Tuesdays, for Some Reason

When I was in high school and college I was a gigantic musichead. I read Rolling Stone cover to cover; I spent thousands of dollars on CDs; I connected dots between dozens of artists based on producers and studio musicians like Nellee Hooper and Justin Meldal-Johnsen. I knew that Calvin Johnson was the other guy on the cover of Beck's One Foot in the Grave. I could keep going.

It took at least a year for me to recognize patterns in the industry. For instance, that most indie records came out in the fall and that all records were released on Tuesdays. I still don't know why this is. My wild guess is that it's left over from obsolete logistics that meant physical shipments arrived on Mondays (or, if they were late, Tuesdays) and the staff needed time to unpack the boxes and stock the album. But maybe not, maybe it's related to statistics about when people buy things.

Picking up patterns in the book world has taken me a shorter time, but I am not distracted by as many things now as I was then. When books come out in the calendar year is often related to their subject matter; uplifting books come out in the summer and serious books come out in the winter. July is a total dead zone. And books, like albums, usually come out on Tuesdays.

Today is Tuesday. And a shocking number of highly anticipated books are coming out on this one day: Sarah Gailey's Magic for Liars, Kristen Arnett's Mostly Dead Things, Ocean Vuong's debut novel, the latest novels from Elizabeth Gilbert and Neal Stephenson, on and on and on. My Twitter feed is sparking and spitting fire. I don't know why the Big Five picked today to dump so many big-deal books. I'm guessing it's the same reason they barely release anything in July - this is the last week to get book dollaz before people start going on vacation and...stop...buying books?

I mean, they know their business (I think) but it seems like, if no one is dropping good stuff in July, maybe be the press that drops something good in July, and the book will do way better than if you put it out at the same time as four other debuts that have been hyped for the past two or six months. This is how March has gradually become a decent month to release films. It used to be a dumping ground for failed Oscar bids, but starting in the late 00s, studios started putting better-than-average summer releases out in March, and now there's plenty of good stuff to see during that month. It seems like the book business could do this too.

Maybe not; maybe they've tried that and it doesn't work. But for the remoras of the publishing industry, like me, a huge dump of buzzy books on one day and then nothing for two months is super unhelpful and frustrating. It means we fight to cover the most popular books in a timely way and then, for weeks, have nothing to do (or get paid for).

All this would be a lot easier if book coverage weren't obsessed with reviewing books at the moment they come out. But it is. I wish that would loosen, because reading a book is a different project than watching a film, and keeping up is so, so, so much harder. But boundaries between the theater market and the home video market have blurred in a way not really repeatable in the book world, so it might be hopeless.

My friend Jen Pastiloff's book also releases today. I haven't said much about it on social media & etc. because Jen does not need help from me; she has a street team, and celebrities like Pink and Patton Oswalt have been hyping her book. But she's a magical person, and her book is as loving and true as she is. It's, well, a great summer read.

There'll be another Tuesday next week, another batch of books coming out from various presses and places. But I suspect most people will still be reading this week's stuff. How good can a book be if it's already forgotten by the time the next week's book comes out?

my to-read/review pile, mostly fall releases 

The Constant Everything

WOW THERE IS SO MUCH NEWS but it's not time to tell you it all yet. I've been out of the office on and off for two weeks, traveling and learning and doing all kinds of fun things, and in the meantime a bunch of fun stuff I wrote has been released and the ARCs have been piling up.

not actually all of them

I am finally listening to Lucas and my husband about the book thing and I really am going to start stopping reviewing any month now. The problem now is I keep saying yes to books that add to my existing oeuvre in some way (for example, picked up two Icelandic novels following the Icelandic book of poetry and the Icelandic novel I reviewed), that are by authors of color or women, or that are fun, quirky genre fiction no one else wants to review for one specific magazine (staring at two long novels like this right now). There are so many more books in those categories than I believed possible, so I keep saying yes to them because surely there can't be many more Icelandic novels in translation that editors really want me to write about? (Turns out, yes, there can.) I'm still oddly unbooked (ha HA) between mid-November and January, but maybe that's an opportunity for me to relax on it.

I've stopped asking for galleys of books out prior to January. This is a step forward.

I want to blog for you about a couple of specific topics (release/looking away from the horse, driving in California/landscapes of belonging), but I have some other things to tell you about in the meantime. They are out in the world things, but they're more thoughtful than the usual litany of announcements.

1. Quite at random, Medium picked up and featured my story about "the new normal of retail" - indeed, they renamed it that - and I'm so glad they did. I'm astonished at the bump they gave, how positively it's affected my numbers on Medium and spreading out to other social media. If you're reading this because you read that story, well, hi and thanks. If you're from Medium, reading this, I'd really like some more information on how to get this kind of bump on other stories. I mean, text me at 3 AM if you'd like. The piece got thousands of views, which is thousands more views than any story I've ever done.

2. Today, Memoir Mixtapes released its new issue, "Guilty Pleasures," and my piece about Celine Dion, "If You Whisper Like That," is the closer. This is the first catered thing I've written in a long time (i.e. a thing I wrote specifically in response to a call for themed submissions), and I had a blast writing it. I hope you have as much fun reading it. I also want to point out how incredible the Memoir Mixtapes project is, how useful it is to wrap memoir around music. It makes the memories easier to write and shape, and the connection with readers stronger. I hope the editors keep publishing this magazine forever.

3. I interviewed Alice Hatcher, debut author of The Wonder that Was Ours, for the Masters Review. I couldn't place a review of this book, for whatever reason, but I was not willing to give up on promoting it to the world somehow. It was a book that I couldn't stop thinking about for weeks, one of the most interesting books I've read this year, and not being able to review it was super annoying. I also wanted, very much, to give Alice the opportunity to speak about the race issues swirling between her and her material. I felt concerned, when I read it, that many readers (progressive readers who mean well) would dismiss the book out of hand as inauthentic and co-opt-y. I knew from reading that it was not those things. Getting out ahead of this accusation with an on-record interview felt like the right thing to do, and I was very happy to do it.

