Waveform

I'll be ordering this book from SPD tomorrow and we'll see it in the store next week. Can't
wait to read it. I'm not familiar with Amber DiPietra's work but I've been reading Denise
Leto for many years. 


Waveform

by Amber DiPietra and Denise Leto
Kenning Editions
 


Kenning Editions is proud to announce the publication ofWaveform, by Amber DiPietra and Denise Leto. Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Disability Studies. Somatics. WAVEFORMdocuments an aqueous, stop-start conversation between two women poets with disabilities. The idea of suspension—being held back, held over, or held by larger bodies, especially water—serves as pivot point for a manuscript that begins with the problem of rising from bed in the morning, of gravity and the ankle, of making muscles that control speech contract and release. Quotidian rituals like listing provide structure while large marine creatures open this epistolary work to a kind of chronic floating.

Denise Leto is a poet, writer, and Senior Editor at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work is forthcoming in Beauty is a Verb, Cinco Puntos Press, Fall 2011 and Puerto del Sol, Fall 2011 and has appeared in Wildhorses on Fire: Other Letters, The Wolf Magazine: Arts Council of England, Aufgabe, 26, and Xantippe. She was a Fellow for the University of Michigan’s Research/Practice Symposium on Movement, Somatics & Writing and is a past Honorary Fellow and Artist in Residence at Djerassi Resident Artist Program. She recently presented her work at the multi-media art event, “Breaking Ranks: Human/Nature,” at the Headlands Center for the Arts.

Amber DiPietra works as an advocate and peer counselor in the Bay Area disability community. She has recently started Write To Connect—life writing workshops for radical and everyday embodiments. Her interests include tracking the orthopedic body in real time, personal fossil records, ¡accion mutante! politics, and warm waters. Poems and prose pieces by Amber have appeared inMake, A Chicago Literary Magazine, Mirage Period[ica],Tarpaulin Sky, Mrs. Maybe, Monday Night and TRY!. Amber also co-curates the working class reading series with Michelle Puckett in Oakland, CA. Visit Amber’s blog at www.adipietra.blogspot.com

John D. MacDonald

 "To diggers a thousand years from now...the works of John D. MacDonald would be a treasure on the order of the tomb of Tutankhamen."--Kurt Vonnegut

I read through Hammett and Chandler and then I put mysteries away for a long time.  When I was working at Shakespeare and Co. somebody told me to try Ross MacDonald.  At the time I was driving down 101 a lot to visit friends in LA.   I’d stop for lunch in Santa Barbara.  Ross Macdonald gave me a new slant on the place. His novels have a quality that reminds me of David Lynch films—all the yucky evils that lurk behind the middle-class façade.  Also, there’s the light—the novels seem so sun drenched. Black Money has always been my favorite, but I’ve read them all a couple of times.

   There’s a temptation to reread a great mystery series immediately after finishing.  You’re in the author’s world and you’re not quite ready to leave. But the quick reread never works.  Too much is remembered.  I had finished them all but, hope against hope, I thought there could be one last obscure title that I’d missed. Or maybe I’d read Black Money one more time….

     I was trying to jump ship at Shakespeare and move over to Moe’s. I’d spend my lunch hours in Lit or Pockets, to remind Moe that he was holding my resume and that I’d be the perfect Moe’s employee.  Sometimes he’d seem to recognize me, often not.  Busy shelving.  On this particular day I may have gotten a nod.  There was lots of Ross on the shelf but I’d read them all.   There are a few guys named MacDonald writing mysteries (I came to Gregory later—good but not great).  I may have heard about Travis McGee, or maybe not. Anyway John D. was next to Ross so I bought Deep Blue Good-by on a whim.  I didn’t know it was the first in the series—dumb luck.  I tore through all the novels as they came into Shakespeare and Moe’s. Fifteen years later I reread the entire series , shamelessly stealing from them to write my own detective novels.  Hopefully I’ve covered my tracks and have stopped short of plagiarism.  I’ve since become a fan of his earlier pulp novels.  Over-the-top lurid junk writing, but mixed with a poet’s ear—and somehow you know that he knew what he was doing.   He lets you in on the fun.  Next time you’re in the store look for The Beach Girls, A Bullet for Cinderella, or April Evil.  They aren’t especially rare—you usually can find them for under five bucks.  Good, tough noir.

