Easter 1916 ...For england may kee faith For all that is done and said. We know their dream; enough To know they dreamed and are dead; And what if excess of love Bewildered them till they died? I write it out in a verse- MacDonagh and MacBride And Connolly and Pearse Now and in time to be, Whereever green is worn, Are changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.
Batgirl has become less of a person that I know and whose apartment I have stumbled out of, and more of a TV character to me. I feel like she's become this myspace version of her desired self and ceased to exist and she did that day when we rode the vespa across the Brooklyn Bridge and had icecream at a dock on the east river.
Earlier today I was myspace stalking her because I was in bed and it occured to me that I had not obsessed over any women who do not love me today. I hate every myspace song in the world, although I understand how perfect they are. If I'm going to abuse myself with your beauty, I don't need you to pick out your own theme-music.
Anyway, I think at least one part of me broke up with her today. The High Fidelity half of me went on to congratulate her on her TV Show premier and then Jack Black started screaming, "What the fuck is that sound?? Is that? Is that a song by The La's? No, no. I fucking love it. It's a fantastic song about HEROINE!"
But some part of me knows I'll still watch her show, thinking there she goes... There she goes again...Racing through my brain...Pulsing through my veins...And I just can't contain...This feeling that remains...
"We're always lucky," I said and like a fool I did not knock on wood. There was wood everywhere in that apartment to knock on too. -Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
Thank you for recommending The Talented Mr. Ripley. It was amazing! You said I would identify wth the horrible, lonely main character but instead I identified with every single character. It was as if every character were spawn of my fractured psyche! You know that scene in Being John Malcovich where he slips into his own brain and it just says, "Malcovich? Malcovich?" That was me in the film! Was there any dialogue? I couldn't hear it. I didn't need to because I already understood what was going on.
I lied about the dialogue. I also don't know what's true anymore!
The moment when Philip Seymour Hoffman's character screeches up in his sports car and ends his hello by saying, "Don't you just wanna fuck every girl you meet?" I laughed outloud! I laughed outloud alone in my bedroom on a friday night after not leaving the house all day!
Gwenyth Paltro's character cries slightly less than I do every day, however, I wish she didn't have such clear motive, like I don't.
Dickie Greenleaf is magnifiscent as a terrible character.
The only part that I really didn't like was the totally-real bludgeoning scenes, which I could picture myself doing.
As soon as the assholes figure out how to get around the software walls:
1) I'm sooooooo getting it!
Dear assholes, I don't know why you exist or why on earth you've gone through your VHS tapes of Momma's Family and catalogued them on youtube. But thank you! Something tells me you identify with Momma's son who lives in the basement. I've posted albums that leak and I can only assume that pretending you created something is somewhat exhilarating. I'm not judging you. My career is playing other peoples music. So please, here's a few things I know you are capable of doing that will finally destroy literature and make my life easier.
1. Figure out how to get PDF files on so we can steal the actual font and deliciousness of printed books from the scans on books.google.com
2. Destroy any ability for this machine to ever check email. I can check my email on the cash register I use at work. The last thing I need is another reminder that agents aren't writing me back.
3. Audio books that scoll the page like credits. Do you have any idea how much of War & Peace I would have finished by now if it scrolled on my screen "...a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away..."
4. Merge it with the pre-existing ebooks that you can already steal online.
5. Melt a back-lit botton onto it so I can read in bed or on an airplane.
6. Put a second screen on the back that displays the book jacket photo so that when you ride the subway or your light blares through the airplane you will be spared the trouble of shouting, "Look at me, everybody! I'm fucken reading War & Peace! and add some kind of progress meter so we don't have to shout that part too.
As soon as the assholes figure out how milk this:
2) I can give up this career too! Remember when I was a journalist for a failing paper when they went online and they stopped paying well for content because everyone just got it online for free and they just took it from the AP? Remember when I got $15 for interviewing Janeane Garafalo or the time I spent three days on restaurant reviews and got $20 for it? I say this, of course, while I'm finally downloading The Talented Mr. Ripley after Margaret emailed me about it the other day.
Also, it's what I deserve after a decade of stealing music online and getting paid to play it.
I'll stop writing altogether and the insanity will take back over. You'll see me on 14th St. in earplugs and my geriatric sunglasses, singing along to the rhythm of my change cup.
1) Thanksgiving, gorgeous New England day, my only non-Irish uncle walked outside and made some kind of off-hand, thoughtless, well-intentioned, insensitive dad-comment about how the entire family are morons who yearn for death just because all of the cousins smoke. He bitches about this frequently.
He once told me that he quit smoking when his third son was born with asthma, which I always thought was beautiful.
So I asked him, "How long did you smoke for?"
He went blank. He stared at me with his big English eyes. He searched my face for clues about what trap I might be setting. And I said to him, "It's a fairly simple question. And may I add: it gets old when you spend all your life telling jokes that other people think are riddles. And it's exhausting to not even get a single answer on a fill-in-the-blank question."
2) This email response of mine is full of macho posturing and mock-alpha male behavior because that is what the hummingbird does when his tree is attacked. It was off-hand, thoughtless, well-intentioned, insensitive and therapeutic in response to an equally cruel and therapeutic email.
Don't ever tell me what to write ever again.
Please just let me work my own shit out and stay out of my creative life. You're stunting my growth, hurting my progess and destroying what might be the best novel I ever write just because you happen to have a different fucking opinion.
I loved you, and you should know that. But God forbid I fucking do something I enjoy or work out my problems. I don't need your fucking opinion on a fucking novel I haven't written yet OR that you've never read. Stop calling me crazy, it's dismissive and rude and it's just another way of you telling me that you don't give a shit about me.
Please grow up. Move on with your life. And don't accuse me of shit. People seem to forget that I feelings. Sensitive little feelings and I don't need to be yelled at because you are incapable of pronouncing words they way I pronounce them. Stop taking shit personally. Stop putting your nametag on things that are not you. They have nothing more to do with you than the nametag has to do with the shirt it's stuck to. <--I vaguely stole that from Tolstoy.
Don't ever tell me what to write ever again.
Only now that I'm looking for a sentence to write here for aesthetic purposes does it occur to me that I say shit like this enough that people probably expect it more than they expect a joke or a riddle.
The lesson of Beowulf, to me, has always been that no matter how much you admire anything: even the great ones can only last for fifty years. I'm not a superstitious person or an apocalyst. But I will always love the music of the nineties because it sounds beautiful: Nero playing the fiddle.
One time I went home with this girl purely because we shared a cab together. I barely knew her at all, which was probably half the fun, and she kept pronouncing my name wrong. About halfway through our evening together (sunrish-ish) a friend of hers called saying she was in a cab on her way back to her place.
All I heard was, "Manhattan Bridge? Don't cross---" she glanced down at me.
"Atlantic," I said.
"Don't cross Atlantic. You're there now? Great." she hangs up. "I've got a friend staying with me right now and she's across the street in a cab from some guy's house. I'm going to ride home with her." She left so quickly that I wouldn't be surprised if a third-person-omniscient narrator saw her leave my apartment nude.
Even though this was kind of a shitty thing what we have to keep in mind is that I'm an even shittier person. First of all, either she paid for the cab back to my house or I got to feel like a big shot for paying my own way home--which I would have done anyway. (Imagine how much more satisfying it would have been if everytime I paid my regular tolls home, from my old office job, I said to some random girl I met in the office, "Nah, baby, I got this." Staff morale!)
And of course, even shittier of me, this saved me from the awkwardest moment in my week. You have a lover, a boyfriend, a girlfriend, your wife. No matter how much you loved him or her the night before you still have to get up and get ready for work and get to the office. That's me with writing time. Only I'm more superstitious than third base coach.
I can't stand guys who say they'll sleep with a girl and then not sleep with her. It's just bad grammar. But I understand them. And yet, imagine waking up in some strange boy's house with a hangover. Did he leave? Does he have roommates? Do I have to get dressed to go to the bathroom? Where is the bathroom? Where's the subway?
And you find him sitting in the dark, satanically sipping a cup of coffee, staring at a dictionary and a blank computer screen, cursing both of them for not working for him. Were he a 10% shittier person there might be signs on his front window stolen from the subway.
<----23 NRQ 6 M C G----> <--Long Island Railroad Chinatown Bus-->
And another one stolen from the bar where you met this sleezebag:
Please Respect Our Neighbors: Leave Quietly.
And since I'm about 8% shittier than I let on, I'll also add that I've had an educational experience from being too chickenshit to face up to girls. For example, Gdzie jest stacja kolejowa? is a very useful phrase if you wake up in a strange apartment and, after checking the mail, discover yourself in Greenpoint. It's Polish for, "Where is the train?"
To my utter disbelief--literally--she myspaced me the next day somehow. She turned out to be a brilliantly talented musician whom I'd seen before but didn't care about.