4. I was featured on horoscope.com! I really was! The piece is a little more commercial and plain than the kind of thing I normally write (especially with the added section titles), but it's about something I did with tarot cards on New Year's Day which I really wanted to explain in detail. I'm not always this kind of person, this horoscopey taroty person, but sometimes I am, and here's the proof. Also, I'm telling you, every one of the monthly cards has been correct. September is the King of Wands, and I'm scared to death of what it could mean. There's a couple of personal projects that could explode into merriment and success, but I don't want to assume and be greedy. I'm so excited that my name is on horoscope.com, though. I don't know why; it just feels really special. Also, I got to commission/pay/promote a friend for the graphics.

5. In the next week or so, an interview I conducted and an experimental essay I wrote will go live. The interview is pretty amazing, but if its flavor is cookies and cream, the essay is salmon-pickle-pistachio. It takes on an established writer with a degree from Iowa, and it quotes a few popular writers at enormous length. I'm worried about pushback, and/or that no one will read it. I'm worried that I've said some stuff I can't take back or contextualize. At the same time, I'm really proud of the piece; it garnered a handwritten rejection from Conjunctions before it landed where it did.

I've learned that being away from routine as a freelance writer is a WHOLE DIFFERENT BALLGAME from being away from routine as a regular worker, or even a copy-editor-from-home. I'm troubled enough by everything on my to-do list that I'm kind of procrastinating finishing this blog post, because then I'll have to start on tasks. A friend said about freelancing that she stopped doing it in part because she was "tired of the everything." Yes. That is exactly it. The constant, neverending everything.

Scraps from an Off Week

Let us say that this week included multiple self-inflicted setbacks. One of them involved fire. Not a metaphor.

Onward: I signed up for this cool thing Jami Attenberg is doing where we're all together supposed to write 1,000 words per day every day for two weeks in late June. You can sign up for it yourself here. I signed up with the idea of knocking out a substantial chunk of the Casablanca novel, but now I'm not sure. I have a lot of little projects I'd like to get done. My plan from last week to write an essay every day this week didn't pan out; see the short paragraph above. Maybe next week I'll do the little stuff to make way for something bigger.

I don't usually get upset about celebrity deaths, but losing Anthony Bourdain leaves a big hole in culture shaped exactly like himself and no one else. We'll be sorting out his legacy on gastronomy, travel, encountering the Other, and a smattering of other cultural matters for a long time. It'd be nice to've had him around to help us sift through all that.

I've got a music memoir on my ARC pile, so I pitched a handful of prominent music mags this week. They got back to me lightning fast - all with passes, but friendly and encouraging and unbelievably speedy ones. Part of me wishes I'd followed my college-era bliss and become a music journalist after all. I'm sure there are downsides to that profession, but at the moment I can't think of any.

Some days I want to stop doing this altogether, particularly when the reasons I do it are so esoteric. Higgs once assigned us a paragraph about why we write, to be handed in the following week. It took me longer to do it than assignments of many, many pages. And then he forgot to ask for it, so we never handed it in. For me it's not as simple as self-expression or leaving something behind or ego; elements of all that, sure, but it's more about communication - the hope that someone is out there reading, needing me to write exactly what I've written for her brain to hum in just the way she likes. Still, the confirmation that I'm communicating with people who want that hum is rare, and the sense that I'm sliding down into a muddy pool hole filled with dead bodies is frequent.

I cannot more highly recommend Ghost City Press's summer microchapbook series. I've been getting it in my email for two weeks now and YOWZA. It's free. Sign up. Start every day (through September!) with cutting-edge contemporary poetry.

Out in the world:

I reviewed a wonderful novel, a lovely deep-dive novel-type novel, for the Arts Fuse. It's about these two badass Surrealist artists who went on to spread propaganda against the Nazis at great risk to themselves. I loved it. And I think I'm going to read the rest of Rupert Thomson's work, now, too.

I also reviewed a hard-to-pin-down book of cultural criticism for Cleaver. It will interest a really small slice of the population, I think, but it was worth reading.

Amphibian

Yesterday was my first day of classes for this, the final semester of my M.A. (Partly because I have a job I feel good about and am eager to write multiple projects that have been building over the last couple of years, I don't feel that weird about the M.A. ending. Except I don't know how I'm going to get chances to swim around in my natural environment - the classroom - once this is over.) It's going to be a supportive semester, because two I-hope-I-can-consider-them-friends are teaching two of my classes, and a woman I consider a mentor, even if I'm too shy of her to reach out much beyond the confines of the class, is teaching the third. The syllabi indicate that a lot more is going to come out of me than go into me, creatively, in the next four months.

Anyway, last night one of the professors was talking about the multiplicity of identity in human experience, and his belief that a person has no fixed self, because the self is changing from moment to moment as skin sheds and digestion occurs and gravity yanks ever downward. Physically, but also metaphysically; every millisecond I have one millisecond more life experience than I had before. I agree with him: to put it in an adage, you never step in the same river twice.

This made me think about David Bowie. My husband is a bigger fan of his than I am. I like Bowie conceptually, metaphorically, and intellectually; the pleasure I take in his music is significant, but not universal. Meanwhile, Matt likes Bowie's music. A lot. (In some ways, this example illustrates our dynamic.) He likes Ziggy Stardust, and I like Lodger and Heroes.

We've only listened to Blackstar once, but we found ourselves repeatedly making eye contact across our computers while we listened, amazed. It was about as unevenly wonderful as late Bowie ever is, but here's what blew my mind: he kept experimenting. He knew he was dying, and he kept trying new stuff anyway. He tried new sounds and new collaborations, and he evolved in his creativity, in what he knew would be the last thing he'd create for us.

I mean, if you have terminal cancer, why would you bother to keep evolving? You have a definite end point ahead of you, a point where your identity can flux no longer. Mustn't you find contentment, then? Stop pushing against your own skin for once? Make the album that brings you comfort, that doesn't press you into discomfort when you're already uncomfortable enough?

No. The river keeps moving; Bowie has no fixed identity aside from the multiplicity he's always been. The fixed identity is change.

If he can do it, so can you. Let the river run.

Rosanna, or How I Discovered Something Worth Knowing

How do you learn things you're glad to know? For me it usually happens elliptically. Through weird coincidences. Yes, I do have an example, glad you asked.