   But the Travis McGee series is his masterwork.  You get that Mad Men hit—characters get to drink and smoke with abandon, flight attendants are “stews”.  The novels were written from 1964 to the eighties, but seem very mid-sixties rat pack.  Embarrassing at times, but isn’t that part of the fun in Mad Men?   I’ve read MacDonald’s letters to Dan Rowan (!) and you can imagine him (and Travis) hanging out at the Playboy Club, or maybe some surf and turf place with an ocean view and a smoky bar.   MacDonald wasn’t a complete Neanderthal.  His love of the Florida coast caused him to be strongly anti-development—he was a conservationist before that was popular (probably still isn’t popular in Fort Lauderdale, Travis’ home turf).  Carl Hiaasen acknowledges this in the introduction to the 1995 reprint (pretty easy to find used).  MacDonald could be pretty subversive—the novels are full of phony capitalist types.  Mostly, though, he was a great story-teller.  Addictive stuff!

  I recently decided to reread Travis, but that I’d read them in order, and I’d only read the original hardbacks with dust jackets.  Not necessarily first editions (can be pretty pricy), but books from the period.  Deep Blue Good-By is the exception. It was a paperback original. But I scored a nice British reprint (they spell it Goodbye, not Good-By) with a suitably noirish dust jacket.  I’m looking for a cloth copy of Nightmare in Pink , so if you see one….

"There'll be times...

 

 

.. when the only refuge is books. Then you'll read as if you meant it, as if your life depended on it."

— Ken Bruen (The Killing of the Tinkers: A Novel)

Swamplandia! and Lonely Christopher

       A few months ago I received an uncorrected proof of a book called The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse by Lonely Christopher, from Akashic Books in New York.  Proofs are a nice perk for booksellers and reviewers—a chance to see what’s coming up and to play talent scout.  They can be daunting, too. Who can get around to reading all these books? How to choose?  I decided to read this one, for a few reasons. Akashic’s an interesting press—Akashic Noir publishes those “city noir” books (check out San Francisco Noir 2, edited by Peter Maravelis), among other things.  The cover of Mechanics is shocking, but compelling.  And it’s part of the Little House On The Bowery Series, edited by Dennis Cooper.  So it was certainly worth starting, at least.

     I read the short stories in a couple of sittings.  Creepy, in the best sense of the word.  There’s a fantasy feel that makes some of the grit palatable, at first.  “Dark” and “edgy” have become publisher’s clichés, but, really… this one’s dark and edgy.  A great first book by a young writer.

    I saw Karen Russell read from St. Lucy’s Home For Girls Raised By Wolves at the short story festival in Cork, Ireland.  Great reading—bought myself a signed copy for the plane.  An exciting collection from a twenty-something author.  A surreal vision of Florida, her home state— like Lonely Christopher’s collection, there’s a fantasy feel, but it isn’t fantasy writing.  Genre distinctions don’t matter here, it’s  good writing.  Karen’s first novel, Swamplandia! just came out, and the reviews are all over the map.  It’s burning a hole on my desk as we speak.  I’ll start it tonight! To be continued….

Please note:  Lonely Christopher recently read at Moe’s with Kevin Killian and Jack Shamama. Audio will be up next week—it’s a great way to sample their work. 

    

   

F.A. Nettelbeck (1950-2011)

 

Hermosa was a surfer town, still is, but now the surfers work well-paying day jobs. They have to—property values shot through the roof in the 80’s and they haven’t come down much. In ’76 I was sharing a house on Eighth Street—one of those cheap rent stories that old bohemians brag about. I was paying about a hundred a month for a nice room in a falling-apart beach house. Fireplace, enough of a yard for Emily, my lab mix, eight blocks from the beach and about three blocks from the bookstore.

I began my education in the Either/Or bookstore on Pier Avenue. I was attending classes at El Camino College and sneaking into others at Long Beach State (poets taught there), but I fed my head at Either/Or. Marx, Paul Goodman and I.F. Stone for my agitator side. McClure’s Meat Science led me out of the mainstream—thank you, Michael. I’d come in from the bright LA light and hit the politics sections, check out the fiction section for Bukowski or Bowles, look at poetry—Wanda Coleman was a favorite then. But I gave these shorter shrift--I was headed back behind the register, to a dimlit (nice contrast to all that beachy sunshine) small press section. An alcove, really. Mimeo, local stuff, handmade limited editions. Issues of Invisible City edited by Paul Vangelisti and John McBride, a long poem, The Burning of Los Angeles, by Jack Hirschman, mimeo edition with illustrations. Bertrand Mathieu’s translation of Season In Hell, intro by Anais Nin, illustrations by Jim Dine—I hear that translation in my head when I think of Rimbaud, “I sat beauty on my knee and I roughed her up…” SoCal poets some nearly forgotten—Locklin, Koertke, Steve Richmond, Stephen Jama. But also some that went on to “bigger” publication—Amy Gerstler, Dennis Cooper, Tom Clark, Elaine Equi…