We met up several times in the coming weeks and before she went on tour she gave me her new record. And since I barely knew her at all, this record seemed like a window into her head. I loved it! She toured enough and was in a studio down south enough that she decided I could be her "NY Boyfriend" and this was all I had of my non-girlfriend, a voice in my headphones.
She sent me her newest song and it was all I had of her for a month. I listened to it almost a hundred times until it echoed into my brain and created new meanings.
And just before I saw her last I was about to launch into a diatribe about how much I loved that new song about the way it--
"Can you believe this? Some guy in San Francisco tried to sign us just based on that song I gave you. I had to break it to him that it has no meaning! I was in the studio on Peyote when I wrote it! What an ass!"
I took your entire review of Missing in Action home to my parents apartment for the week. You obviously put alot of work into it and I just want to say thank you again. When I first got it in the mail I think I was too frazzled to respond or even read it. Reading over my own novel with someone else's eyes was very refreshing.
To answer some of the questions in your margin notes: "might as well" v. "mind as well." I don't really know why Liam always says "mind as well." Is it an Irish thing? New Englandism?
Re: Liam's age--it made sense to me at one time that he'd be young. But then I could never decide. Should this be a pathetic story about losers who live with their parents 10 years after high school?
Sherry Leworski is one of my favorite characters. I invented her when I was 19 and I can't stop dating girls like her. I wish I could write another Liam novel and then retel that story from Sherry Leworski's perspective.
I am, however, startng to wonder if it might work as another novel entirely. What if Liam was younger when he ran away? He's more than a bit childish as it is.
Even though I thought it was funny at the time, I really haven't been able to write since I got that email from Annie. I know I'm a sensitive Irish pussy. My family comes from an island where it rains so hard and so loud that if you're not sensitive: you'll never hear your own children cry.
But so is my brother so I told him how shitty I've been feeling. How shitty I always feel when I'm not writing and how there's no cure for it. But I said it like this, "I feel like Rudolf the rednose reindeer, verse 1."
He wrote back, "Tonight's the night. As your attourney I advise you to go with it."
I said, "I know it might be the best writing day of my life but it just feels like a foggy Christmas Eve and Santa's gonna stay home. He also doesn't even give a shit whether they let poor Rudolf join in any reindeer games."
"Brendan, with your nose so bright, won't you guide my sleigh tonight??"
Chapter 1.
One time Annie's sister wrote this short thing that I think of once a year
this weekend represented the commencement of one of my favorite times of year, where we're surrounded by little colorful things that give us great joy.
Clementine season!!
I emailed her the other day to tell her that I think about her whenever I eat Clementines and they both make me happy. "Clementines are my life metaphor." Annie's sister and Clementines. They both make me happy.
I'll probably never hear back from her because
a) all I ever fucking get is misinterpretted. Not even. I get mispronounced. No one ever reads me honestly. But I rarely ever get read. If you had any fucking clue what it took Otis to write "Respect" and the years of troubles behind it, you would never even fucking dream of calling it sexist or derivative.
b) She's not my sister. She's annies sister and losing sisters when you break up is one of those horrible truths about mating habits of the North American Male.
Chapter two
I got along so well with Nikki's sisters at the wedding that we became bros. They'd text me shit like, "I just saw Girl Talk!" and "Your friend's commercial is on again! So cute!"
But I can't fucking call them right now and be like, "Hey! Heard your sister is back with whatshisface. Did you see Beowulf? Me neither! I feel sad today."
BBC? (British bird accent:) "Once the chicks have hatched, the male ruby throated hummingbird will never return to his former mate's nest and he will certainly never interact with her sister. Relationships between sister and sister are more important for the survival of the species and the rearing of the bastard chicks. Territoriality between the females, as in all species, will only lead to fighting which would prevent them from continuing the species."
Chapter 3 It's okay. These things happen. (Don't mispronounce my words when I'm not being a smartass.) These things happen.
Wallace Stevens had ice cream. Seamus Heaney had blackberries. Which he loved to eat but which turned rotten if you stored them:
I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot. Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not.
And I have clementines.
Chapter 4
Clementines are my life metaphor. Clementines are my girlfriend metaphor. Clementines are my Annie's sister metaphor. Clementines are my dead gramma metaphor. Clementines are the reason I love Mercutio. Clementines are my metaphor for the catskills joke in Annie Hall.
I canned my grandmother in a grave. I canned Mercutio on page one. I have canned my ex girlfriends. I have cryogenically frozen my pantheon of exes in my mind and yet I stand there like Michelangelo, hurling my marble-chisel at their absolute perfection screaming, "CHE NON PARLA??"
"WHY CAN'T YOU SPEAK?"
Canned clementines are called "Mandarin Oranges" and they're a fucking emetic and they only remind us of the Clementines we've should have savoured once before.
I loved Annie's sister the first day I ever met her. She was like a Clementine. She was sweet and wonderful and before I knew it she was gone. When she moved back to Chicago I stood there like a child on Wallace Steven's street, trying not to cry about the ice cream that just fell from his cone before he'd had his fill.
At my grandmother's funeral I cried until my tears killed the grass with salt. Because here was a woman who would have been available to me any time of day or night and the first time I could be bothered to fucking talk to her she was dead. To me.
You are a Clementine. You're nothing fucking special. There's a fucking million of you and even the fucking tree doesn't give a shit about you because you fall to the ground and go back into it when some hummingbird shits out your seedless filth.
I have a feeling, however, that you mattered to the humming bird when he broke through your barriers and discovered how sweet you were.
Chapter 5.
Wikipedia.
By far the most serious edit to A Moveable Feast is that after his death, Hemingway's fourth wife deleted a lengthy apology to Hadley, Hemingway's first wife and perhaps intended heroine. This apology appeared in various forms in every draft of the book, and Brenner suggests that Mary deleted it because it impugned her own role as wife with its implications that Hadley was the most important spouse.
Epilogue.
How I miss her! How I miss her. How I missed my Clementine! But I kissed her little sister, I forgot my Clementine. Then the miner forty-niner soon began to peak and pine. Thought he oughter join his daughter, now he's with his Clementine. Oh my darling, oh my darling Clementine.
Those are the actual words, and there's a reason people don't like to sing that verse and yet they love the chorus.
In a corner of the churchyard, where the myrtle boughs entwine, grow the roses and the poses, fertilized by Clementine.
Oh my darling Clementine, you are lost and gone forever...
It takes no thought whatsoever to think this song is grotesque and weird and disgusting. But if you can just humble yourself for one second. Imagine that you were a miner 49er and you watched your daughter drown because you could not swim. You would spend the rest of your life below the Clementine tree you planted at her grave, hoping for one sweet fruit.
This post alone took four hours to read and no time write. Either that or the opposite.
If I worship the cult of my exes to a necrophiliac degree and they ignore me it's probably because they mispronounce me. It's also probably because I only seem to bother them when I'm in a writing slump. It's because I miss them and I miss being inspired by them.
1) Something to consider: I cannot get Nikki to read my shit for the life of me. And yet. When she does read it her response is warm and full of joy and she always says the same thing. "Where's the rest?"
The mother goose loves her chicks so much that she chews for them and feeds each one individually. Then one day she realizes that she can't keep doing it and so she pushes them out of the nest before their feathers develope. They fall 40 feet from the nest and bounce off the floor. If they survive the journey to the lake they will learn to feed themselves when they get there. The mother goose loves her chicks very much. Like most birds she is a single parent.
If you worked for the bird-version of BBC your narrator would misunderstand us and say, (British Bird Accent) "In Manhattan young mating humans have to over come the noise of the city by repeating their mating calls to each and parroting them back, echo like." The screen will then cut to Brendan, standing outside of her apartment after break up sex with half my last novel shouting up, "Where's the rest?" Then to two weeks later when I left her box of shit at work and forgot her phone charger and she texted me, "Where's the rest?" Then to me hopelessly wondering if what happened to the other half of our relationship that never happened, flying to Minneapolis and waiting in her hotel lobby shouting, "Where's the rest??"
2) I'm having an intellectual love affair with a friend of mine's girlfriend. He is terrified of me because he is not that bright and he thinks I'm going to steal her away. He would calm down if he accepted how much he loved her and how much I've totally tried and failed. She and I have these passionate mind-quickies together while he's at work. She doesn't want to piss him off, so we just keep it a secret.
"Don't tell your label, but I stole your new song off myspace by wiring it back through my laptop. It's amazing. I took my glasses off and went for a walk in Brooklyn and listened to it 15 times in a row. I got lost!"
"Yay!"
"I can't wait to spin it next week. But for now I'm just listening to it alone and I am in heaven misinterpreting it."
"Why misinterpret?"
And I wrote back,
The greatest/worst thing about art: It will never be interpreted by the art appreciator as it is by the artist.
Because they are three separate things.
"Ha! I love it."
"Then imagine how much I love your song: I didn't think it until after I heard it."