Years ago, a friend recommended that I listen to a cover of Toto's "Africa" recorded by a Slovenian a capella group, Perpetuum Jazzile. I loved it, so I surfed on and listened to them doing "Rosanna," even though "Rosanna" was never a favorite song of mine. It was too bouncy, maybe a minute too long, with a silly synth bridge and a loud and unnecessary brass line. One of those songs that I heard enough times on my parents' adult contemporary FM station in the car on the way to the grocery store that I never felt the need to listen to it in my adult life.

Until I heard Perpetuum Jazzile do "Rosanna."

Then the song took on something new, a charm it hadn't had before. It felt like an interesting assemblage of elements instead of a mere lump of semiprecious material. After a few listens to the cover, I decided to listen to the real thing, for the first time in years, so I YouTubed actual Toto doing "Rosanna." The first comment under the video (at the time) was something like "Ah, Rosanna. Making drummers cry like children since 1982."

Wow, what?

I had no idea what that was about, and wanted to know, so I looked it up. Turns out that Toto's drummer, Jeff Porcaro, was quite possibly the best pop-music drummer of the 20th century. He was a studio musician on many, many, many recordings, a lot of them very famous indeed, and his playing was effortless, innovative, and precise. He died at 38, weirdly, while mowing his lawn, possibly after taking a leetle too much cocaine, but maybe from something else.

For "Rosanna," Jeff Porcaro wrote what is now known as the Rosanna shuffle (!), and after that my research turned into areas of music knowledge that I could no longer follow - ghost notes and other stuff about drumming that I don't understand. But this shuffle is famously hard. (There's video of Porcaro himself breaking it down. I suspect it resembles Michael Jordan teaching how to dunk.) Tons of videos exist of amateur drummers playing along with the song, concentration and pride sharing facial space. For "Rosanna"! A song that I considered one of the least interesting hits of the 80s until Perpetuum Jazzile came into my life.

I consider this information about Jeff Porcaro and the Rosanna shuffle to be ephemera well worth knowing, whether I ever find practical use for it or not. You never know what's going to be of use inside your head, though. Hell, maybe I'll be across beers from a drummer one day and this will be the only thing I have to say to him. And let's not leave aside the fact that today I got an entire blog post out of it.

In any event, I'm really glad I know this, but the way I got to it is so knotted and forked that it's a wonder I learned it at all. From a friend pointing me to a cover of a song I love, to a cover of a song I was once kind of eh about, to the song itself, to a comment on YouTube (which I suggest has the worst comment threads in the entire universe), to Wikipedia, and thence to new knowledge.

KABLOOEY! NEW KNOWLEDGE! 

I seriously doubt I would've had occasion to learn Jeff Porcaro's name any other way. This Escheresque path to knowledge is the way I learn lots of things worth knowing, and incidentally, it's also the way I pick up little details that make writing more fun and interesting than it would otherwise be. I like finding a place in story, in character, to put the random stuff I learn. I haven't found a place for "Rosanna" yet, but I suspect I will.

Coping with Salieri Syndrome

Last night I was thinking about Brian Wilson. Sometimes, in order to keep the lid on a persistent earworm, I assemble weird mixes from my iTunes on the fly. The more I confuse my music center, the less likely it is that the Jem theme is going to kick around in there all night. Why not listen to the Bellamy Brothers next to Dr. Dre? Last night, along with some Dylan and some Feist and some Daft Punk & etc, "Wouldn't It Be Nice" got in there. Every time I'm listening to the later Beach Boys (i.e. not the "Surfin' USA" era), I think about poor Brian Wilson and the misfortune of being born a Salieri.

The legend goes that Wilson worked himself to the bone making Pet Sounds in response to the Beatles' Rubber Soul. Today neither album sounds crazily different from what preceded it, but at the time they were both big leaps. Fun, fluffy pop marked both bands' careers in the early 60s, but Rubber Soul was richer, folkier, more varied, more album-like, even a little experimental at times. Pet Sounds tried to mimic these qualities in its own way.

Rubber Soul happened at the end of 1965. The Beach Boys released Pet Sounds in 1966. Yay! Totally worth it!

And then, in 1967, the Beatles made Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

And Brian Wilson had a total nervous breakdown.

I'm not kidding. Wilson's mental health was pretty fragile throughout the mid-sixties, but evidently Sgt. Pepper was the breaking point. McCartney has said that the band was inspired by Pet Sounds to make Sgt. Pepper, which is nice and all, but, um...Sgt. Pepper. Your argument is invalid. The Beach Boys were never the same; Wilson went somewhat AWOL until the early 70s, and they kind of bounced back later, but it wasn't like before.

I think it broke Wilson that the Beatles were revolutionizing pop music pretty much right under his nose. He probably had, in greater abundance, the same feeling I have about Randall Munroe (the creator of xkcd), which is like "I totally hate you for your brilliance, but please don't stop making art, but you're making all of us look bad, but I love you, but I also hate you." (Don't misunderstand - I am a little ant trying to make little ant art, and Munroe's had enormous, widespread success, and anyway he and I aren't even in the same field. So it's definitely not the same thing. But that IhateyouIloveyouIhateyouIloveyou feeling's gotta be the same.)

Like this. Remember this? In Ratatouille? When Skinner eats the ratatouille at the end, and is immediately astonished/in love/furious?

The problem is, when you're confronted with once-in-a-century genius and you're just a once-in-a-decade artist, you can't see it as history will. You can only take it personally. That was the best part of Amadeus (aside from three hours of superlative music) - that interesting problem of well, I can't really blame you, Salieri, for hating Mozart, because if you're a composer other than Mozart in the eighteenth century, it sucks to be you. It probably sucks about as much as it does if you're a band other than the Beatles in the 60s.

So, there we are. Poor Brian Wilson.

But this is another reason why spite and envy about the creative works and/or success of other writers is such a waste of time. If they're better than you, even if they're on another plane of better than you, there isn't much you can do about it but be the best Salieri you can be. History will roll on with or without you; you can't control it. And, after all, Pet Sounds is a really good record. Well worth a listen.

KerouaCobain, or A Note on Freshness

Kurt Cobain's suicide turned 20 last week. He's an important figure, but I find it slightly ghoulish the way articles and commentary on Cobain pop up like clockwork on every anniversary of Nevermind; of In Utero; of his final act, alone with a gun.

