I wish I were in a position in my life where I would have bought Motown Remixed when it came out. Put it this way: if they redid Back to the Future in the nineties, this would be the music they would be listening to in 2025. Download it here and then throw away the rest of your music.

I'm almost positive that the revolution will be, in part, televised. Thanks Son Volt.

Today I feel like...*

1) James Joyce. My eyesight is failing. I thought for a few weeks that my glasses might just be dirty. But I am having trouble reading printed words. I can't afford new glasses and the ones I have are broken anyway. I wore them taped for three weeks before I could get the money together to buy some super glue. Joyce's eyesight went south in his later years because he drank too much. It is never known how much of Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake he was actually able to read.

If you are one of the fabulous people who have agreed to read my manuscript this week, keep this in mind. When you see that the entire premise of my novel is full of holes, remember that everytime I pick up the manuscript I think to myself, Ah shit, someone smeared grey ink all over that reem of paper I just bought.

2) Murphy Brown. Remember Elton, the painter? My roommate doesn't work outside of the house much. At first I didn't notice, but every day since I moved in he's been building something, cutting holes in the walls, or looking around his huge mess for a missing drillbit. He can afford to do this because he has three roommates who pay the rent for him. It would bother me if I had never seen what kind of closet-like, windowless shitholes everyone else lives in in this neighborhood.

New York City real estate is a disgusting phenomenon that captivates almost everyone. I know fry-cooks who wish they had bought their house in Bed-Stuy when they had the chance in the eighties because they could sell it today for two million. My roommate has lived in Williamsburg for ten years--when Pavement was still recording in their loft and before TV on the Radio was evicted for doing the same thing. He has us locked into a rent that is half what the rest of the building pays. He is worth it.

Having that said, tomorrow he can't hang out with me because the land lord is coming in to brick over the windows so that a building can be added on next door.

3) Mark Twain In 1893, Twain travelled from Hartford to Chicago to see the World's Fair. He got sick and spent eleven days in his hotel room before returning back without ever stepping inside. This is a fair--I've learned after finally finishing Devil in the White City--where the inventor of the Braille typewriter was hugged by Hellen Keller. Where a Princeton professor named Woodrow Wilson took his wife, where Susan B. Anthony watched Wild Bill ride and Thomas Edison showed Houdini his lightbulb.

The magic of the fair was felt by everyone for miles around and on the dedication of the final day they pursuaded congress to commemorate the American event by having all the children in all of the school in the country say a pledge of allegiance

Moments ago I stepped out of a cab I couldn't afford and ran into the Knitting Factory where I was supposed to meet Peter to see Gravy Train. The room was filled with the tepid humdity of dancing bodies and the legions of girls in vintage t-shirts glowed from their collective euphoria. Something wonderful had just happened to everyone in the room.

The woman at the desk looked at me through a pair of sad eyes behind a pair of cats-eyes as she told me the show just ended.

I really, really, really wish I had a job that would let me enjoy rock music on occassion.


*This is a regular installment of posts wherein I compare my minor troubles to the minor troubles of greater people in order to make myself believe, by transitive property, that my minor troubles make me a greater person.

Labels: Chicago

The past few weeks I have been shuttling my manuscript around to other people. This keeps it out of my clutches and gives me a little vacation. I do what I would do on vacation anyway: read, watch movies, drink alot, etc. I know that in a few days I have to get going again, but I'm enjoying the time and the mindless entertainment.

But I've been thinking alot lately. Publishing is so much harder than writing. Ben and I saw a movie last night where people were being harvested for organs to save the lives of the people they were cloned after. They all stayed healthy and alive because the people who were going to kill them told them that they would soon be selected to go to a big tropical island.

I'll go ahead and ruin the ending so that you don't--like we did--find yourself checking your cellphone every five minutes starting at 3:30 AM, begging yourself to go home, wondering when the goddam movie will end. In the last scene the hero destroys a holographic system, makes the prisoners see the real world. They've spent their whole lives staring across a draw bridge at a beautiful, lush tropical island. And when it's shattered, they come to realize that they are in suburban Albequerque.

And that's what I worry about in writing. I think I'm much happier pretending that there is a bright island ahead than I ever will be with any range of achievement or failure. I've created and oft-shitty life for myself in the belief that someday soon I won't be making drinks and riding the subway home with a sore back at two thirty AM on a sunday. I've led myself to believe that against all odds--first of all the remote possibility of getting published and then the even further event of someone actually reading it--I may be able to have a career in this.

1) One of the biggest problems with living in my Peter Pan-like apartment is that we can't have internet. My roomated bought the first wireless card they ever made, but for the landlords to provide cable access, they will have to admit that people live here. This is not very difficult. In the hallway to my front door there is a karate studio, a yoga gym, and a massage therapist. Regularly I sort throught my mail as total strangers climb my stares and help their six-year-olds tighten their karate belts or juggle a cellphone and a yoga mat at the same time.

But it means that I can only get internet on clear nights. There's a petstore on the first floor that has wireless and I think all one hundred people living in my building use it on a daily basis. I wish I could rely on a signal because my brain is full of Williamsburg moments, which I want to catalogue.