I don’t remember the book, or the poem but at some point I stumbled onto F.A. Nettelbeck. Some permeation of Bug Death, in some mimeo, probably. I read it before I’d read Burroughs, possibly didn’t know about cut-ups—I met Harold Norse a year or so later, I think. That’s ok. I didn’t need historical context to appreciate the poems. Either way they would have taken the top of my head off, as the poet said. His filtering process was scary perfect. The thing that most sours me on “experimental” poetry is that, with most, there are so many more misses that hits. Too much wasted time, too many wasted words. Too much ego—why did they leave that in? I think, as I try to read. Nettelbeck never wasted time. Staccato little lines, hard hitting, a film-noir kind of feeling but not at all retro or clichéd: tribes rehearse the /ritual for the/videotaping/(the raper.) forcing/pink legs apart-after/this instinct settles/slowly like mud into/a dried out skull. Leafing through his work now I’m amazed at its rigor. Rigorous isn’t a word you’d usually associate with his “type” of poetry—the “road to excess” school. But, really, it takes a kind of stubbornness to stay on the road—it’s a long way to the palace. The street signs fly by. Who can read them, let alone choose those that matter and set them down in discernable (sublime!) order? One hell of a job—a life’s work.

Something like eighty per cent of Americans see themselves as middle class, which is a lie of course, there’s the oppressor class and then there’s the rest. I think, among the “middle class”, there’s a sneaky realization of that lie, like an itch you can’t scratch—or maybe a cancer. Some become more aware of the lie—and for some of us, at a certain age—late teens? Early twenties? There’s this search for authenticity—often embarrassing—white boys trying to sing the blues. Most give it up—possibly not a bad thing—society needs ballast, and it’s tough to keep up mortgage payments when traveling the road to excess. But I’m fascinated by those that stay true, or try. I’ve had long stretches on the road, but I’ve also stayed too long at the rest stops. Nettelbeck’s work had that blues singer/jazz musician/pirate quality, fascinating yet embarrassing to the middle class. Should we leave it be and stay bland? Appreciate from a distance? Jump right in and risk a life on the outside? Authenticity is a tough nut.

warm alcohol glow known
as god we are almost
home they say
repeat, give me something
warm—your arms clinging

I was working at Logos Books and Records in Santa Cruz when Americruiser came out, early eighties. After work I’d go to the Teacup Bar, in an old Chinese restaurant on Pacific Avenue. The earthquake of ’89 flattened the place. Nettelbeck drank there, but we didn’t talk that much. We had a mutual friend, Bill Simmons, a visual artist and if Bill was there I’d join in on group discussions. Mostly, I think, Nettelbeck went there for quiet drinks—me too—so we sat at opposite ends of the bar. It’s strange but kind of great to be immersed in the work of an artist, to see him or her in passing, watch from a distance. Possibly more to learn that way than from asking direct questions,

He had a nice way with the bartenders—the Teacup hired young women, mostly of the punk persuasion. Those were Big Book years for me—athletic reading. Russian novels, Melville, lots of Gertrude Stein. And Joyce. A good way to go for awhile, until it becomes like too much rich food. Nettelbeck seemed to chew that stuff up and spit it back out at you. Not that those others haven’t stayed with me, and often nourished me—but, in a way, Nettelbeck has had a bigger effect. Or, more visceral at least—I saw what he was seeing. Living in Santa Cruz sans car meant taking Greyhound a lot, to San Francisco or Oakland to get a little taste of the urban. Nettelbeck sucked the poetry out the greyhound rides, the stations, and all that “real” stuff. And, reading back the previous sentence I realize how clichéd it can seem—“the only ones for me are the mad ones”. That searching for the real in the dark corners is, perhaps, an inauthentic practice for those who will probably return to the “middle class”. And, yet, the alternative is to ignore what’s going on—all that awful unruly stuff, all that depth. What’s a middle class boy to do? I don’t think Nettelbeck wrestled much with that one—he seems pretty aware that he’s part of the oppressed class, probably never thought of himself as middle anything. At least, that’s what his poetry says—more like, look at this sucker! Isn’t that an interesting bug?

'I have talked to mentally crippled idiots, holding good jobs.'

I imagine he never had a “good job.” The road to excess probably doesn’t allow for that. Another tough nut of an idea. Occurs to me that I’ll probably never enter the palace of wisdom—I worry too much about my retirement.

I think beginning in the eighties his poetry just didn’t get considered. I think people who did know about him saw him as a kind of Burroughs knock-off. I know they were pals, but I don’t see too much overlap, stylistically. But, mostly, I don’t think people of the eighties avant ilk read or thought about his work. I find this really fascinating—that he wasn’t picked up by the avant or post-avant. There was a fork in the road, somewhere, and the cutting edge became less edgy, more refined maybe but the visceral was given a wide birth. There was a lower gross out factor. And the pros and cons of having a good job didn’t get discussed. The cutting edge didn’t threaten the man in the gray flannel suit. Real life issues were left out of focus—like trickle down or the foreign wars. Nettelbeck’s poetry points to the elephant in the room. Hell, he scared me! To stretch the zoo animal metaphor, he was like those monkeys that throw their own shit at the patrons. Take that! The message being: I’m in a cage, fucker. Let me out! (or, Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!). This is dangerous stuff—enough to make most get off the road to excess at the next off ramp. One good way to avoid the issue—marginalize the whole thing by declaring it out of fashion—or doing a Gertrude Stein—“that doesn’t interest us”.