This article at the Washington Post caught my eye, because it seemed like that rarest of creatures: a new angle. But it dances around the problem of the final mix of Nevermind of which Cobain disapproved, and I'm afraid that its reading of Cobain's pre-death importance may soar far beyond reality. (I was there, and Nirvana was way famous - acting as a sort of pushbroom to the dreadful pop of the early 90s as well as glam rock and G&R-type hair metal and all else that came before - but I don't think they were famous beyond anyone's imagination, as the article has it. Probably not beyond David Geffen's.) Still, kinda sweet to think about a few generations of kids plucking out the first notes of "Come As You Are", which happens to be the only riff I ever learned to play on the guitar. I wonder very much what "Smells Like Teen Spirit" means to people born around the time it was a hit on the radio, as opposed to what it meant to me or to the Xers.

Anyway, over the weekend I listened to Nevermind for the 11,867th time, and it reminded me strongly of the last book we finished in my American Novels class: On the Road. Not because the two works resemble each other artistically (although I suppose you could argue that they do, each a yawp from its respective generation), but because each, despite its grounding in a particular time and place, offers utter freshness.

I didn't love On the Road. I found it rambling, self-centered, pointlessly repetitious, and reeking of privilege of various types. But I was nevertheless seduced by its sincerity, which is a rare quality when uncoupled from sentimentality. The voice is completely convincing, head-over-heels committed. And it feels...fresh. There's just no other word for it. It feels novel and new and unique, 60 years after its birth, after it's been made a bible by numberless masses.

Nevermind feels the same way. All the reasons in the world exist to make me bored with the record: I've listened to it 11,867 times, I heard "Teen Spirit" played and referenced and analyzed to death in my adolescence, I wore out CDs of other grunge that practically photocopied Nirvana. (This listen, I realized that Stone Temple Pilots' Core is basically a 12-track meditation on "In Bloom" with a little Metallica flavor.) Nevertheless, it's a thoroughly fresh record. It makes you sit up straighter and turn up the volume and pay attention.

Both Nevermind and On the Road have the capacity to revolutionize a young life, no matter the year. Their age seems not to have denuded their power. They're both still genuinely exciting, and they both stand quite apart from the hordes of imitative works that they spawned. It's a shame that (arguably) neither Cobain nor Kerouac was able to top himself after that one great artistic expulsion.

How does "fresh" happen? Why are there so few albums and books and films that succeed at staying fresh generations after birth? How do you quantify it? Is it inevitably linked with voice-of-a-generation works, or even just voice-of-an-artistic-movement stuff? Is it one of those qualities, like pornography, that depends on knowing it when you see it? If anyone knows, please tell me, because I'd like to be able to create fresh work. (Wouldn't we all?)

Being Genuironic

Just a few words about The Book of Mormon, which I saw over the weekend at the Pantages (and good heavens, what an incredible theater). I am a great advocate for Parker/Stone's work, and I'm still sorting through what I learned about them (and about entertainment, and about culture, and about life, and about politics, & etc.) when I marathoned South Park in late 2012-early 2013. Because this musical has gotten reviews waaaaaay beyond the norm, I figured it would be the best thing evar, so I was really excited about going.

Well...

It's not that the show isn't good. It's great! It's funny and smart and subversive and big-hearted and it has this piquant quality that I noticed in large supply in latter seasons of South Park: its writers seem to know a lot about life. I guess you call that wisdom? For many it's a surprise to find such a quality in a "silly cartoon show" or a silly Broadway musical, and maybe that's why I felt there was a disconnect between the insanely good reviews I read and the show I saw, which was great!, but which was not really much greater than South Park.

My operating assumption is that the reviewers of Mormon are just not that familiar with South Park, or at least that they didn't watch all 221 (at the time) episodes in relatively quick succession the way I did. Because as outstanding as Parker/Stone's brand of entertainment is, Mormon felt like more of the same of it, not something way beyond their grasp. I'm not going to call it a disappointment, because it wasn't. But it wasn't the best thing evar.

The finest thing about it was the same thing that was surprising about the "Up There" number from Bigger, Longer, and Uncut. Here that is:

So, not to be tedious, but the dynamic in "Up There" goes a little something like this:

1. It's absurd that Satan would sing a Little Mermaid-style number, with a backup choir and everything, about getting out of Hell. 
2. This kind of song has evolved into being a cliche, and so this song is a parody of itself. 
3. In context, the character genuinely feels the desire to get out of Hell. That desire is real. 
4. Hence, the song feels genuine, even though a) the situation is absurd and b) the song is parodic. 
5. The song evokes real feeling in the audience, in part because it's a well-written parody, and in part because there is genuine feeling behind the parody. 

This is a very tidy and difficult trick, being ironic and genuine at the same time, and it's one that Parker/Stone pull over and over and over again throughout their work. It's the precise trick on which The Book of Mormon operates. The songs are drawing from Broadway tradition: cheery, South Pacific and Music Man-type songs that are no longer acceptable to the jaded audiences of today, but which are still catchy and fun and real to the characters, which makes them real to us, despite us laughing at them.

So I expected nothing less from these guys (who have won a Peabody, after all), but apparently reviewers were not so credulous, which created a gap between my expectations and the show. Which is great! So you should go see it when it comes to your town. But if you're really familiar with South Park, don't break your heart if you can't make it to Mormon. The Mormon episode of the show, while very different, makes some of the same points and is equally funny.

Is this more interesting than news about writing? Because I did a lot of that in the last several days, and wrote a few paragraphs about it, and then decided to post this instead. Ah well. You'll get the writing stuff later in the week.

Revisitation, with Special Guests the Postal Service

You seem so out of context
In this gaudy apartment complex
A stranger with your door key
Explaining that I'm just visiting
And I am finally seeing
Why I was the one worth leaving

I was the one worth leaving 

If you aren't already singing along, get yourself hence.

