Upstate and Away!

All of a sudden, I’m going to Ithaca today. I’d been looking for bus tickets for a couple days, but they’re expensive and I have to pass through Philly or New York City because nothing goes directly from Pittsburgh to Ithaca. But then, strangely enough, a former co-worker of mine at Puddledockers Kayak Shop was visiting his brother at CMU and I jumped at the chance to hitch a ride back upstate with him.

Every summer since I was 15 or so I’ve gone upstate to work at the Kayak shop and hang out with my uncle Phil, who owns the place. He and my aunt Margaret used to refer to me and my brother, the only children on that side of my family, as the “corporate kids;” they could simply come hang out with us for a little if they ever felt the need to breed. This is in one way a compliment, of course, but I also think it sounds like Matt and I were irritating enough to keep them from wanting their own kids for very long. This very well could be true.

In any case, it’s good to know that the my streak won’t be snapped this summer. I’m sure he can used an extra set of hands this weekend. July 4th is one usually one of the biggest weekends of the summer, which makes sense, and there’s no rain coming to shit on it. I’m unrepentantly excited.

Any advice for my next book?

The Original Keeps Getting Newer

The Original magazine, which I had the immense pleasure of working with while in school at the University of Pittsburgh, just got itself a snappy new website. It fuckin’ nice. Some of my old stuff from last summer is still up there; I linked to it under my “At Home Dentistry” tab, which for those who haven’t click on it is how I talk about writing. But beyond that there will be a summer full of incredible things to read and look at. The official launch isn’t till Friday, I believe, so don’t go and get all discouraged if all the content isn’t up today. But think about it, take a look, and then go back and look again. You won’t regret it.

Fuckin’ Al Gore. Fuckin’ Media.

Al Gore wrote an article for Rolling Stone in the issue I just got. It’s about, to some measure or another, global warming, the media’s complicity in doubting global warming veracity, politicians insatiable need for campaign funds, the Citizens United ruling by the Supreme Court, the invasion of Iraq, the banking crisis, and other fun subjects. It’s not a very good article. It’s all over the place, seemingly a directionless screed that I understand as a liberal but can’t respect as a writer.

I hate the mass media; MSNBC kills me every time, and Fox is, well, Fox. But I’ve had something rolling around in my head for a little while that Gore’s article brought up again. “Throughout American history, we relied on the vibrancy of our public square — and the quality of our democratic discourse — to make better decisions than most nations in the history of the world.”

This, I think, it a verifiably stupid argument. When I look at media in the past I don’t see the golden age like he does. I see William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. I see an incredibly ignorant populous back then just as now. Modern media might — might — be louder, but I don’t know if it’s truly worse. It’s weird for me to see a liberal make the same fire and brimstone argument of a nation in decline as conservatives make against social legislation. Because in spite of all the shit that goes down I don’t think we’re in decline, I think we’re just trying to make changes, no more or less than it was “back in the day.”

I’m not used to defending media. I’m not even sure if I am. But I do think that Al Gore is screaming fire in a movie theater just like Pat Buchanan or Bill O’Reilly. And that’s boring, and ineffectual.

Che, Hunter, and Ego

I’m about halfway through The Motorcycle Diaries, by Che Guevara, and so far, so good. I picked it off my girlfriend’s shelf because I still haven’t managed to renew my library card and I was desperate for something to read. I finished the Rum Diary two or three days ago and I was getting itchy. (I just realized they both have diary in the title. Weird.)

The book also falls into a set that I’ve been getting more and more into recently, that of books that deal with people’s formative years, the awkward time between when we are declared legal adults and when our character and temperament seems to congeal into actual adulthood. Motorcycle Diaries is perfect for this: Che was a young, idealistic medical student, fairly naive but a pretty nice guy. The changes that occur during the book are subtle, but as the book unfolds he starts talking less about getting drunk with people he’s met on the road and more about Chilean mines, the conquistador invasion of the Incan empire, and poverty and death. Still gets drunk a lot, but it’s less prominent.

The Rum Diary was a little different, of course, because it’s a work of “fiction,” and was accordingly crafted by the author to reflect a certain vantage point. Like I mentioned in a previous entry, Hunter Thompson was 22 when he started it, made his character 30 to give him a little more seriousness, and then made him act like a world-weary 50 year old. That alone can tell the reader tons about the mindset he was in while writing.