The class I did the least work in during college was The Divine Comedy.
The professor was so good that I still cannot remember reading Paradiso. And yet I never missed a class and to this day I am friends with the professor and I listen to his lectures on my iPod whenever I eat dinner alone.
It amazes me--the way all nature amazes me--that all of us seem happier when we imagine a time before we existed. We're also way too excited about the future. And yet as we get to the future we miss the past that we hated at the time.
Theo asked me last night whether a story I told was a true story or just one of my stories that I make up. It occured to me that I also do not know where to draw the line.
So, just in case you were suspended in disbelief by the batgirl story. Go here.
I took my new GoGo dancer out to dinner and I ran into Woody Allen in the men's room. She had already seen him before and was all atitter over him. He was washing his hands with a satanically tiny bottle of Purell.
"Sir, I'm a big, big fan of your work. You're a brilliant person and you make me feel better about my disgusting self," I said.
"Thank you. Thank you very much. It's no bother. It's great to be appreciated."
I didn't mention that it might be a bother. We both realized this at once and laughed.
"Can I ask you a huge favor? I'm on a date with this girl tonight. I've never dated a Jewish girl before and it would make me look like Jaweh if you could just walk over say hello to me and keep going back to your table."
"Sounds fun. Let's do it. What's her name?"
"Anna." I was soooo ready with my punchline! I couldn't tell him in advance even though I really wanted to. It is "Wood! Can't you see I'm fucking busy??"
I go back, sit down, pretend to understand the wine list and I can see her eyes light up as he walks up behind me. "Excuse me."
"Wood! Can't you see I'm--"
Woody says, "Ohmygod! Anna! It's me. Oh, you don't remember that night at ALL do you?"
Of the fifty most talented people of this generation: 45 of them are people we see ever day. Fifteen of them are going to die in their sleep before they get the respect they deserve. I will be a flaccid, amalgamated character made out of five different bartenders who DJ in the story of their lives.
All I ask is that you get this once scene right:
Manhattan. Dawn. The bartender wakes up a guy and a girl who have passed out while he did his paper work. The lower east side awakens without us. Bartender's iPod dies, but he keeps his headphones on so that that it might look okay that he is singing "The Auld Triangle." Over the Manhattan bridge on the subway. He recalls the Gogo dancer's perfume. On his arms. He is a disgusting creature. The subway emerges from the tunnel out of canal street. A Jim Carroll song appears on his headphones. Sunrise missed him. But the East river is only beautiful when you're not trying to think about it. And when he arrives back in Brooklyn: singing out loud to yourself is a survival skill.
Herbie pushed Tony from the Boys' Club roof Tony thought that his rage was just some goof. But Herbie sure gave Tony some bitchen proof. Hey, Herbie said, Tony, can you fly? But Tony couldn't fly . . . Tony died.
Ben has been my best friend for twelve years. By his next birthday we will have known each other for the majority of our lives. I don't have any bullshit with Ben. We're both terrible people. We both need to shower in the dark. Our mothers would fight-to-the-death in a contest of who's-conception-of-her-conception is the brightest little boy. And they'd both die.
Ben knows when I'm lying to him. But more importantly: Ben knows why I'm lying to him. Frequently when we're telling stories to each other we have to stop halfway through and say, "Wait, no, that's not what happened. That's how I told someone else that it happened."
When Ben talks to me, I do not have to think because I believe in his brain. If you want to talk to me. If you want to be my friend. If you want to talk to me again in twelve years do what Ben does: do your thinking later.
You cannot sit there and respond to me because you already have. Your lip twitched the second you disbelieved me. Your crow's foot smiled before your lips did. I'm a sensitive piece of shit and that's why my family calls me Rainman. But it means that I'm still a sensitive piece of shit who wears sunglasses in his own apartment.
I emailed Nikki my latest erudite poop-joke and when she didn't respond I wrote back, "Awww, thanks sweetie. I think your spring line is shaping up great!" She emailed back: "Am I supposed to take this as you saying that I did not write you back in a timely manner."
Do I need to switch to decaf? Yes. Do I need to write more and bitch less? Yes. Can I be any more fucking obvious in my needs or be misinterpreted more??
If you don't read poetry you won't write poetry. If you read hundreds of rejections letters, you can write one yourself. Today I had to fire the director of my Shakespeare Company.
Subject: You seem like you're going to be a pain in my ass.
Body: Do not do me the indignity of accusing me of anti-semitism. Listen to me.
Every great writing team in history is this: a Jew and an Irishman. Late-secular-Judaism invented psychiatry to deal with a post-religious world. You know what Sigmund Freud said about the Irish? Early-religious-Ireland was already secular and we still live in fear of the Church, which we don't listen to anyway.
The only reason I don't want to work with you is that you have too many survival skills and I want this play to crash and burn with us. You are going to be too scared. Irish people are morons who do great things because they don't even listen to themselves. You will probably be a great grounding force because you will worry about all the things that I am unable to. But, again, I think you're going to be a pain in my ass.
I do not need a director who knows how to direct. I need an actor who doesn't know what the fuck she's getting into.
We that have done and thought, That have thought and done, Must ramble, and thin out Like milk spilt on a stone.
Like most of my shitty ideas: this only works in Irish.
2) My high school sweetheart was the valedictorian she was also the girl who when I--terrified of the fast-talking, educated rich assholes in my first honors class--interrupted me in the middle of saying this: "The thing about this poem is that Ezra Pound had a gift and she--"
Turned around, stage whisper: "HE!"
I'll never forgive her for being the first person to accuse me, correctly, of being a pretentious asshole. Before that I was just white trash.
HOWEVER, she was one of those perfect girls. She was a Barbie doll that appeared in school every day right out of the package. Her dad was an asshole. He was my Lord Capulet.
She had an outfit rotation. Written down. On a list in her desk drawer.
When I discovered this fact I began taking notes. I was 17 and already romance was not so exciting as being a romance anthropologist. By the end of the school year I would get out of my piece of shit car and check my notebook, "Today? Cherokee striped blue sweater, teal bra, Gap jeans, Colorado socks and penny loafers."
I loved her that much that I wanted to see her in my mind exactly as she would be that day. I should have taken better notes. She was my first goddess and I wanted to be as bright as she. Instead I just wear the same outfit everyday. Which makes me a fucking Mitchum man, apparently.
3) When it rains:
THREE MOVEMENTS
Shakespearean fish swam the sea, far away from land; Romantic fish swam in nets coming to the hand; What are all those fish that lie gasping on the strand?
No thank you, but thank you for describing THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MERCUTIO. I don't know if you have consulted JEFF HERMAN'S GUIDE TO BOOK PUBLISHERS, EDITORS, AND LITERARY AGENTS, but if not, you might take a look, as it has fairly extensive profiles of the agents listed, and might be helpful. Thanks again.
Yours sincerely from my nest in a giant pile of money,
The Agent Who Turned 'Wicked' into a Fucking Musical John Hawkins & Associates, Inc.
Publishing people: the first word should be the answer. We're AUTHORS and our AUTHORITY drives us to drink! Promise you'll never tell anyone this secret? Promise? Okay: WE READ SHIT! We read James Joyce! And when you read James Joyce you say shit like "I wonder what he really means...?"
Thank you William Reiss at J. Hawkins & Associates, Inc. for giving me what my assistant would call a "fortunate misinterpretation."
You said: No!
High Fidelity: "I'll leave a nice polite message and she'll never call back." Instead I await the same outcome with this:
Dear Mr. Reiss, My assistant would call that a Fortunate Misinterpretation. However, that was the best rejection letter I've ever received. Thank you for saying "no!" instead of dancing around it like other agents (who somehow think that authors don't read) do.
I will repay the favor by reviewing whatever book your clients have coming out now. What's the latest?
Something tells me you're put off by my earnest civility.
The girl behind this post once texted me the only text I save--after Johnny O texting me the following: "You are a great writer." --Her sister, however, said "I would never come to one of your gigs because I think you're a cocky piece of shit."
And I deserved that.
I am!
I am a cocky piece of shit because of her sister.
Who died.
Everyone in Henry James Memorial Junior High School never fucking heard of Henry James. My best friend in college was Georgia Burman. We wento HJMHS together and we read HJ's "Turn of the Screw" togeth in Women's Studie's Class. However...
Everyone at HJMHS heard of Lucy Elliot. They thought she was a slut. Lucy Elliot was the first person I ever heard of in Junior High school. Lucy Elliot gave head to the first person that I ever heard of anyone giving head to. 6th grade bus to the first field trip I ever didn't fear in 6th grade. My brother was, like me, the biggest loser in Junior High School. However...
Her sister is a friend of mine. I went to her sister's funeral.
It was the first thing even I ever dressed up for ever. If I ever published a novel about anything it should be titled "Dear Lucy Elliot.." Me. Catolic. Christian Scientist. Scared. My honest answer to my religion? Lucy Elliot.