Last night I went to see the Postal Service live at the Greek Theater. When I read on Wikipedia, of all places, that the Postal Service had mounted a tour for 2013, I bought a ticket almost immediately. I won't set forth the whole history of the band (a fairly interesting one) here, but I will say that virtually everyone I know who likes the Postal Service loves the Postal Service, me included. I actually wore out my original CD of Give Up, played it and played it and played it until it was too scratched to play anymore. When I told people this, they offered sympathetic moans that indicated not only that they could see how this would happen, but that it's quite a shame.

Every time I see live music, I'm faintly amazed that the people on stage are doing their jobs. That the job of musician and performer is one that you accomplish by standing on stage and doing what the Postal Service did last night. It's a weird job, and very difficult to get and keep, but performance is a career field like any other: there are people who are naturally good at it, and there are ways to get even better at it, skills you can learn to improve. Nevertheless, it's creation - a mysterious act - of music - a mysterious creature - before my very eyes. I get a real kick out of that.

And I wanted to see this show because it seemed possible that the opportunity would never come again. The Postal Service is a monolith of one-offing, collaboration that happens once and never again, and this tour seemed no exception. Like seeing Jimi Hendrix live, or Nirvana.

The thing is, I didn't really love the show. Ben Gibbard, fabulous talent that he is, is kind of a spaz. And there was very little in that performance that I haven't enjoyed just as much at home with headphones. Laura Burhenn of the Mynabirds, who released a miraculous first album and a thoroughly mediocre second one, was one-fourth of the performers, and Jenny Lewis of Rilo Kiley, who's been part of the band since Give Up and whom I know best as someone quite different

!!!!!!!!!!!!

, was also there on stage. That was cool, and seeing these four people make something special happen before my eyes was cool. But I've been to live concerts that seared my skin off and seeped into my bones, and this just wasn't one of them.

Gibbard said one thing that interested me. More than halfway through, he said he was grateful to us for coming, for loving this music from so many years ago. He said that "means so much to us."

Not my picture; came from here, which opens with a nice sum of my feelings
about Give Up, albeit from someone a good deal younger than I

I really have no idea how I'd react if a project I did as a fluke with some of my friends and colleagues, meant to be a side effort away from my main career, turned out to be this thing that everyone adored. That was one of Sub Pop's biggest sellers ever. That journalists were always asking about. That influenced a gigantic swath of indie artists and assembled a subgenre out of almost nothing. That people pleaded with me for more of. I think after a while I might be tired of the whole thing, especially if people were still clamoring about it an entire decade later. It amazes me that the band decided to reunite for a tour at all, and the last thing I expected was that they would be grateful that people were still all into Give Up.

Matt pointed out that for them it ain't nuthin but a thang, since they made it and own it. I think his phrase was "eh, let's set up a tour, make some money, go home." I guess, but these songs are ten years old. I often wonder how the Rolling Stones can play "Satisfaction" ONE. MORE. TIME. without losing their damn minds, and surely this isn't that different. It's music that they made in 2003, that was finished then, from which they've since moved up and away.

No? I really don't know. Maybe Gibbard was lying for our sake. Maybe the band thinks of Give Up as a sweet pet that keeps on giving them treats rather than a random flare of genius that has become a stone around their necks.

I always love seeing evidence of artists who seem to be just as into their art as their most slavering fans are. But I thoroughly sympathize with artists who feel that once a piece of work is done, it's done, and they want to work on new challenges rather than revisiting old stuff (coughBillWattersoncough). I guess it just depends on your personality, and on the art.

It's a Revolution, I Suppose

I got a rejection last week that I described on Facebook as the wussiest ever. Here it is, in entirety:

Dear Writer: We don't know of anyone who hasn't had work returned at one time or another, but that certainly doesn't make it easier. We hope you will find consolation in the individuality of editorial tastes and in the assurance that with persistence, good work will be recognized as such. Thank you for trying us. The Editors 

You may note that never once in this missive do the editors actually reject my story. They're just speaking in generalities. Matt suggested that I reply with "So when can I expect payment? This doesn't explicitly say my story was rejected, so that must mean it's an acceptance, right?"

I swear, I swear, I swear this is not sour grapes. Since I started thinking about rejections as returns, I tend to shrug about them and try for the next market. This market in particular was a shrug, the story kind of a long shot. I just find it weird that they couldn't say outright that my work wasn't a good fit for them. Or something. Something other than platitudes.

Last week I wrote a story that I'd describe as "supernatural noir." I wrote it in overbaked Raymond Chandler voice-over, which was just a barrel of fun. The story has to do with a voodoo lady who sets zombies on our hero and his client. I got the idea from this dream I had: I was at a party where someone had hired a shoegazing emo band, and after midnight, two members of the band suddenly turned into zombies and attacked us. When I woke up, I thought this was hilarious, because how could you tell the difference between shoegazing emo musicians and actual supernatural zombies?

In other news, I took a trip to Barnes & Noble recently with the intention of buying a couple of children's books, this book by Jess Fink, and a new blank book. I left with none of these things. Everything just seemed so overpriced, and I couldn't find Jess Fink's book. It's probably the first time ever that I went to a bookstore with the concrete intention of buying things and left with nothing at all. I'm a little troubled about what this bodes; if someone like me can resist purchasing at bookstores, I begin to understand why they're going under. Because I went home and bought what I needed on Amazon instead. Saved about $6 on a Moleskine.

Of late, I can't stop listening to "Radioactive." I admitted to Matt that, when something happened the other day that made me feel terrible, I clamped my headphones on, turned the song up as loud as I could stand it, and even tossed my arms over my head to push the music closer to my ears. As I was listening I let the images that came to mind play in my head. I let the music make me feel better. I told him, while explaining this experience, that I felt like I was too old to be listening to music like this. Headphones and Nirvana, or headphones and Garbage, or headphones and Green Day, made me feel better when I was 15. But I'm not a teenager anymore. I'm not even a twentysomething anymore. Am I not too old to let music be the soother of my angst?

On the other hand, it kind of makes me sad the way people generally seem to stop taking joy and solace in music, stop feeling music with seriousness the same way they used to, as they get older. Graduating to Jimmy Buffett and Mahler? Uh, I'll take immaturity, thanks.

The image I saw while listening was of a woman walking through fire. The chorus of the song evokes invincibility to me, and listening to it so close made me want to make a film of it - the first time I've felt this urge in years. Of course, the song already has the best, most delightfully freaky video anyone could ask for, so oh well.

