Among The Jumbled Heap

Plotless. Characterless.

A novel with no intimation of story whatsoever, Writer would like to contrive. And with no characters. None. Plotless. Characterless. Yet seducing the reader into turning the pages nonetheless. -David Markson This is Not a Novel I don't like what's happening to me. I've started hating everything I read. Reading is my long-time lover, but she just doesn't turn me on right now. I tried to deny it, tried making excuses, but I have to own my feelings. Every bit of contemporary lit th...

Where Eagles Dare

Punk Rock Ukelele When I was a young wart hog, I fancied myself a punk rocker. Even in the late 80s, punk was a niche genre that bordered on nostalgia. The heyday of punk rock was already past, yet Punk lingered on and provided an outlet for my pubescent rage. I remember well the first time Big Bob stuck an earbud in my ear that piped in the Suicidal Tendencies's "I Saw Your Mommy. That was my introduction to punk, which was not exactly punk, more of a thrash L.A. Gangster kind of metal, ...

Shoot The Tiger

Have you ever heard that thing about how you can sing every Emily Dickenson poem to the tune of Gilligan's Island?  It's a common English teacher joke that's only funny because it's true.  Try it, you'll see. In China there is an ancient poetic form called the Ci .  Most of these poems were written in the Song Dynasty.  The Ci share what we in the West call a poetic meter, and it is believed that the meter is in fact a tune and that each of these poems was meant to be sung to this now lost tu...

Jenny’s Tomay-Toes

Here's another one from the Baxter Lane Animistic Men's Chorus.  This is a long one, clocking in at over six minutes, BUT it includes: shamanistic drumming, ukulele solo, extended throat singing, harmonica playing, original lyrics, and a turn toward the lewd right towards the end.  NO, it's not lewd.  Get your mind out of the gutter; there's no metaphor involved.

Interview with Bonnie Jo Campbell

Brief yet marvelous interview with Bonnie Jo Campbell at the Chicago Sun Times: http://blogs.suntimes.com/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/36628 My favorite part: I went right back to writing about Michigan! Still, I get letters from readers saying “you’re writing about my hometown in West Virginia,” or “you’re writing exactly about where I came from in Alabama.” I think by writing about a place with great specificity, you manage to make it universal. I was one of those people! I wrote and said, "you're ...

2010: My Year In Reading

OR Strikes and Gutters Cobain and Taylor : Strike and Strike Early in the year, in the cold of January, I got a surprise with Heavier then Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain. I thought Heavier would be a mindless read, something to keep the brain processing words while I cast about for a better book. I read the book while poised next to Skull Creek, a bitter Ozark wind crippling my hands, and the book took me places in the mind I had not been in fifteen years. It was good to go back an...

Allie Gautogen

Last year on my birthday, some friends and I gathered in my den to celebrate the rite.  During the course of that evening this small band of merry men was transformed into the Baxter Lane Animistic Men's Chorus.  Thanks to my friend Jim Yates and his ever-present iphone, the origins of the BLAMC are forever captured in a series of photos and audio tracks.  The track featured here has one of the best throat-singing solo's that ever came out of a white man's throat, as well as the dronefully enlig...

Lore Segal’s “The Reverse Bug”

Every month the New Yorker chooses a short story from their archive and asks a writer to read the story for their Fiction Podcast. This month Jennifer Egan reads "The Reverse Bug" by Lore Segal. Jennifer Egan Reads \"The Reverse Bug\" If you've got 30mins to spare, give that time to Segal ala Egan. Delightful to read and delightful to hear, "Reverse Bug," written in 1989, contains prophetic echos to our own age of terror, but it does so in a subtle, pleasing way.

The Perils of Describing Technology

The Brothers: a novel / Frederick Barthelme. I've reading Barhelme (Frederick not Donald). Never read him before, but I heard about him on the blogosphere because of the kerfuffal over his departure from the Mississippi Review. Did he quit? Was he fired? Read about it here. I'm drawn to Southern writers. I especially like Mississippians. I thought Barthelme might be a good reading fit for me. I have been underwhelmed by Brothers. Maybe it's just a one-off wonder and the rest of his st...

Vargas LLosa on Writing

Mario Vargas LLosa is the first Nobel Prize winner I've had the pleasure of reading before he won the medal.  The one regular reader of my blog may remember a post from about a year ago quoting a perfectly pitched scene of defecation.  I posted that in the midst of a Vargas LLosa obsession. I came to Vargas LLosa by a circuitous route.  I was doing a bit of research, reading the communiques of SubComandante Marcos when I happened upon a footnote, written with Marcos usual ironic contempt an...