When I was twelve I thought, " All I could hope in life is to have 10 people miss me half as much as we miss Lucy Elliot."
I was 12. I was a dork. A loser. I was the biggest Loser who ever went to Central Elementary School and I am this Piece of Shit that you condescend to talk to today because of Lucy Elliot.
Her boyfriend was even less-white-----therefore-------trashier than me. Hispanic. He gave her the dignity of missing her when she died and faked his ID to get her name tattooed on his arm.
Lucy Elliot died in a high school car accident. I visited the driver when she was in the hospital. She was a friend of mine. Afterwards. My ride there--to Hartford--was by her guidance counselor. She was a friend of mine and she'll spend the rest of her life wishing she could love her friend now as much as she wanted to when Lucy Elliot died.
My middle name is Elliot.
Brendan John Hastings Elliot Sullivan.
John for the Biblioscribe that never knew Jesus.
Hastings for the battle of Hastings in 1066, which is a Dennis Miller joke about the first modern war to ever use the bow in modern warfare ("...after that they used the longer clip-on ties but....)
Elliot for my other grandfather who taught me about birds and told me that there is more to life than what you've done with it.
Lucy Elliot. Who also happens to be my cousin. I would take a knife in my puny spleen for anyone of my asshole cousins.
But Lucy, Elliot....
When we were in Junior High School you were the first girl to ever talk to me. It was Taco Day. The first day of Junior High school I was terrified of the bricks. But I went.
To this day I consider Taco Day a sacred holiday.
Because I miss you.
On the first day of 7th Grade you took my dorky-ass, purple-haired self aside and said "If you're Jay Sullivan's brother I need to talk to you." I was a loser. I'm still a loser.
And at your funeral I thought, "I wish that Lucy Elliot lived for one more day so that she would know how much I loved her. But now it's too late."
That funeral created my entire conception of life/loss/love/and death.
Dante on Writer's Troubles, Mercutio with the cure.
“It’s not easy, Mercutio.” “What’s not easy?” “Creating. It doesn’t just fall out of your ass because you squat.” “I beg your pardon?” “Let me beg yours before I go to my dinner. I beg your pardon because you’ve never once had to work in your life and let me guess, you never finished Purgatorio.” “I did too!” (I did not.) “Let me save you the trouble: rest assured there is a place for you somewhere in my work and I wrote it down before I met you.” “I hope you do die before this thing gets finished and then we’ll never know what circle of heaven you’ve made for your cocky self.” “They’re not circles in heaven. They’re spheres. Of course you didn’t finish Purgatorio. You’re another ignorant git who doesn’t listen to a word people have to say unless it’s about food or sex?” “Sorry? I didn’t hear that first part.” “Don’t patronize me. If you had any idea what it is to work you might understand great work. If you have any idea what it is to have a brilliant idea crammed into your head and stuck there like a keg that cannot be tapped. The whole book is right here,” he drummed his skull like a village idiot. “Right here and I can’t get it out because I know it will only fall in the ignorant hands of people like you. You’ll even buy it. But you won’t read it.” “I’ve always imagined it would be a Christmas Present from Cangrande so that the whole kingdom can see how much you kissed his ass in this one.” “I wasn’t finished.” His eyes are still bloodshot from the brimstone. “If you had any idea what it is like to spend every day trying to get an idea to flow out of your head, you would understand. If you had any idea what it’s like to sit in your apartment hopping on one foot—raving, mad, driven to insanity by frustration—like a swimmer with a clogged ear.” “My apartment.” “Your apartment? My God! Has there ever been such absentee ownership in the entire Roman Empire?” “I have some advice for you then, Mr. Dante. The cure for Swimmer’s Ear is as follows. Maybe it’ll help with your writer’s block.” “Please. Astonish me your expert swimming ear/writing cure.” “Al-co-hol.”
A storm-beaten old watch-tower, A blind hermit rings the hour.
All-destroying sword-blade still Carried by the wandering fool.
Gold-sewn silk on the sword-blade. Beauty and fool together laid.
I wonder what it's like to be German or Czech and just be able to say, "Fuck! I'm fucking old! My cock barely works anymore!" Instead I'm from a small Island full of shamed mouths and eager ears and we speak in code to each other. There's a reason that the White Stripes are better than the Raconteurs. The simplicity of Black, white, red and drum, guitar, vocals is a chokehold on the genius that makes every note sound like last words. So Yeats says, "My aunties read my poems and I can't tell them how much my old cock barely work anymore? Let's see. I just won't use the word cock. First of all it stands up but it's wrinkled and weathered. I'd show you now but it's cold. You know what? It looks just like that old church tower and you'd have to be fucking blind and loney to ring my bell. What the fuck do I still have it attached to me for? I must look like one of those old soldiers who is weighed down by a sword he should have dropped years ago. I worship any creature who would even go near this blade and you're goddam right it would be the most beautiful thing in the world if I got laid!" Boring. It would be fucking boring to be from anywhere else.
After watching another documentary about the mating habits of birds I've become at peace about how we want what we can't have. It's a basic survival skill.
Tonight I parked the scoot by Beauty Bar so that I could go to Duane Reade. You may not know this--Conrad definately knows this--when you have a bar that is your family environment you find yourself going out of the way--almost magnetically--to swing by and says your hellos. I grew up on what Connecticut calls a busy street and when Ben and I had nothing to do on summer nights we would stand in my front yard and play frisbee until someone dropped by. Just because you want what you can't have doesn't mean someone else doesn't want something you already have.
Denise was working and I wanted to drop in and congratulate her on getting into Beauty School. The doorguy is fixing the exit sign above the door after it fell on his head. The manager gave me a big smile. These are people who don't know my middle name and myspace has to tell them when my birthday is. That's fine. Because these are also people who would tear a drunk asshole off me and pound him into the subway grating on 14th st.
I'm Irish. Yesterday I called my sick auntie to see how she was doing and I had to introduce myself. I had to use my full name. And my father's full name just so she could figure out who I was.
"Congrats on Beauty School."
"Thank you! are you DJ'ing in back tonight?"
"No, I just came in to say hello. I'm going to Duane Reade to pick up some Theraflu to bring it to a sick girl and trick her into loving me while she's ill and weak."
The three girls on the barstools next to me somehow did not think I was the most disgusting creature alive. To my surprise they were all smiling, "That's sweet. I wish I had someone to do that for me!"
Their smiles were too broad for me to destroy them but I had to let it out so I whispered, "I bet you do. I bet you have men who would pound a man through the grating of 14th st for you, I bet you have an auntie who wishes you would call and who would give up her inheritance for a single one of your flaws, and I bet there's some little twerp who would take the night off just to bring you vaporub. But you don't give any of them the fucking time of day."
Denise sent me to the sandwich shop next door (Bite) for hot water and honey and she made a hot toddy for Batgirl. There is no reason I should have risked the jobs my NY family--30 bouncers, managers, barbacks, djs, bartenders--just for one girl south of Houston who won't sleep with me. But there you go, Proust. I've found someone for whom I would ruin everthing and ruin the lives of the people who care for me--just for a single one of her flaws.
My second biggest frustration/problem is of course my own fault. I am nearly always up late at night when it's quiet and when I can think and organize myself. This is the time of day when I think about the people I love and wish I could see more. I send them text messages and emails because I love them and I want them to get a good nights sleep and I'm not going to Hunter Thompson them out of bed just because I need them.
I remind them of the time when I we went on the roadtrip that time. Or how I wish we would go back to that bar where the cunt behind it was awful to us right after the Hold Steady Show and how we went back every week after that and called her "Our little hoodrat friend."
And everyone always assumes I'm drunk or on E or something. Thus the grandest gestures of pure honesty and love that I make are returned:
1) By completely ignoring me. Which on my end is as embarassing as when you don't hear "I love you too."
2) Annie, "Stop fucking texting me in the middle of the night!"
3) "How wasted were you last night?"
Sigh... Now I know why Ben never posts anymore.
I've also realized lately that Annie is another one of those things like cigarettes and coffee and drinking and carousing that I become addicted to when they make me happy and destroyed by when they make me sad. I quit smoking all the time. It's wonderful. And to this day I think cigarettes are disgusting and they make my lungs clog unless I've had a few drinks.
It's dismissive and myopic to blame your problems on another person. That also means that if you have a problem that is making you dismissive and myopic you can get rid of that person and get rid of the problem. I just finally deleted Annie from my phone.
For a year I've been scrolling past her name (which is still listed as "Aunt Connie" from the days where Nikki would find my phone with messages from Annie and get hurt feelings) and lately it makes me think, "That's so weird! It turns out Annie was right! I definately can't write this novel!" When I met Annie she pushed me to read more, write better. She was like the basketball coach you can never please. I have a theory that it's because her father was often her basketball coach and he was a very good coach. I think she would have been more comfortable with someone distant like that or at least someone who didn't act like her mother, which I always did.