Seven Devils in Your House

I am drafting this nearly two full days before I intend to post it, because I have to dismember a head of cauliflower for dinner and there is no vegetable I consider such an effing chore as cauliflower. Procrastination ahoy!

I have been reading Marianne Moore's poetry and Lorrie Moore's prose, along with a memoir by Pam Houston. I am surprised at how little I like Moore #1 and, by contrast, at how Moore #2's turns of phrase seemingly jump out from behind a door to be astonishing and brilliant in the midst of a somewhat ordinary tale. I want to devour all of what she has to offer. Houston's book was fine. It covered a lot of the same ground as the other two books of hers I read, which leads me to an interesting notion I appear to have learned about writing: it is possible to keep telling the same story over and over for an entire career without being laughed out of the room. I haven't finished thinking about this, but I'll blog about it when I do.

Yesterday I started a story based on a mother-son idea I've had for a while. The first 1,000 words came really slowly and unpleasantly, and I have the feeling it's going to be a good exercise in rewriting. As of yet I have no idea what its audience is, whether it'll turn out literary with genre elements or just unsaleable.

Lately, with no concrete story ideas, I've been thirsting to write about ghosts. I don't think it's just due to the Ghosts by Gaslight anthology I'm still inching through; the more I think about it, the more I realize that I like ghost stories above nearly all genres. Yet they're so unusual these days, and even more rarely are they genuinely spooky and well-told. (Gregory Maguire's Lost is a good one, FYI.) Also, like going around and around the same jogging track, I keep mentally returning to Florence + the Machine's Ceremonials, an album that is just packed with ghosts and ghost stories, whispered and half-understood. Since first listening to it, I've wished I could write a novel that somehow accompanies the album, the way House of Leaves and Poe's Haunted go together. I'm not Flo's sister, though, and I really haven't the foggiest idea what she had in mind when writing the songs on that album, so it's a pretty impossible notion. The songs are just so evocative, of dark hallways and fluttering dresses and the wind through chimes and things half-seen in mirrors. I want to evoke in words and story what's evoked in music there.

On Monday I wrote the initial draft of an essay about breasts. I don't know if it's any good, or if it'll evolve into being any good. I also went back to a short piece I wrote in the middle of March (which was, happily, better than I remembered) and gussied it up for publication. Several hundred words of miraculously speedy feedback later, my gussying was shown to be for naught, and I'm not sure whether to plow into more work on the piece again or let it sit for a little while longer to see what happens. I do think there's something there, but it was starting to read like gibberish after the third revision.

Similarly, in my day job, I seem to have lost the ability to determine when commas are used correctly in long sentences and when they aren't. I think it's because I edited a long piece written in very muddled English last week, the kind where by the end you sort of forget what syntax is supposed to be because you've seen so much of it that stinks. Since then I've been editing kind of stoned, not really sure what's firmly correct and what's just up to the Comma Gods to decide in the hereafter, man. Ultimately we're all just commas in the long, architecturally unsound sentence that is Life. You know? Like, little splicey commas, all of us. Wow, I'm hungry.

So I guess I better chop some cauliflower.  :(

Sundry Adventures with Salt-N-Pepa

I have something completely unrelated to writing to tell you about today.

In October of 1993, Salt-N-Pepa released Very Necessary and I turned 12. I had a friend named Karen Reed during my middle school years, and her mom was a bit more permissive than mine about the kind of music Karen was allowed to listen to. She had a cassette of the "Shoop" single, which included a bunch of remixes, the square and educational song "Let's Talk About AIDS" (as a companion to their hit "Let's Talk About Sex"), and the B-side "Emphatically No".

I borrowed the cassette from Karen and listened to it A. LOT. Because "Shoop" was an awesome song (and I dare you not to find it so even now) (the outfits are a little dated, but the model around the 2:30 mark makes it all worthwhile), and as it turned out, so was "Emphatically No". The title is kind of all you need to know; a dude propositions the sweet ladies of S-N-P and S-N-P turn him the hell down repeatedly. I have now had this song in my head on and off for nearly 20 years, and when I was 12 was the last time I had any access to it.

Some weeks ago I tried to find "Emphatically No" on the internet to see if it was as cool and funny and empowering as I remembered. All efforts in Google, BitTorrent, iTunes, Amazon, and even YouTube failed. Apparently this song was not available in 21st century media. Amazon did offer the CD single, though, so I thought, hey, I'll bet I'm not the only woman in her early 30s who heard this song as a tween and wonders what happened to it. I'll get the CD, rip it, put it on YouTube, and then I'll get a bunch of poorly spelled comments thanking me for my efforts.

So I ordered the CD. A week or so later, I got a message that the order was cancelled. When I wrote to ask what happened, I was told that due to a UPC scanning error, it turned out they never had the item to begin with.

Okay, no problem. Just order another one. There are a bunch of copies on Amazon. So I ordered another one, even though I was slightly embarrassed to have ordered two copies of a Salt-N-Pepa CD single from 1993.

A week or so later, I got a package in the mail, and when I opened it, I found a copy of the DVD of Identity (2003), starring John Cusack and Ray Liotta.

I wrote the seller and asked what happened, and evidently another UPC scanning error occurred, and that seller never had the single either. And now I had a free copy of Identity and no Salt-N-Pepa.

So I placed a THIRD order for the damn single. And all I could do was laugh. Like, uncontrollable belly-laughing. Because it was just so ridiculous! All for the love of a Salt-N-Pepa B-side.

My third order was cancelled.

(Incidentally, this episode is emblematic of how my March has gone. Nothing is easy and everything is scripted by Samuel Beckett.)

This third cancellation was for the third used copy I'd tried to buy. I prefer buying used items whenever possible, but at this point I'd just had it. I was still dogged in my determination to get the effing song, but I was honestly beginning to believe that every one of the 60+ copies purportedly for sale under the Used rubric was not an actual copy of the CD, but was listed due to an error. So I bought the last "new" copy that Amazon had on offer, via Newbury Comics, for $11.99.

$12 for a Salt-N-Pepa single from 1993.

A couple of days later, a package arrived. I opened it and found a sealed, brand-new copy of Identity (2003), starting John Cusack and Ray Liotta.

