering, his empty eyesockets turned towards the dark heavens as though trapped in a piteous deathplea with the immortal gods, seeking forgiveness for his grave misjudgment.

Munch's Venus

The Sisyphus Club

Recently while walking past a Starbucks with a friend, I commented on all the consumer whores sitting shamelessly in the window sucking on their corporate-sponsored brew. Look at them - they're not even aware of the fact that their souls have been eaten out.

Later a thought dawned on me - is there any difference between sitting in a Starbucks versus sitting in an independent coffeehouse while gazing at a laptop with a glowing apple on the lid? While wearing sneakers with a stylish check mark on the side & a jacket with North Face written on the south face? Here I am typing this on a name brand computer while sipping from a name brand beverage and listening to a name brand CD on a name brand stereo. My room is lit by a name brand lightbulb, I'm wearing name brand jeans, & glancing occasionally at a name brand alarm clock. Gah! I never even got the chance to succumb. I'm already living inside the machine.

I really must get around to reading No Logo.

Or better yet, the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

A Salty Venture

Sauntering along steelrust railroad tracks, kicking shale, my burlap bag slung across my jacketed back, brimming the outskirts of a nameless grey seaside town on a chilly morning. I find myself amid rank weeds and discarded litter in a vacant lot behind a ramshackle garage built from dirty orange bricks. A tiny miniature trailer lies overturned at my feet, like a discarded toy in the grass. Stooping, I retrieve the artifact and shake it slightly like a thermos, curious as to the contents. I strike a match on my denim trouserleg and hold it near the trailer door for a glimpse into its dark interior. A tiny matchbox man leaps out in a panic, his head ablaze. He runs in frantic circles, waving his little stickarms before stumbling over a haphazard leaf. Using the leaf like a fireblanket, he extinguishes his flaming head. He peers up, dazed, his little head like a lightbulb, his eyes like pinwheels.

I'm not clear how he can fit inside the toy trailer, since he is considerably larger in size than it. In a chirping voice he admits sheepishly he doesn't know either. I apologize for my negligence with the match, which he shrugs off without concern. His name is Edison and he climbs onto my shoulder, clutching my ear for stability. I stroll down along a sloping road past empty grey buildings to a seaside cafe overlooking the bay where the air is salty and thick with the odor of cod. My stomach growls a warning, so I enter the cafe with my new passenger and slide into a booth providing us with a pleasant vista of the harbor. Edison clambers onto the table and seats himself on a saltshaker while I peruse the coffeestained menu with eagerness. Glancing about, I notice several dejected waitresses scattered about at separate tables, head-in-hands, staring miserably at heaping trays of dirty dishes before them. The waitress in the tomatostained apron who brings me my clam chowder too seems rather vacant, lost in routine.

Edison suddenly emits an electronic gasp and dives under the table in haste as a greyhatted hachetman lurches through the cafe door. He stands near the entrance, surveying the contents of the restaurant with a wary eye. Edison tugs my pantleg frantically. Understanding that the hachetman is after him, I open my knapsack and he nimbly leaps in, nestling amongst the books and articles of clothing. Then, having finished my soup and leaving a reasonable tip, I rise and pass by the hatchetman's suspicious eye on my way towards the exit.

He follows me outside. From within the bag, Edison makes woeful predictions if we do not elude the hatchetman. Without glancing back, I head for the nearest abandoned house, a madhouse designed by a demented architect. With Edison perched on my shoulder once again, I climb up a flight of crooked Caligari stairs, the hatchetman tailing close behind. I lead him on a dizzying madromp through five-cornered rooms and twisting passages of labyrinthian perplexities. A triangular door opens out onto the rooftop of the madhouse. Here I cling to a crippled weathervane, blinking in muted daylight as clouds whirl overhead.

When I feel the hatchetman has been suitably eluded, I reenter the bizarre structure. I wander down sloping corridors, trying various doors in search of an exit. One room contains several torn disheveled mattresses spilling cotton innards from gashes onto a cement floor. Another door opens to reveal an eerie underwater room, a small grimy window letting in a thin turbid stream of light. A girl crouches in one corner, trussed up with rope, her mouth tightly gagged, bulging eyefright. Strange translucent tubes, swaying and wavering, release poisonous bubbles into the water.

I quickly slam the door shut on this spectacle and continue down the corridor. Finally I discover a doorway which leads us outside, not far from the fisherman's wharf. Edison insists the hatchetman will find us again and we must launch a boat to get away. We climb aboard a stalwart craft and cast off, plowing swiftly through taciturn waters with powerful oarstrokes, as seagulls scream overhead, as though sounding alarm. Passing several other boats engaged in marlin-hunt, our craft glides further away from the coast, across the saltstained waves, sifting in sunshine swirls.

Glancing towards shore we spot the hatchetman pursuing in a vessel of his own. Oaring desperately now, we soon escape the bay, and behind us the coastline vanishes. Then heaven cracks and torrents rise against us, threatening to capsize our modest craft. Valiantly I joust the storm, paddling in seasick circles. Edison clings for dear life until the tempest snatches us up and dumps us in the drink. The ocean, refusing to swallow me, washes me onto a shipwreck island where I collapse in the sand, falling into an obscure sleep. Hours later I revive to discover Edison sprawled dazed beside me, shaking saltwater from his lightbulb head. The hatchetman's boat drifts close to the shore, empty. He must have been pulled under the waves during the squall.

Wading through the surf with Edison perched on my shoulder, I reach the craft and climb aboard. With weary bones, we row back to the mainland where I return my lightbulb-headed friend to the plot of land behind the garage where I first found him. He waves a fond farewell, then leaps back into his miniature trailer and I bound off, bag over shoulder, down the railroad tracks once again.