Everybody gets nervous when it comes to "meet the parents" time in a relationship. Which is rediculous unless you watch as many Gene Hackman movies as I have. Don't fucking sit there and wait for people to approve of you (don't ever wait in line!) and use your time wisely. It's research. When you meet the opposite sex parent of your lover all you have to say to yourself is, "Hm, so here is the paradigm of my love's concept of my gender."
The real reason Annie asked if we could never speak again is that she was sick of me asking her research questions and she said I have too much work to do on my novel and on my life. But I think what was a bigger problem was that she realized what a terrible person I am and how I've used our entire relationship (meeting, living together, break up, awkward post-break up dinners) as research.
Mercutio is inside my head. Locked in. I can't get him out right now. Shakespeare in Love was not a just a movie.
The rest of the novel is in there too. The characters have spoken. Arlecchino has already gone looking for the bird that Mercutio let out. He will return with it tied to a string and Juliet will pass him in the street and this is why she says in the balconey scene.
I would have thee gone- And yet no farther than a wanton's bird, That lets it hop a little from her hand, Like a poor prisoner in his twisted gyves, And with a silk thread plucks it back again, So loving-jealous of his liberty.
But it's stuck in there. I can't fucking get it out. There's also a little voice in the back of my head that sounds like Annie and tells me I can never write this. I know I can. I have. But the voice.
Instead of flowing out of my head it is stopped. Stopped like the clay stops Hamlet's keg. Stopped like the honeybees corpse stopped my hummingbird feeder. Instead of relaxing and waiting for it to flow out, I'm hopping around my apartment on one leg, furious, raving, angry, frustrated like a swimmer with a clogged ear.
I had swimmer's ear last week from the result of a routine showering mishap. It was wretched. I was as disquieting and you would feel if you woke up someday in my body instead of yours. I was in Bizarro land version of myself! I couldn't hear anything but my own thoughts and voice. It was so awful that I went to the pharmacy at Target and begged Lily to help me. I checked the ingredients of the product and it turns out that the solution to swimmer's ear is the same as the solution to not writing: Alcohol.
Again, thank you for your letters. They actually mean alot to me.
If you want to create something truely original, start by doing something cliche and searching for its undiscovered meaning. If you think you talk to much, start by finding a girl that listens too much. It will shut you up.
What Stephanie said last week is right. "It's good that you talk to much, it means your brain is working even faster than your little mouth."
The world is in chaos! War! Violence! Poverty! Workers are striking! Damn the man! The ice age is coming, the sun's zooming in! Engines stop running the wheat is growing thin! A nuclear error but I have no fear! Cause New York is drowning and I, I live by the river!
The world is sick and tired of being tired and sick! No more redbull and Emergen-C to fuel the dying resources of the day you never wanted to happen! Pepsi with Taurine just to get through your commute! Ha! Revolt is in the streets! Picketers are outside my window now and they want--!
Wait? Seriously? Out of all the oppressed people of the world the only ones getting listened to are Hollywood joke writers? The Daily Show is shut down? The stage hands from Wicked are winning against the evils of fucking Broadway. China can poison my neices's toothpaste, they kept my insurance when they fired me, I'm one appointment away from the end of a root canal but instead I can't afford it and there's a tooth spreading rot throughout my diseased brain.
But we've taken to the streets because we can't live without The Lion King??
Fuck it. I still get to live by the river.
Mercutio, Having Discovered Dante Quartered in his Bedroom, Goes to Give Dante Shit About It.
In the hallway on the way down to dinner I ran into the loathsome, sulfuric creature who has taken over my room. Dante. I would have missed him entirely, but I had to finish dressing all by myself because my cousin sent Arlecchino off to the coffin maker’s to cancel an order. I gave him my warmest Napolitano merchant’s smile, “Well if it isn’t the man who invented love!” Dante’s ancient eyes squinted at me, “I beg your pardon sir?” “Mr. Dante. What a pleasure it is to host you in my bedroom.” “I’m sorry sir, I haven’t had the pleasure of—” “Oh trust me: I’ve had the pleasure. Many times, hmm,” I say, exhaling with my nostrils to keep me from his stench. “How is the trilogy coming along?” He coughs, cautiously. “I’ll be lucky to finish it before I die.” “As will we, sir! It took me the better part of last summer just to read Purgatorio.” “I have a feel that will be the least popular volume. It—” “I have a feeling you’re right!” “—is rare in humanity that we like to think of the work ahead of us, that’s for sure. Purgatory is the second most promising thing about Catholocism. And yet, no one wants to hear about it,” he let out a slightly gloital, but rather girlie sigh. “In general we enjoy the tragedy of others, their misfortunes and never wish them to be our own. That, and we all like stories of untold joy and the smiles of Fortune.” “Yes, but and then what?” “And then what what?” “And then what do we do? What do we do when we reach heaven? What do we do when we’ve finally attained that thing we’ve been searching for?” “I think we’re maybe talking about two different things.” “I can see that.” “Heaven is the ultimate goal in humanity and Christian humanity is only one example of this. In Heaven we cease to exist as we once did. Time is not what we thought it was, our bodies are not what we thought they were. Language disappears and so does all of our earthly needs of survival, food, lust, companionship, conversation, literature, entertainment.” “That is Fantastic, Mr. Dante. So what you’re saying is that Christianity is magnificent because instead of ending life in the disappearing act of death—instead of burning out like a candle—we—God’s own candles—can have the joy of being tortured like a candle in the fires of the Inferno. In Purgatory we can have hot wax poured on us and try and keep our wick aflame. And if we’re really, really good we can go to the heavenly light where no one has any need for a candle in the first place and we immediately disintegrate.” “I never said Christianity is magnificent, but you’re quite right on with the rest.” “So instead of a world where we cease to exist upon death you’ve promised us a ending where instead we got to heaven.” “Right.” “And in heaven: we cease to exist.” Dante glanced down and rubbed his ink-stained fingers together. “I don’t think I caught your name. Mr...” “Mercutio.”
In school I remember learning that Dante wept when he learned that Paulo and Francesca were lovers caught cheating. Dante wept because they were in hell, but at least they were able to cling to each other.
I just read it again and it occurs to me that the coda of the inferno is: on earth as it is in heaven (i.e. the gluttons have to keep shoveling waste into their mouths). Wouldn't it stand to reason that...this couple who barely kissed each other--are punished in hell by clining to each other through the winds of a cyclone. Which is, to me, exactly what marriage looks like anway.
Is it possible that by creating anti-sodomy laws you only make such a fruit more forbidden? Is anti-gay rhetoric just gay foreplay?
Romeo was attracted to Juliet. Romeo went insane when he found out she was a capulet.
I live in a city where it's considered romantic and chivalrous to leave the bar before you have sex with someone. Even in my trashy, filthy bars with their drugs and their lies you'd still get in trouble if you got caught en medias coitous.
In the face of all this, I'd still like to meet a nice girl. But it would only summon up Plato's ghost to scream "And then what??"
"I honestly feel like every ray of sunshine is a distraction from the work I'm already not doing. Please delete me from your phone before I ruin your life."
"wow...ok."
And I'm on the other side screaming, "What, my insanity is not good enough to warrent your capitalization??? CUNT!"
As I go slowly insane and re-spun as a childhood creature I also enjoy it like a much dumber child should have. I am a sensitive creature. My hearing is terrible, my vision almost gone and it takes the smell of death to even phase me anymore. When I stay at my parent's house in Connecticut I can never sleep. The crickets chirp a terrifying mating call. I am driven to distraction by everything and it's only because I am so alone these days. I wish I had a very charming and carrying girlfriend to read my stories to. And the one thing you can say about me is that I've tried. Being this horribly-sensitive jellyfish-like creature makes me the sweetest boyfriend and the worst slumber-party guest. When you leave the cluttered streets and return home all you can think of is how to feed your needs. The iPod that drowned out the subway is still blaring, the boyfriend who ignored your calls all day is there. You may have groceries to put down. You may have the need to do that performative dance when you enter a room that you never do alone. I watch people who think no one is watching all the time. And I've never seen someone walk into a room tear off their headphones and shout, "Ugh! What a day! I can't wait to unload it on...no one..."
Aretha?
"Ooh, your kisses, sweeter than honey."
"Thank you, sweetie. I missed you so much!""
"But guess what? So--"
"Shhh...honey. Let's just drop everything and go lie down together for ten minutes. Just like I'll dream about every minute after you're gone."
A) Someone who talks like me should never have children.
B)I should not have children.
C) Even though've I know this.
Still.
I.
Want.
To Have children.
You and I have known each other long enough that I don't have to apologize before I say this: I have a gift which the doctors call a disorder.
The doctors call it a...
And I'm blessed for it.
It is not the disorder I wanted.