I hope you're finding this funny, because I sure as hell did.

I wrote to Amazon asking them for a return and notifying them of this remarkably consistent error. Then I looked down the list of used copies of the single, seeking the first description that a) mentioned the item as a CD and b) appeared to have been written by a human looking at an item, rather than basic filler text inserted by a large-volume independent seller. I e-mailed that seller, requesting confirmation that the item actually existed due to my being burned FOUR GODDAMN TIMES.

He said he was pretty sure he had what I was looking for, and I ordered it in three seconds flat.

And today...

Twenty minutes or so later:

So. Now you can tell me for yourself whether all that absurdity was worth it. Of course, without the absurdity, you'd never know, would you? Because I wouldn't have been able to put the fucking thing on YouTube at all.

By the way, does anyone want a copy of Identity?

Come and See

Another selection from my Highbinder playlist.

That's all for today. Cash speaks for himself, and there's a lot going on in my head this week but none of it's related to writing or reading.

"What's on your mind?"

Yesterday I wrote about 3,200 words on KUFC. Although I whinge and wheedle, I'm now sure it's the right thing to do to go on and write this book. After reading through what I'd done most recently (months ago, before this whole literary adventure), I felt a rekindling of interest in the idea and the main character, to my great relief. It's good stuff, and I'm pretty sure it's going to be a terrific book. I'm especially interested in the project because I came up with a terrible, wonderful choice for my MC at the final turning point of the book, tens of thousands of words away. The kind of choice where neither option is particularly good, i.e. a realistic choice. Great tension in that.

I feel like until now I'd been writing half-asleep, without really considering how things fit together in the world of a novel. I'm still not at the point where I can outline things very specifically more than about two chapters in advance - which may indeed be evidence that I'll have to rewrite this one, too - but I'm determined to let character propel the story, rather than just my ideas of what must come next.

I'm now about 300 pages into 2666, and I still have my opinion of BOY. Jeez oh Pete. This is a weird book and I have no idea how all this shit goes together and I can't wait to read the next hundred pages.

I'm also enjoying some new-to-me music lately. Although I'm only now listening to more than a song or two of hers, Regina Spektor feels like an artist I've been listening to for years, like a friend I've known since we were teenagers. She hardly feels new, just natural.


I found this fantastic band, the Leftover Cuties, who I think would resist "hipster" or "retro" and insist that what they're up to is 100% normal:

And I'm completely obsessed with this song (please ignore the source...):

Even better with headphones. And there's also Callas. Lots of Callas.

Finally, I'm trying to dislodge the hold Facebook has on me. I read a bunch of addiction narratives in a row, rather by chance, a couple of weeks ago. In thinking about what they had in common, and the general pattern to which addiction adheres, I discovered that the way I feel and behave about Facebook is, erm, pretty unhealthy. Of course Facebook isn't nearly as destructive as, for instance, heroin - that's a stupid idea - but it's still remade the pattern of my days in a way that is bringing me less peace. So the concentration and attention I give it is declining.

I thought I'd write a lot more about this, but it seems so lame, and I can't find the right words without skipping into other topics. And it doesn't matter much. I'm slowly backing away from Facebook, which is both challenging and pathetic, and the details aren't too interesting to anyone except myself.

Sorry About All the F Words

*

Well, that was interesting.

I've set myself a new work schedule wherein I am allowed to fuck off for the first half of the day, but I have to get down to business and work (for money) at noon, and can't stop until I have worked for four hours or hit a certain dollar amount. I am also allowed to switch it up and work straight from 8-12 and then fuck off for the rest of the day. The plan is to reserve the fuck-off hours for writing, but during this first week it's only sort of worked out that way.

I'm working on a secret project that has gobbled up some of my morning hours, and that project does indeed involve writing and have to do with writing, so it counts. But my hope was to dedicate time to the actual placing of fiction-related words and sentences on the page, and that hasn't happened.

Yesterday, when noon rolled around, I had an utter failure of concentration. I tried for about half an hour to get to work, but my mind kept wandering (jumping around and shouting incoherently like a tweeker, if I'm honest) and I couldn't focus on what I was reading. My job is editing, so this would not do.

I went out for lunch to a restaurant that I'd been meaning to try, which was a letdown. I went to Michaels. I drove to Granada Hills to visit the library there. (Apparently there are more literary types in Granada Hills, because their library has all manner of things I can't find in Chatsworth.) I returned a couple of books and greedily snapped up four more, none of which I really have time to read. I listened to Florence at high decibels and let the wind blow my hair.

When I got home, I still felt a little chaotic in the mem-brane (ahem), but it was a different kind of chaos. I'd been mulling over story topics while I was out, trying to assign ideas to themes and trying to cobble themes together into a whole. The fornit was telling me I needed to write. I sat in front of a blank Word document and watched the cursor blink for a while, and nothing happened.

So I took my battered notebook to my favorite chair. I sat there for hardly a minute, and poof. "I took the urn and I left the building." I wrote about 2,000 words longhand before I ran out of gas, and Matt came home, and later in the evening I wrote another 400 and typed it all up.

I came up with the germ of this idea kind of randomly a couple of weeks ago, and the story is even more fucked up than I thought it would be. I LOVE it. No one in a right mind will ever love this story as much as I do. It is too depraved. I am so satisfied.

There's a flurry of NaNoWriMo stuff all over FB, and as always, I wish participants the best. I toyed with trying to write 40,000 words of the KUFC book this month, not signing up or anything, just setting a personal goal. But it's shaping up that I'm going to San Francisco AND San Diego this month, plus working on the secret project (deadline is December 1), plus Skyfall and Breaking Dawn 2 come out in the next few weeks and there is a LOT of opera to see. This might sound like I'm making excuses, but I really don't care, this isn't the right month for me to be ambitious about my writing goals.

I'll leave you with this, which is not my pattern at all when it comes to creative work but with which I think a lot of people sympathize:

*In principle I do not like Oasis. I feel it very necessary to make this clear. I think they are/were stupidly pretentious about music that's not much more than solid midlist rock-pop. And, HEY LIAM, YOU ARE NOT JOHN LENNON. But this song, which I do like a lot, expressed just what happened yesterday. Hilariously, my iTunes places it in the "Indie Rock" genre. Oh, it is to laugh. 