In the spring of freshman year, lo those four incredibly long years ago, I gobbled up a book called The Proud Highway, which was a collection of hundreds of letters Thompson wrote between the ages of 18 and 30. He obsessively made carbon copies of all his correspondance, which was a godsend for Thompson fanboys such as myself. To be able to look at a great writer at age 19, when I was 19, and see a kid with raging emotions, incredible intensity, even if I was so little like him myself in the details, was simply amazing. He was, to a t, a stupid little kid with an ego. I, too, was/am a stupid little kid with an ego.

In the nonfiction classes I’ve taken, plenty of students, myself included, have written short memoirs. Pretty soon, I got sick of it, and if I felt some desire to get something of an emotional or personal nature off my chest, I put it in fiction. It’s simply that every memoir I wrote or read in a class was navel-gazing to the nth. I have no faith that anything I’ve experienced over my short and easy life is in anyway remarkable, or is something that no one was experienced before. So why would I write a fucking memoir?

So instead, I like to read about the formative years of others, and through that both confirm my suspicions about the lack of novelty in my experience but also allow myself to feel comradeship with these people, and let them do the bragging for me. And if by some luck I see an event in their lives and get a chance to apply it to my own, well, only the better.

Anthony Jeselnik is Very Funny and the Pirates Won Last Night

By the way, the job I interview for yesterday would involve selling Verizon products to businesses. This what not what I had thought it was, and I am now dreading getting it.

In other, much less depressing news, I had the opportunity yesterday to interview the comedian Anthony Jeselnik, who’s from Upper St. Clair and is coming back to Pittsburgh next weekend. If you haven’t heard of him, do a quick search, he’s fucking hilarious. He runs with a deadpan arrogance, and tends to say as many offensive things as he can in. But he maintains that he doesn’t do it for shock value so much as a really well done bait-and-switch, which is one of the simplest and often most hilarious methods of comedy. Set-up A, audience knows B would be the appropriate response, and comedian gives the C. Jeselnik, however, often likes to just straight to H or X.

Example: “I just accidentally hit a kid with my car. It isn’t serious, though. Nobody saw me.”

I am realizing more and more that my experience with the Original completely spoiled me. When I interviewed Gene I hung out with him for over an hour and a half; now I’m expected to get good stuff from 15 or 20 minutes. But despite his stage persona, Jeselnik is a very easy guy to talk to. He even apologized for being a little late with the phone call (phone interviews are another thing I’m trying to get used to).

Also, Fuck The Red Sox. I finally got to see the Pirates win at PNC, it was magical.

Free Red Bull Day at the Office

A woman wearing a burka (burqa?) got on the bus this morning, and while of course all I could see was her eyes, it certainly did seem that she was white. I wonder how many women of European descent end up taking that kind of veil.

In other news: what I had meant to write about yesterday, before I was so rudely interrupted by a dress code, was The Rum Diary. I finished it in about a day and a half; it’s a breezy read, and entertaining. When he started writing it in 1959, Hunter Thompson was 22. Fucking 22! His character, however, was 30, and obsessed with the idea of going “over the hill.” I’m not one to require honestly in fiction, but given the fact that I knew his age at the time of writing, and have read probably too much of his interpersonal correspondance from that age, I was bothered when Thompson’s character Paul Kemp talked, sometimes at length, of feeling like he had experienced it all. It’s a relatively autobiographical novel, so when Kemp spoke I heard Thompson, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that the author’s ego was a little out of hand. I’m not sure why this bothered me; Hunter was 75% ego and 75% id, I should have expected it.

It also stood out to me because of a habit I’ve started when writing fiction. The “campus novel,” like The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, can get a bad rep as unserious or youthful (pejoratively). So, I simply bumped my characters’ ages up to 23 or 24. Instantly they can be taken seriously. I get the feeling this is what Thompson did, that he felt the things he was writing about but knew it didn’t make sense for a 22 year-old to be saying the things he wanted to say. The problem is, it didn’t really work. Just by saying Kemp was 30 didn’t make his voice any less that of a 22 year-old. And now I’m afraid that’s how I’ll sound. 24 is much less of a jump, but still.

They’re making a movie out of it, too. Johnny Depp, of course, plays Kemp. Weirdly enough, they took out one of the major characters. Weirdly enough, they did the same thing for the film version of Mysteries of Pittsburgh. It bothers me when they do that for book-movie transitions. I judge adaptations against movies like Wonder Boys and Stand By Me. Wonder Boys was masterfully trimmed; taking out an entire character, like Cleveland in Mysteries or Yeamon in Rum Diary, seems like sloppy work, intended not to fit the story into a film but bluntly rewrite it as a film.