Note: Drinking and Thinking, F.A. Nettelbeck's Blue Press Chapbook, is available at Moesbooks.com. Other titles are availble in the store--call for a stock check.

What I saw and What I Didn't See

   "Events Guy" is my official title, although I clean it up a little for the business card: events coordinator.  It's a nervous-making job. If the weather's too hot, or it's raining, or parking's especially bad the audience can dwindle to a handful.  There's also the overbooked author problem, or the great-but-obscure-author who doesn't get the audience he/she deserves. Also the unexplainable off night, when a "draw" doesn't draw. And then there's "thank you for organizing this. I'd buy the book, but I already downloaded...." 

But there are nights when things click. An author gives an especially interesting interview to the Express or the Chron, a news event corresponds to the book in question, the New York Times gives a positive review. 

Last night was one of those golden evenings.  Four poets from Cork, Ireland, not well known in the States, but all the chairs were full, standing room only. Patrick Cotter, Gerry Murphy, Leanne O'Sullivan, and Billy Ramsell came to the Bay Area to read at Litquake (they'll be at Litwalk Saturday, The Liberties pub in the Mission). I snagged them for a pre-Quake Berkeley night, mostly for my own amusement because I'd read and loved their work. 

The poets were amazing.  I've been doing events for many years, and I know that there are poetry readings that are about as much fun as waiting in line at the DMV. Why lie about it? And yet, when a poet knows how to read well, and the work is good--the experience is as rewarding as looking at a masterpiece, hearing great music, seeing a great film.  These four know their stuff--the work was deep, the performances just right.  And yes, we do have their books at Moe's--come in and take a look.

Karen Joy Fowler is a genre skipper. Lots of Authors work that way now, and it can be pretty exciting, but I think it's harder than it looks.  Excuse my language here, but part of the genre bender's job is to fuck with your head. Take your expectations regarding fantasy, mystery, Sci-Fi, and twist them around.  That can come off as just another literary game--but not here. Fowler's characters are too interesting, and the set-ups exist in a land of the
almost-real.  You're head isn't dramatically turned around--there's a gentle tick to the left or right, and before you know it you're living in another dimension.

Karen will be reading from her exquisite new book of Short Stories, What I Didn't see, this coming Monday 10/11 at (of course) Moe's Books.

Cork, The Inferno, and some very gritty noir

Just back from the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Festival in Cork, Ireland. The city sponsors this great fiction fest--five days of  readings, panels, and the best after-reading parties anywhere (I know, I've attended/crashed many a Lit party).  I went to do a reading and a panel, but, more importantly, I was there to scout out good reading for the Moe's customers.  Readers included Tess Gallagher and Ben Greenman, Dutch sensation Nyk de Vries, and also a few writers that may be new to you.  Check out Mattaponi Queen by Belle Boggs (Graywolf Press) and St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves (Vintage) by Karen Russell.  Fresh new writing--funny, human, lots of depth.

O/R press doesn't like to sell to bookstores. They're a download/print on demand outfit, but unlike the others in this category they publish established authors--and high quality books.  I had to contact them to order copies of Eileen Myles new novel Inferno.  Troubling to a bookseller--especially since books like this are what keep Indy stores in business, and separate us from the chains.  Excuse me while I rave about this book:  Inferno should, could, may, be a book of On The Road proportions.  Admittedly I'm a sucker for the young artist comes to the city to find fame/love/a place in history novel. I've read Balzac's Lost Illusions three times.  But, really, Myles tells the old story very well. Mostly she's a poet, with an ear that's as good as Kerouac's. Read this book, there are sentences that will carry you to another planet--really!  And please, treat it the way you would treat (did treat) On The Road.  Buy the paperback (at a bookstore!), put it in your "rucksack", beat it up, buy a second copy for a friend.  If this book doesn't inspire a generation I may lose hope for American letters.

OK, Benjamin Whitmer is a "stable mate". We're both published by PM Press in Oakland. But--he's written one of the toughest noirs around. Pike is fast and hard, but it also has heart. Like all the PM Press titles there's a political thrust--but it doesn't get in the way of the action.  Benjamin will be reading around the bay area in October, and will be at the Bouchercon mystery convention over at the Embarcadero Hyatt. He's reading at the Moe's post Bouchercon party--labeled Hardboiled for Hard Times--October 18th.