The Loneliest Number

I'm not going to indulge in self-pity now that Matt has gone to California as of this morning. Women send their husbands to war zones every day; less dramatically, there are lots of long-distance relationships out there, many of them lasting for years. But I am having a very hard time concentrating on my work right now.

There's this (thanks to Tiffany):

I don't think music actually gets much better than this. It's the best new thing I've heard in eons, knocking me over the head with itself. Some elements are thieved rather shamelessly from "Cecilia", but aside from that (or if you can get over it, which I can), this song reinforces all the stuff about which I rant without cease about how much value pop has for us as a culture.

Listening to the rest of the album, they also steal from Queen (duh) and Elton John, among others. Watch me try to care. The melting pot of influences and larceny is how we get stuff like David Bowie and Beck, after all.

I'm not sure if I'll put in much of a workday, after all. My brain's not working that efficiently.

I submitted a couple of stories this morning, and I've got my book sitting next to me. The proofs came yesterday. I've more or less read it again, and found a bunch of errors I need to fix for the next round, and there's really no reason for me to pick up the paperback and read it yet once more. But it's so appealing, sitting there.

In book form, by me.  

I just want to pick it up and flip through it over and over. But there's no reason to. Can you imagine how I'll be when I'm actually published, when I've got a book in real bookstore format? I'll strap it to my chest like a sack of flour and carry it around with me. Yeulgh.

Here's the blurb I wrote about it, below. Comments welcome. I still need to do the elevator pitch, etc.

But not today.

All Available Time: a novel about relationships and regret through the lens of malleable time. Pushing thirty and disconnected from much of her life, Elaine Robinson travels with her five best friends to a remote lodge in central Virginia for a week of quiet and camaraderie. But the lodge has an unexpected resident: an old and heartless Timelooker, a being with the power to manipulate time and bend it to her whims. As they struggle to outwit this creature, Lainey and her friends must also confront matters of time and loss that they haven't laid to rest. Long-dead family members refuse to be consigned to memory, and long-buried emotions erupt in the present. A journey into the murkiness of the human heart, as well as across two centuries, All Available Time is a supernatural thriller that is nevertheless deeply felt and redemptive. 

A Kinder, Gentler Overdose

When I first hear a song that I really love, I tend to over-listen to it. I listen to it in the car both to and from work, I listen to it at home on repeat, I pound it into my brain for a week or more before I've had enough of it. All manner of songs have been subject to this treatment, from Paul Simon to Lady Gaga. A couple of years ago, that song was "Come to Me" by Wah!, a kirtan artist of great repute and popularity.

The world of kirtan reminds me a lot of the world of Christian music; it's a whole subculture of people buying and selling and sharing music and attending concerts that goes on more or less entirely under the radar of people who aren't aware of it. I believe there's probably good music and unfortunate excess in both genres. There certainly is in kirtan. At its worst it's repetitive and kind of self-indulgent, with no value to a wide audience unused to its negatives. Ganga White said to us at teacher training that there's something funny to him about chanting to excess - Hare Krishna Hare Krishna Hare Krishna over and over and over, every hour of every day, gets worn into your brain such that your brain maybe can't develop new patterns. As long as your dominant pattern is Hare Krishna, you may not wind up growing very much in your spiritual journey. I'm paraphrasing very badly, but what he said made good sense to me, that chanting in great extremes leads to a failure of imagination.

That said, part of what I love most about "Come to Me" is about six and a half minutes in, when she switches to Sanskrit. The Amrita chant she does is so lovely, and so understated, that it always makes me feel consoled. (Appropriate for a song that's about Amma.)

On Tuesday, I attended the yoga class at Whole Yoga that I enjoyed so much three weeks ago and subbed for last week. I hope I can go to it regularly. One of the songs on the mix for class was a re-do of "Come to Me" that Wah! released on a more recent album - it's slower and shorter than the nine-minute version I love so much from Hidden in the Name. But it reminded me that I hadn't listened to the song in probably over a year. I had over-listened to it on my old iPod, and had never put the song on my new iPod when I bought it in 2009. Hearing her lyrics on Tuesday night made me feel old, loved, held, tired, mournful and rejuvenated all at once.

Come to me
I will take away your sorrow, come to me
I will open your tomorrow, come to me
I will open up your heart, come to me
We will never be apart

Not, perhaps, the most creative lyrics on planet Earth - kirtan lyrics rarely are - but her melody is simple, convincing, full of free-floating love. I couldn't find the long version on YouTube, but this website will play it for you via MySpace.

The following morning, I paid $0.99 to download the song to my iPhone so I could listen to it on the way to work. I sang along. I over-listened to it for most of last week. Then, on Friday, when I was full of jitters and loose ends and terror about my last day of work and what it held for me, I just kept the song in a little pocket in my mind, murmuring "Remove all fear, come from where you are to here," when I felt sad or anxious. It helped so immensely - it's a great debt I have to this song, now, for its soothing powers during the past week.

Even so, I think the song helps to demonstrate what Ganga said, because when she makes jai ma into the chorus toward the end of the song (jai ma is perhaps the most basic and widespread of all chants, and the one most likely to be irrevocably patterned into Wah!'s brain), it feels like a bit of a creative failure. I'll still sing along, but it seems like overkill that she put the Sanskrit in there at all. She could have just repeated the earlier lyrics. But instead, she's got to work jai ma in there somewhere, because everything comes back to jai ma, jai ma, jai jai ma.

I still haven't managed to insert this song into any of my class mixes. It's too soft for the majority of the music I use in vinyasa classes (which is stuff like Thievery Corporation and Cafe Del Mar), and it's too bouncy for restorative or yin classes. I'll figure out a chill mix to put it in, because others deserve the gift this song gave me, but it'll have to be next week, when I have time enough at last to pick through my music as I've been wanting to for months. I'm thinking of putting together a mix called Inevitably Makes Me Feel Better (or something rather more catchy), with "Rocket Man" and "When I Come Around" and "Enter Sandman" and "Come to Me" and others on there, songs that never, ever fail to fix whatever ails me for four or five minutes.