Click Here to Read a Fax by Hunter Thompson. His letters are always fucking wonderful. This one starts “Okay, you lazy bitch…”

I’m coming up on 500 words, which I’ve made my post limit, but I want to write about people’s formative years. It’ll be up soon, I hope. I’m on my second free Red Bull and I’ve been typing like a motherfucker.

Business-Professional

Yesterday I was sitting in Hemingway’s around 3ish, enjoying a beer and digesting, when I got a call from a random 412 number. Sometime a day or two before, I had submitted a resume to a marketing firm on a whim, during a period of more than normal pre-life stress. I never expected to hear back, but here was a random phone call from a businesslike woman asking me to come down for an interview. I fumbled a little on the phone, but of course I said yes to the interview. Fuck it, it’s a job right?

For some reason I decided to walk from 18th and Carson all the way down to the office on Terminal. I was a touch sweaty when I got there. But the lobby was air-conditioned and I was early so I settled down to mentally prepare. I had no idea what I was walking into, I’ve never tried to get a job in marketing before (and the more I say that, the weird it sounds: marketing). But I figured if I had my wits about me I could handle it.

I go up to the suite, and tell the desk-lady that I have an interview at 11:45.

“Oh..” she says. “Well, um, you’re wearing jeans.” Yes, I am. “They won’t interview you in jeans.” Really? “Yeah, I’m sorry.”

I’m a little taken aback, and very embarrassed. For some reason it had no occurred to me that jeans would be in appropriate. I’d worn jeans in every interview I’d ever had, but then again, the most formal of those was for the City Paper. And the woman on the phone hadn’t mentioned a dress code. I was wearing a fucking tie, that’s not good enough?

The lady gives me some forms to fill out so that when I come back with the proper attire the process will go smoother. The other guy in the entry room gets called back into the offices, and I find myself really pissed off that he’s wearing a smooth black suit. He could probably have beaten me up.

I fill out the forms and hand them back to the woman with a copy of my resume. Just to make sure, I ask if there are any other rules for the dress code I should know. “No,” she says, “Just business-professional.”

Business-professional. Fucking business-professional? Is that why you have your flabby-ass tits hanging out of your shirt, does that count as business-fucking-professional? And did you really have to look at me with some much disdain cause I dared come into the office in jeans?

Naturally I said thank you very much and left, with an interview rescheduled for 10:30 on Friday.

Little Tiny Rules

“If you dislike contemplating little tiny things, might as well quit now.”

Last Friday I got a chance to go down to South Side and meet Alberto Almarza, writer of the above quote and sculptor of little tiny things. He was out on the corner of 12th and Carson as part of Art Out of the Box, a Sprout Fund, uh, funded event that gets an artist to hang out on a street corner or in a park, with a small open studio, working and talking with passersby. The idea is to fight against the image of an artist holed up in a studio, working alone and only coming out for air when the magic is done.

Alberto’s project was to build his little tiny things and hide them in nooks and crannies around the intersection, where there’s a pocket park and guy feeding pigeons next to then don’t feed the pigeons sign. It was wonderful seeing Alberto work. The tables and chairs he made topped out at a centimeter or two tall, made out of balsa wood soaked in polyurethane or epoxy. The dexterity involved in this is impressive. Even more difficult were his little paper boats — literally a paper boat folded exactly as you would, only working with paper a centimeter square.

He didn’t have the hands I expected. They didn’t look particularly nimble, they were covered in a blackish art byproduct, and the nails were cut short. Hands of a sculptor, yes, but not perhaps of a miniturist (I can’t believe that’s a word).

I’m not opposed to the idea of contemplating little tiny things, so I spent a good amount of time wandering around the intersection and looking at his boats and dinettes, wondering conceitedly about things like artistic merit and difficulty. I knew that what he was doing was difficult. I knew that it  was aesthetically pleasing to me. Similar to some veins of modern art, I knew it was art before I knew why it was art.

I think it’s about constraints. Poetry constrains writers by proscribing a certain density to the words, requiring that each word used be absolutely necessary to the poem as a whole. Soloists, in jazz anyhow, are sometimes constrained by a subset of notes that they’re limited to. In these cases, the art comes out of working within your constraints to produce something that doesn’t feel constrained.