It is this:
I cannot have children.
Literally.
You are likely the opposite. But instead our children are our Lower East Side. It existed in both of us--before both of us existed--and will exist long before we are done existing. Before we even talked about having it. But the way we shape it. The way we teach it. The way our child longs to respond to someone else besides us--and wishes for what it heard pre-utero--before each half met its complement--is what makes it distracted from us. And what will make it only love us when we're dead and gone.
When I informed my mother that I would abandon her--and all her love--for a life in college and a scholarship--she said a million things.
The worst of them was that she loved me.
The greatest of them was that she said this:
Shhhhh. If you're busy now: read it again later.
The greatest of them was that she said this.
Fighting.
Screaming.
My mother. Crying. Screaming. My mother--the only woman I'll ever completely love in the world. "I wish you could just be three years old forever."
I wish our Lower East Side would stay 3 years old forever. The parents of the Yiddish theaters that we turned into bars will wish that assholes from nice families--who scream--like ours--did not ever come down here to work. And the asshole Irish Mc's that came before would agree only because the only thing they hated more than the Jews who took over were the 'Spics that took over after.
So many apostrophes!
But each is our child and our grandfather. What our parents see as bullshit, [------------], is we want to be like our family.
Maybe you remember that last time that band that I believe in stayed with me and Nikki said, "I DON'T WANT TO BE THIRTY AND HAVE A COUCH FULL OF BANDS!"
I. Am. Not. 30.
Instead of being of the age where I want a child I've accepted than I cannot ever have a child. Instead I can love your children as much as I love my own. Our children are asleep. I am incapable of being their parents. They already existed without me. I am in awe. I am in awe of their existence. And I cannot think for one minute that I had anything to do with them. And yet I want to.
The only thing I can say is this:
Tonight I had another band stay in my apartment. We treat bands like Goddesses. They should be. Each person is also our muse. Which makes them a Godess. And if the English language could ever be understood you would get what I mean: You are a God. You are not the Latin half-god. You are a God. You are MY god. And I have no word for what you are other than to say this: You Are My Goddess, musicians.
But as my children I want to nurture you before I die. I want you to have a reason to finally appreciate my love when you do not have it anymore. And the only thing I know to do is what my father did to me with Charlotte's Web and what my mother did to me with everything else.
Bands of New York City:
I love you.
And I do this thing which I hope you never hear or understand. Because I love you. I bring you into my apartment. I feed you. I put you to bed. I get you blankets. I turn off the lights. And just before bed. I light a dying candle.
And I read to you a children's book. I wish you loved it now. I think you might. But the worst that can happen is 40 years later you hear it again. And you find yourself wishing that you could be in your twenties. I wish you wished you were where you are right now: Broke. Homeless. Staying on your friend's couches.
And wishing--more than anything else before you die--that you could have one more second of that misery.
Among the things I will never remember is that I lived with these people. Perhaps I'll never forget this. I know the bands. You love the bands. I know the bands and love them just as much as you do. I can only love them because I still love them after their bullshit. I know who from TV on the Radio wants to barback for me (OUR GODS?? BARBACKING??? OH, GODESS!!!!) I know who from LCD Soundsystem would DJ for me but who is to embarassed to tell her friends that she needs the gig.
I know.
And I give them the work anyway. I lose money for them. Because I love them anyway. I let them stay on my couch anyway. I wish they asked for more work. I wish they needed more couch. Because you and I, Dear [------], are still their parents.
[ORCHESTRA: CUT THE MUSIC DURING THE MOST IMPORTANT LYRICS.
LET THEIR HEARTS BEAT THE DRUMLINE.]
::And they will only believe how much we love them when they finally feel as disappointed in them as we've always been. Yet they still know the most important thing which we can only repeat from the beginning:
I love you more than anything else in the world and I'd give up our entire world...
I believe in your music. The only reason you're scared to record it is that you were born in the eighties.
In the eighties they had these strange things called Answering Machines. For some reason, rather than using the fifties-style speaker phone on voice mail everyone would run home and check their messages. Out loud. On a shitty little speaker. Very weird. When you hear your voice on someone else's answering machine you cringe. The basstones of your voice--which travel up your jaw as you speak and which accompany you in the shower when you sing--are gone. High pitched. Whiney.
The thing to keep in mind is that the person listening on the other end has just walked in the door, has a lot of shit to do, but the only thing they want in the world is to play their messages and hear your sweet voice.
The worst thing they could possibly think is: I missed Liam's call!
Stop worrying about what other people think and spend a little time worrying about the things you already think--that are wrong.
I Love you is the greatest thing anyone of value could want to hear. Tonight I said to an artist friend of mine something that I strive to hear about our quest of being misinterpreted:
"You write songs about being in the Lower East Side where we work and share our lives. When I hear your songs, I walk into a bar where I work--where I DJ--and where I've spent a million nights. When I hear your music it brings me the joy of feeling like a character in one of your songs."
I'm vain enough to think that I inspired someone to create art. I am humbled, terrified and (finally!) quieted by the art she's created.
Thank God for the drink because when I should've gone to bed I accidentally replied to an email from my autie--a brilliant novelist--the encouraging words I wished she would understand. And the second most important thing I've ever said to someone I love is my bullshit advice on writers' block:
p.s. Sometimes the best words are misheard again. Lately I've been gaining format/wisdom/experience from stupid/drunk/misunderstood Irish songs. They had audience. The audience is not the asshole agents who cannot wait to get through a stack of OUR shit they will not read. The audience is lovers in pursuit of life (LOVE). They are drunks.
That's all I've learned from working in the bizarre mating ritual that is humanity in NYC forgetting themselves in bars. And sometimes the best songs are misinterpreted, misheard and the second worst thing that happens is they are misheard again.
Our aunties taught us how to speak. The.worst.thing we can do to them--now that they've died--is speak again into the books they would've loved and wish they could hear us read to them.
Everyone in our family would give up every dollar they've earned, every book they've read, every story they've told, every job they've had, every area code they've lived under, every child they've nursed.
I just had the most fantastic night with the most Brilliant artist you will ever misunderstand. She is amazing. Sorry. She is also an artist. She's an amazing person. She is also amazing.
I'm a terrible person. But hanging out with her makes me feel like a child molestor who just found Lolita. Ah! This one gets it! You LOVE the little girls so much you have to touch them! One year from now you, your neice, you asshole uncle, and my amazing mother will all tune their radios to the song they never asked to hear--from her--because they didn't know they wanted it.
Tonight I went to her apartment because her boyfriend was at work and I told her the things I was upset about. She cared.
LISTEN to me when I say this and pretend it is half as important to you as it is to me: I asked her lay down, turn off the TV, drink her wine and listen to me read my words for 2 and a half pages.
The greatest joy I may ever feel in my life:
Is that the most brilliant mind south of Houston St. asked Me to read more.
More. Than. I. Had. With me.
Her brilliance is subsumed by her love. Her love comes from a place you (we) will never understand. She barely understands. And I will value the three minutes she spent listening to me.
Si puer cum puellula moraretur in cellula, felix coniunctio. Amore succrescente, pariter e medio propulso procul taedio, fit ludus ineffabilis membris, lacertis, labiis.
(If a boy lingers with a little girl in a cellar, their meeting is fortunate. As Love increases and for both (pariter) boredom is dispatched far from their midst, an indescribable game occurs with limbs, shoulders, lips.)
This poem is set to music which I have. Only iTunes censored the latin "Cum" (with) so that the young minds wouldn't be corrupted by Latin. I haven't laughed like this since I was excused from doing my report on the Beat Poets in high school because the library's web filter blocked all the sources.
A Priest walks into church and sends a mysterious email to her son:"You know i love you, right? be CAREFUL what you send me!! i don't want to lose my job by receiving naked butt films!!!!!!"
This priest is my mother and I am therefore her son.
Before I left for work last night Spin came in the mail. The Greeks loved the theater in part because every play was an inside-joke and they all had many of the same characters and they spoke in the same language they used everyday, unlike the goddam Jews. Reading music magazines was an addiction I enjoyed because they all seemed like different plays with characters I already loved. "OMG! Achilles banged Karen O and now they have a sideproject with Mnemesone!"
Back then Spin would come in the mail and it was like getting a letter from your step-dad, after your mother left him, and he wants to impress you with how cool he is. "Ooo! Spin discovered this great band called Bloc Party! They look just like the band from England I had afterparty for a year ago. Same members too!"
I hired these 20 year olds to run my thursday party so I could stop conning my closest friends into coming in so I could charge them to drink. I re-subscribed to Spin so that I could find out what the hell is going on in music and not act like their step-dad. The year I've spent in the 14th century has turned me into an old bastard.
Now I have to force myself to read the entire magazine which might actually be written in Greek. Gone are the days when the bands were my friends and lovers and seeing them I had the joy that an Olympian has when the torch-runner enters the stadium dressed as Prometheus.