2) I'm reading Chuck Klosterman's new book Killing Yourself to Live. Two things: Chuck Klosterman writes exactly how one of my good friends in college talks. Sometimes you read Klosterman's articles in Esquire or The Beleiver or Spin and you think: Ah! That is an interestting and nuanced perspective. Same with the friend. You pass by him or you walk out of the same movie and he has already prepared a few paragraphs about what he thinks. But god forbid you get stuck next to this friend in a long class or (in my case) an seried of extended road trips. Too much. It's just too much.

This friend also smelled fairly bad and the longer I read Klosterman, the more he starts to smell.

Anyway, this book is about Chuck Klosterman being Chuck Klosterman on a long road trip. I'm supposed to review it, but I'm making no progress since I can't get over the novelty of shutting off this annoying, smelly person whenever I want.

There's a power out in my building. I live in what you might call semi-legal housing. We have commonly have problems that arise from having a hundred people live an eat in what was once a thriving corregated cardboard factory. Half of my building was on the roof, drinking as the fireworks of temporary surges burst through the windows.

It was just like July 4th. Only in doors.

I mention this only because I am moving out with Williamsburg next month. I will miss riding the L train home at night. I'll miss checking out everyones tattoos and playing name-that-tune with the tinny beats that eminate from their iPods. More than once a week I run into someone who is wearing almost the same outfit as myself and who stares at the world through his glasses with the same tired gaze as I do. We meet eyes, acknowledge that we are not as unique as we were in out hometowns, and move one, somewhat crushed.

I'm practicing being a career author. The biggest thing I've learned is that you do business over lunch, which is convenient, because in my current profession I also do business over lunch.

Last week (I can't believe I forgot to mention this) I donned a tie and waited in the front lobby of a Very Famous Publisher for a friend to come out. Twenty-foot high bookcases display first editions of their legendary pressings. In Cold Blood, On the Road, Uncle Tom's Cabin, etc.

I gave her a copy of the fake-promotional material that the ivy league kids made and she read a chapter just to be nice. She is an editor for the company and therefor had great insight into how things work--how manuscripts get passed around and what social network makes books happen.

She asked me what I wanted and I said I was looking to have a career. I didn't want to get an advance and go nowhere, I didn't want to try and find an agent too soon and never make it.

"You're so negative," she says as the waiter brings me a beer. "You're going to sell this manuscript. The only question is how you want it to happen. Why are you so down about this? Most people are excited." I explained that I've never met a career author, but that I spend most of my creative time with musicians and comedians--both of whom only make money from performing and rarely see anything after their first deal.

She gives me the email addresses of five agents in the city and I have yet to follow up on them. The Very Famous Publisher did pay for the lunch, however. So far I am ahead. On friday I am meeting with another Annie--Ben's girlfriend. She is an amazing human being who is capable of reading 300 pages a day. Again there will be a tie and lunch involved.

Message One:

"I've got big news. My group has decided to publish your novel. We just finished designing the cover and the jacket blurb."

Yeah! My novel is being fake-published in a make believe process made up by Ivy League graduate students! They are pretend-giving me a fake-advance of $5000 and starting a print run of 7500 non-existant copies! That's the best fake-news I've pretended to enjoy all day!

"We're going to rough-cut your pages, which means we consider it 'literary fiction" My fake-debut is going to be pretend-literary!

"Can't you atleast give me a good fake-advance? I've been for-real-working on this for three years."

"Sorry, the publisher did lose $40,000 by producing your novel."

Already I'm a fake-failure.

If my novel's main characters had a themesong that they could never play to anyone, it would be "Common People" by Pulp. The problem, I've learned, is that poor people pretty much never consider themselves poor any more than rich people would say they are upper class.

Here’s a rule I learned. I’m not a real smart guy, but I know that life keeps a lot of secrets from you. Pretty much whenever it can. But I figured this one out on my own: only pretentious people use the word pretentious. And they always mean it as an insult, but it’s a disease they diagnose because they can smell their own. It doesn’t really even bother me any more now that I know that. Want another one?—I hope I pronounce this right—Bourgeois. See? Knowledge is power.

A thrilling cell phone conversation

"We're trying to figure out how to fake-market your manuscript. I say it's a working-class Dave Eggers."

"Huh, I like to think of it as a modern Huck Finn."

"We think the Dave Eggers plug might be overplayed, but we don't want to say it's Holden Caulfield goes On The Road."

"Oh God no." She makes a long explaination of the problems she's having with her group of grad students, who are in the process of pretend editting and fake publishing my manuscript as part of a class. "Can you say that again?"

(Sighs) "Yes, my group of Ivy League grad students can't think of a single novel that compares to yours."

A friend of mine, quite suddenly, called me to send her 60 pages of the manuscript so she can pretend-edit it in a class at Columbia grad school. A class taught by real-life publishers.

This should be a painful process akin to selecting one of your children to live. But it turns out I'm a little too shallow for that: instead I'm sitting here feeling like the perfect outfit is in my closet and I just have to find it.

Ben, Pete and I camped out at Upright Citizen's Brigade to try and get tickets to see David Cross. I had left my copy of Huck Finn at home, so I picked up a copy of To Kill A Mockingbird

1) This was a grown up decision. They did just come out with the next volume of the new translation of Proust. Since I have yet to finish the first section of one, I realize that there are plenty of other ways I could decorate my apartment for eighteen dollars.

2) It's amazing to me that Huck and Mockingbird were assigned to me at some point. I don't even slightly remember either of them. I was, it seems, illiterate as a child.