Alberto’s constraint was the size of his work. How to make something so very small but still make it more than just a very small thing. One of his “mini-installations” was a table and chair set in a cervice of a rock. Very cool, I thought. But then he told me to look a little closer, and I saw that he had somehow managed to draw a cave painting on the wall beside the table. And the tiny little clothesline that he hung tiny little squares of paper on weren’t just paper: he had drawn pictures of his paper boats and balsa chairs on them. Working within constraints, achieving greater than those constraints.

My Tag Cloud Is Weird (and more cursing)

I wrote today. I think it’s about a thousand words, a part of a very, very amorphous idea I have. I want to create a character through first person narration by the character’s friends and acquaintances at different parts of his life. Kind of like coloring in all the background of an image and hoping everyone can see something in the foreground.

I got the idea from The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano (there’s supposed to be a tilde on that). The entire middle section of the book, which is also the books longest section, describes the travels of Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano (no tilde there) through narration by their friends and acquaintances. I guess I stole the idea, but I was planning on forsaking the introductory section (which Bolano’s book has) and just plunge right into the stories. I also don’t think the kind of stuff I’m producing right now has the stamina to be a full book (Detective‘s is huge, 600 pages or something like that). Maybe it could be a long short story or a short novella. But really, right now it’s just character sketching, and I’m more pleased with myself for writing it at all than for any quality it might have. Daily writing has never been my strong suit, but I feel like if I start up the habit this summer there’s more of a likelihood I can continue it on into adulthood.

I started reading The Rum Diary as well. When I finished the Teddy book I didn’t have anything to read and I didn’t feel like going to the library, I was too stoned, so I grabbed it off my friend’s bookshelf and set too. I read the first 20 pages in about as many minutes, and it’s a short book, so I decided to just keep going on this slight detour or summer reading.

I really like Hunter Thompson’s pre-Gonzo stuff — Hells Angels is a badass piece of reporting — and Rum certainly isn’t Gonzo. It is the product of a very young guy, only 22. The prose still has his voice but it isn’t full-throated yet, if that makes any sense.

I know I mentioned Hunter Thompson as an imposing figure in my head what with the youth with which achieved some measure of an interesting life, and this book is definitely good to combat that. It does two things simultaneously: First, it pounds it into my head that Hunter Thompson did not pop out of the womb and great writer. Second, it shows me that even if someone’s first major attempt at their work isn’t nearly of their later quality, it doesn’t automatically mean the early book is shit. Cause this may not be the full Hunter, but it ain’t bad.

No one ever wants a blog post longer than 500 words, so before I go I have some links. Apparently it’s all about the links.

Matt Taibbi’s blog I referenced the other day is definitely worth a look : Taibblog

and so is his Goldman Sachs article: The Great American Bubble Machine

My mom worked for Philadelphia Stories, and look at her award information.

That’s about it for now. Still figuring out WordPress shit, but it’ll flow better soon I’d hope.

Finally Finished With TR

I finally finished The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, by Edmund Morris. It is, among other things, an incredibly well written narrative history of Teddy up to age 42, when McKinley got shot and he became the youngest president in history. Side note: as McKinley Lapsed into shock, and they were arresting his assassin, he says “Don’t let them hurt him.” That’s a pretty solid guy.

I already read Theodore Rex, which is Morris’ second volume on Teddy, accounting his presidency. Although there’s no chance in hell I’ll reread that for years to come, I do kind of wonder what it would have been like if I had read the books in order. Teddy comes across as super human in the vast majority of each book, but more so in Rex, after he’s matured a bit.

In Rise, there is a long accounting of his actions as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, a position he used to, among other things, start the Spanish-American War in order to get his rocks off on a battlefield. As soon as they declared war he resigned and created the Rough Riders.

So, with my current self-defeating jones for Big People and Big Happenings, it was great to make sure that Morris, a TR apologist of the first order, did not shy around the intensely imperialist nature of Teddy in the late 19th century.

I’m definitely ready to be done with Theodore Roosevelt for a little. There’s still Colonel Roosevelt to read in the trilogy, but it’s still in hardback, and fuck paying for that. It’s time for more Latin America: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Roberto Bolano (whose poetry gives me a sense of a Chilean Bukowski,) maybe a little Isabel Allende…

Suggestions are of course welcome.