Not only that but a friend from work was listed in the "Download These Songs Now!" column and I did I not even have his record. (All I really know about them is I met his manager at a party in an art gallery where we all ended up in the owner's apartment upstairs so the artists could smoke pot. He got wicked stoned and when he put his coat on he twirled around like a dog to his tail trying to find the other sleeve. He knocked over a six foot catctus and had to make up for it by dogsitting.*)
My mother is a Priest and the other Priest in her church--how can I put this?-- strikes you not as a St. Mary but more of a St. Bernard. I make her mixes to cheer her up and she rides to church smoking and singing "What you gon' do with all that junk? All that junk inside that trunk? I'ma get, get, get, get, you drunk, Get you love drunk off my hump. What you gon' do with all that ass? All that ass inside them jeans?" My mother is a goddess.
She pulls up to church, stubbs out the cigarette, chews some gum, parks, puts on her priestly collar and marries someone or does their funeral and when she's cleaning up the blood of Christ you'll see her foot tapping, "My hump, my hump, my hump, my hump, my hump, my hump. My lovely lady lumps."
I sent her a mix from songs I had downloaded that day by copying the links from computers.
Her sister and mother were both--what was the word?--St. Bernards. It's obvious she wanted a daughter and instead we've become sisters. It's the reason that I love all women.
When I woke up today I got the email from her which the mom-est way a mom has every mentioned pornography. "I don't want to lose my job from receiving naked butt films!" This was weird to me because I've long been made fun of as a liar for saying that I do not watch porn and it has been said before that if so I might be the only guy in history who does not. It's also been suggested that I might watch hours and hours of porn but I would be so pretentious as to just call it "film."
The truth is: I have enough un-realistic views of love to last me until my lonely death. The last thing I need is to spend more time on the internet studying the ways that human beings do or do not interact.
In the following exchange we even fight like sisters.
"I don't want to lose my job from receiving naked butt films!"
"Pardon?"
The email bounced back at me. I texted her "Why are my emails bouncing back to me from you? Did you and Paw lose the farm?"
"I just have to be careful, ya know? And I love you! So I hope I didn't hurt your feelings. love, Momma (who loves you and hopes she didn't hurt your feelings...)*
*because I love you"
"What are you talking about?"
It bounced back to me again.
She sent me an email, "!!"
I reply, "You're starting to piss me off. What the fuck are you talking about?"
"you said your e mails were bouncing back so i thought if i sent you one then you could just "reply"... don't yell at me i'm your mommy!!!!!"
"I sent you fun music and you wrote me back something about porn. I have hurt feelings."
"I'm sorry! I loved the music but my computer wouldn't show the video and the page that i was trying to use had all kinds of naked butts on it. I didn't mean to hurt your feelings and when I wrote 'try replying to this' it's because I was at church and I wanted you to know that my e mail was working fine but I couldn't text you b/c someone was coming in to see me. That's all." Get this visual down: A man walks in to see the priest about his troubles with Perdition. She's texting her son about the porn he sent her. "I saved the two songs you sent. Forgive me?????"
It wasn't until I was writing this that it occured to me that I am doomed to die alone because no woman will ever be good enough for me unless she will treat me as Mary to Jesus. When else has a mother sought forgiveness from her goddam son?
"Forgiven. I don't know why mp3 links had naked butts unless they were stolen from some file index that also has porn. I guess we're even then if you were at work in church and porn butts came up! Ha!"
"yeah and they were girls bending over with no underwear on so I was kinda wondering 'who would send this to their mommy?' I like the songs!!"
Even when I try and cheer up my goddam mother and do something nice I still end up fucking it up. That is the story of how I tried to cheer my mother up with porn.
*Describe to me the feeling you just had. I just told you a story that fits into your perception of mythic New York. That scene should be in whatever play some asshole wrote after he saw Rent. This is the feeling I want to instill in you when you read Mercutio. It must sound to you like discovering Atlantis and you are pleased that it is even more beautiful than you thought. The joy of history is that all the bullshit is over and the appreciation finally begins. Does this New York really exist? Sometimes. If we went down like Pompeii at that exact second future archeologists would never know how anyone created anything because to them it would seem that all of the artists spent all of their time knocking over plants at round-the-clock gallery parties while the musicians smoked pot.
LOS ANGELES, Nov. 1 — Hollywood’s two decades of labor peace shattered Thursday night, as movie and television writers declared they would embark on an industrywide strike for the first time since 1988, when both writers and Teamsters walked out.
The writers’ union said it would inform its members no later than Friday afternoon as to when the strike would begin, according to a person who attended a union gathering Thursday night at the Los Angeles Convention Center.
The strike would pit union writers, whose position has been eroded by reality television and galloping technological change, against studios and networks that are backed by big corporate owners like General Electric and News Corp., but are also unsure of the future.
The walk-out threatens an instant jolt to television talk shows like “Late Show With David Letterman” and “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart,” which rely on guild writers to churn out monologues and skits. And if the strike drags on, audiences could see the eventual shutdown of soap operas, TV series and movie productions, as they exhaust their bank of ready scripts.
There are too many things I love in this story. Hollywood is just as foreign to me and New York is to most. It makes perfect sense to me that this city is noisy, dirty, crowded and then everything you have to do involves rubbing total strangers and vaguely acknowledging them. To begin:
1) Writers are threatened by reality? When have they not?? Achilles should always be played by Jeremy Piven because he must have said to Homer: "You make me look like an asshole out there."
2) I wished only that I could summon up Joe Strummer at a séance, so as to have his moral support: "So they've stopped paying the writers and they're 'unsure of the future?' They shouldn't be unsure. They should be terrified. Does not one fucking listen to my music anymore: The future is unwritten!"
3) Like most people of my age, consumption level, income and education, I would fight any movement that sought to cause a single hair to fall out of John Stewart's bald spot. In fact, I didn't even care about this until I realized that the networks are fighting the union who represent the people who write the jokes John Stewart doesn't use.*
*Jon Stewart till become out generations Shakespeare because no one will ever believe that he wrote his work. Every writer from these shows that I've ever met says the biggest joke around the office is: "Anybody even get a premise in this week?"
No one reads books. That is a stupid argument made by coffee shop intellectuals who will never write a book worth reading. Of course no one reads books. I don't read books. I buy lots of them for research and most of them are pretty good. But it doesn't mean I finish them. I get headaches.
I love finishing books after I finished them. I hate writing, but I love having written. I'm glad I went to Kenyon but I'm pretty sure that while I was there I hated the work and I hated the professors.
If you're going to write a novel that's great. There are worse things to do with your time: I know because I do all of them.
But if you're going to write something, it helps an aweful lot if it's SOMETHING WORTH READING. There was a time recently when people did not read books because there were none. The Mycenians* had a written language which they used to settle accounts and write down laws. It wasn't until someone came up with a story so fucking brilliant and amazing that it occurred to anyone to write it down.
It begins:
Spend one second looking at this unapproachable alphabet. I cannot read it. But at the time it was written men who wanted to get laid would sing this song at parties, in public and to women as they went off to bed. It was written by one man who was blind and probably transcribed by another who was a Jew.
They would sing it like this to terrify and entertain you and keep you listening:
SCREAM, goddess, the WRATH of Achilles, the RUINOUS WRATH that brought us WOES INUMERABLE, and HURLED DOWN INTO HELL many strong SOULS OF HEROES, and gave their bodies to be a PREY TO DOGS and VULTURES.
I'd write more on the subject, but I've honestly never read it.
*the reason I don't know how that's spelled is because I've never read a book on the subject: one time I heard a book on tape.
The smell of sulfur and burnt hair had already singed my nostrils before I heard this feeble knock at my door. I moved my desk upstairs recently so that I might see daylight sometimes. My landlords are having a family health crisis and their daughter just got kicked out of school and I'm trying to keep myself from going insane listening to her tiny feet gallop back and forth along the home.
This is another thing that makes me feel like a bad person, just like how grocery shopping when hungry in Brooklyn is when I find out that Brendan is a horrible racist.
I opened the door and there he stood, shivering. Red robes and a pointy red hat. His grey beard had grown in since I saw him last. Dante Alghieri. "Dove posso trovare il bagno."
"I'm fucken busy, Dante. Give me English and make it prose."
"I went to see Carmina Buranana at BAM but I got the date wrong. It is playing November 1 but of 1907. I feel like an ass."
Dante's been really bugging me lately. It's not just that he still smells from his visit to hell or his ego, but it's also that damn outfit he wears everywhere. White beard, red robe, red hat. I had him come speak to my writing group once and he drew so much attention to himself that our attention was drawn away from him by everyone's stares.
"You and me both." Seconds before I received a random text from a girl I knew in college whom I hadn't seen in two years that just said, "You're a complete asshole. Just thought you should know."
Just then I heard the little girl who lives upstairs come galloping down the steps. "You got a package from Amazon.com."
"What are you? The fucken mailman? I get a package from Amazon every fucking day because you can't seem to explain yourself and I have to read a dozen fucking texts just to keep up."
"I never said reading what easy."
The little girl ran to the door and I pushed Dante into my apartment. "Will you just get in the house before my landlord's daughter thinks you're fucken Santa Clause?"
"Can I use your bathroom."
"Yes, and take a shower while you're in there. You smell like Prometheus tried to smuggle fire out of heaven as a suppository."
"Yuk, yuk, you Kenyon kids and your Loeb Library jokes."
"I learned it from watching you."
I am obviously disastisfied with the publishing industry at large and readers in general. At this point I would deliver my manuscript orally to any agent with half a brain. I just want to be heard. If you could lie in the dark and listen to the words I spend all my time on for just five minutes before you went to sleep at night I would personally come to your house, pull the headphones from your ears after you fall asleep, tuck you in and I would even leave a glass of water on your window sill do you don't have to get up in the middle of the night.
Wrapped up in the joy of reading is that special bond between parent and child that forms when the last thing they hear as they slip into dreamland is the voice of the loving parent who wants you to stay awake just long enough to know that they all live happily ever after.
I then realized that the book at hand had nothing to do with my houseguest or my new novel. I called the little girl who lives above me down and she answered the door with the pure delight that only a child can. "I have a present for you, sweetheart." I know less about children than anything else in the world but I crouched down to her level because people seem to do that.
"What is it Bwendan?"
"It's something very special," she tore through the wrapping paper and immediately her eyes were rapt around the drawing of the girl on the cover. "I want you to meet Miss Ramona Quimby. This is a very special girl and a very special book about her and look! She's a little girl just like you who loves to play and run around and who sometimes gets into trouble because she is misunderstood. She even has your brown hair and bangs!"
"Thank you Bwendan!"
"You are very welcome, Missy. Have your daddy read it to you before bed and you can both enjoy it together." She gave me one of those monsterous hugs that my neice gives me that make you believe when Jesus says Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see god.
When I got inside Dante had his shit all over my desk and he was sitting in my chair, squinting at this exact screen. "Why'd you say this mean thing about the girl from who was trying to help you?"
"Get out of my chair. Now! I told you to take a fucking shower."
"It sounds to me like she was just trying not to hurt your feelings."
"Squint a little hard gramps, I said sounds like these letters sound like this to me. Who gives a shit what I write on my bullshit website that no one reads anyway? You're worse than Nikki. I spent six hours writing a whole goddam post about my undying love for her and she sends me a screed about how I don't know anything and possibly never loved her because I got her new boyfriend's address wrong."
"I don't really know how it is with you kids these days. I had maybe 40 books growing up and we considered that a library. Everyone gets a book now. The last thing this planet needs is another book."
"Thanks, Dante. Thanks a fucken lot. Anything else or were you leaving?"
"Why'd you give the girl that book?"
"Because when I have eyestrain or low blood sugar I get headaches and then she gallops around her apartment and I can't write or read because I'm so focused on how pissed off I am and then I feel terrible because I was just like her when I was a kid and it drove my teachers nuts. It's not ADD and it's not this new bullshit of "SID" which isn't even in the fucking DSM. She's sensitive. God forbid a child be sensitive. Like you. You met a girl when you were nine and never fucking got over her and you lived with Princes your whole life but wouldn't stop bitching about how steep their stairs were."
"I chose my words very carefully, Brendan. I said, 'Why'd you give the girl that book.' I get it. Brendan will save the world through literacy. But why do you think that one will do?"
"It made me happy when I read it. Ramona was like having the little sister I always wanted and I had a crush on her fictional sister--Beezus. Which, wow, is actually short for Beatrice. And I thought maybe if she saw herself in a story she could get into the book and then maybe she'd get into other books. Gateway books."
"So the inventor of Mercutian philosophy is somehow upset that people think your stories are about them and then turns around and hopes that a little girl will read a book and think that the stories are just like her?"
"You're conflating this."
"Brendan, I wrote a story once where I put the pope in hell. Okay? Not a dead pope but Pope Boniface while he was living. I think I know a little more about putting people into stories than you do. It is very strange that me should be so fond of being thought wickeder than they are. In every story and every history our names are but the labels that give name to an event and like labels they have the last possible connection with the event itself."
"Did you steal that from Tolstoy? And what was that first part, Dafoe?"
"Actually it's both, but I got it from reading the epigraph from your copy of Wicked. I was also surprised to know that in the original L. Frank Baum Oz they won't let Dorothy go back to Kansas unless she kills the Wicked Witch of the West."
"That's as far as I got in the book too. I only bought it in the airport so that I could have a book to talk to Nikki about but I couldn't even get through the first page."
"So we're agreed then? Not everyone can see themself in every story and therefore every story is not for everyone? I don't know why you're bitching about the publishing industry when you can't even get through Wicked and you definately can't get through Tolstoy. Do you think you're Dr. Johnson just because you finished a book about a three year fishing trip, Ahab?"
What a joy it was to recieve my two complimentary copies of FIELD: Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. I had begun to think that my blinding genius had been wasted on the deaf ears of humanity. Until reciept of your package, I literally went to the offices of every literary journal in the Great Lakes College Association to throw my work away for them. David Lynn at the Kenyon Review appreciated it so much that when I stop by I also throw his reading stack into the bin and mail off rejection letters at my own expense just so that I can savor his purple-penned signature for myself. The problem is that every time I go back to throw my incadescent brilliance on top of his latte cup the OTHER trash bursts into flames and I have to extinguish it the way Gulliver taught us. I was going to say that you could just keep the "modest honorarium" you mentioned in your letter--since my lifelong dream of being published in a magazine that nobody reads had been fulfilled--and then I realized that my name is not Cathy Park Hong, as your letter indicates, and that this package was sent to me in error.
Let me me start by finding a polite way of saying thank you for sending me something I did not want to read in a the first place. Not only did I not read it, but I took almost five minutes out of my day to misread one part of it.
Let me ramble on about the mysterious world of publishing, which I got into because when I was a child books brought me great joy and when I was in college I found I'd rather be in a book club than learn anything. The acquisition of books has always been more rewarding than accidentally reading them, so I became an agent's assistant so that I would read almost one per year and decorate my apartment with the free books that I would also not read. I am about five seconds away from the single greatest part of my week and I'm running out of ways to not tell you that I'm finally shutting off iChat so that my co-workers and I can eat lunch, put it on the company credit card, gossip about who fucked whom in the industry and maybe--if there's time-- and anyone has finished a book or a book review recently they can tell us about it and save us the trouble of reading the wikipedia on the subject.
I wish I could be more help but objectively all I can think about when I hear book proposals is: will my boss let me use the company card to take you out to lunch and, if so, where?
Sincerely,
Some Girl from College.
Example:
Hey Brendan,
Good to hear from you! And thanks for sending this along. Your book sounds interesting and ambitious.
I'm sorry that I can't be entirely helpful on the recommendation front - we tend to be attuned to what kinds of work editors are interested in rather than other agents, so I really don't know who to suggest. Also, the agent I work for is in her 60s, so the other agents I know are through her and are also in their 60s and rarely taking on new clients. My best advice would be to search agents through the Association of Authors' Representatives website ( www.aar-online.org), where you can search for who specifically likes what sorts of books. We're part of the AAR too, and it's generally a good gauge for respectable agents. Also, as lame as this sounds, going to the acknowledgements page in books of authors you like is a good way to find agents whose interests might overlap with yours.
Let me know if you have any other questions - I'm happy to help.
Some Girl from College.
This is all very polite advice for anyone who gives a shit about the most second most disgusting industry in the city. Why the fuck would I want an agent who already has someone like me in her expense account? Or the reverse: why on earth would she want me?
The only joy I keep with me after five years of planning parties and watching this modern day mating ritual is knowing that somewhere our headaches magically become someone else's heartaches.
The greatest gift any artist could ever give to all of humanity--specifically American humanity--would be to take the audio track ofBBC's The Life of Birds Finding a Mate and take our the audio track to play it over real-life footage of the obscenely honest and contrived mating ritual that takes place on the small-scale of creatures who do their mating dance in bars and clubs anywhere from 14th St. to Canal. Every single word the goddam Brit says is true, promised, honest and fulfilling of his need to colonize the world and put to words the things he (never she) sees.
Were it not for the ignorance and the ego of videographers and artists the greatest and most important work of all humanity could find it complement in sampling all the great love scenes of life and film and allow them the honesty and the hypocrisy of being narratted by some BBC asshole who could maybe tell them what they truely mean for the course of human evolution. Were I Ben, David, Caleb or Adam I could pitch this to HBO. Instead I am still Brendan and I sing this song alone in the apartment that none of us could barely afford.
