#BooksIReadinJanuary2010

1. The Two Kinds of Decay
Sarah Manguso

The disease had been in remission seven years. Now I can try to remember what happened. Not understand. Just remember.

For seven years I tried not to remember much because there was too much to remember, and I didn't want to fall any further behind with the events of my life. I still don't have a vegetable garden. I still haven't been to France. I have gone to bed with enough people that they seem like actual people now, but while I was going to bed with them I thought I was catching up. I am sorry. I had lost what seemed like a lot of time.

2. Chromatic
H.L. Hix

Boy meets girl, girl smiles.
Boy colors and looks down.

I see music, a colored medium
that darkens its surroundings.

Her bright body the iris,
his dark mind the pupil.

He hears the night as dark,
she hears it as a medium.
*
Red-brown in daybreak's red-brown light
a dolor of doves pavanes on the lawn
under these capacious trees,
but here color loves the evening,
always and only in secret,
withdraw, watching from a distance,
a brazen taint of starlings
brag its black advances.

3. The Adderall Diaries
Stephen Elliott

My father may have killed a man.

It was 1970, the year before I was born. The year the United States invaded Cambodia and the voting age was lowered to eighteen. He was thirty-five, the same age I am now, living in his parents' house with my mother and one-year-old sister on the north side of Chicago, trying to make it as a writer.

They lived across from a park, a large park for a city block but not a green park. Chicago ran on a system of patronage with Richard J. Daley, the kingmaker, at the top of the pyramid. It was a crooked town, and proud of it. Someone got paid off with a contract and covered the park in cement, a swingset, and a baseball diamond, turning it into a hard place filled with rocks.

4. The Disappearance of Seth
Kazim Ali

The day the war is declared over, but before the Al-Asker Shrine's gold dome unravels to concrete and rebar, before the gold evaporates into fume, before the bridge falls, the rest of it, Salman pulls into the driveway of his parents' home for the first time in five months. Zel is sitting in the passenger seat next to him, busily filling a hip-flask with whiskey from a bottle she had stashed under the seat.

Salman watches the amber stream trickle into the curved vessel. "Why didn't you fill it at home?"

"I had to bring the bottle," says Zel, "in case I have to come out here and re-fill it."

5. Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned
Wells Tower

Bob Munroe woke up on his face. His jaw hurt and morning birds were yelling and there was real discomfort in his underpants. He'd come in alter, his spine throbbing from the bus ride down, and he had stretched out on the floor with a late dinner of two bricks of saltines. Now cracker bits were all over him--under his bare chest, stuck in the sweaty creases of his elbows and neck, and the biggest and worst of them he could feel lodged deep into his buttock crack, like a flint arrowhead somebody had shot in there. Yet Bob found that he could not fetch out the crumb. He had slept wrong on his arms, and they'd gone numb. He tried to move them, and it was like trying to push a coin with your mind. Waking up for the first time in this empty house, Bob felt the day beginning to settle on him. He shuddered at the cool linoleum against his cheek, and he sensed that not far below, not too far down in the sandy soil, death was reaching up for him.

6. The Interrogative Mood
Padgett Powell

Are your emotions pure? Are your nerves adjustable? How do you stand in relation to the potato? Should it still be Constantinople? Does a nameless horse make you more nervous or less nervous than a named horse? In your view, do children smell good? If before you now, would you eat animal crackers? Could you lie down and take a rest on the sidewalk? Did you love your mother and father, and do Psalms do it for you? If you are relegated to last place in every category, are you bothered enough to struggle up? Does your doorbell ever ring? Is there sand in your craw? Could Mendeleyev place you correctly in a square on a chart of periodic identities, or would you resonate all over the board? How many push-ups can you do?

7. This Won't Take But a Minute, Honey
Steve Almond

We knew this: on April 28, 1945, in the Reich Chancellery, Adolf Hitler married Eva Braun. He kissed her hand and made her his wife. She wore a blue dress and a grey stole. Four days later, he and Braun entered a sitting room. She swallowed a cyanide tablet and kicked over a flower vase. Hitler bit into the pill and shot himself at the same instant. He had heard reports of Mussolini, hung like a sausage in a public square, and feared bombs of sleeping gas. He ordered his body and Braun's burned. Some days later, a story circulated about Hitler's valet, that he had fed bits of the dead to Blondie, his German shepherd. We were never able to confirm this, though we heard the dog upon our approach, howling at the artillery.

8. About a Mountain
John D'Agata

If you take the population of Las Vegas, Nevada, and you divide that by the number of days in the year, there should be 5,000 people in the city and its suburbs with a birthday on the same day that Las Vegas began.

On the hundredth anniversary of its founding, however, Las Vegas had only gathered twenty-nine of those people.

One of them arrived in a beaded blue headdress, her eyelashes sequined, her ruffled skirt torn.

Another stood smiling as he watched her while she preened.

There was a child in a knapsack. Its mother on the phone.

An Elvis showed up briefly. Turned out he was lost.

The Motel Pool

On my non-teaching days, I've been writing, writing, writing away--and meaning to post these links, but my eyes have been tetchy after long days of scrolling, cutting and pasting, scrolling some more. Thanks very much for bearing with me.

--Click here for my piece "The Pillory," which went live on the January 2010 issue of Brevity last week.

--And here for a few words on process I contributed to Saeed Jones' For Southern Boys Who Consider Poetry blog.

--Oh, and nice words for my "Mr. Cat" in a post about the most recent Mississippi Review (though I like my fellow contributors' pieces a lot more than Jeff Crook does.)

Note: The photo above was taken by Mark four or five years back from the window of our Fort Lauderdale motel room. I'd hoped to use it for the cover of the second edition of Lawnboy, but the book designer had other ideas. I have to say that that pool looks appealing on a night in which the temperatures are sinking and the gate of the deer fence is banging away in the wind.

Goose Frenzy

Mark and I were walking over to the gym this afternoon when we were met by this incredible sight over the Amagansett town lot. Hundreds of wild geese advancing--doing what? Celebrating? Feeding? Exercising? Experiencing a collective mental episode? I switched on the video mode of my camera, and here you have it, my first YouTube, so please excuse the raggedy ending. (No, we weren't Tippi Hedrenized. I'd already thought I'd switched the camera off.)

Eruption and Joy

I've been hard at work on a new writing project, which is turning out to be both satisfying and demanding emotionally. I'm not ready to talk about it yet, but I did preview the opening pages at the reading in Cape May on Sunday night. I'm describing it to myself as a memoir of eruption and joy, as odd as that might sound, and it seemed fitting that Mark and I read during an hour-long thunderstorm. (An hour-long thunderstorm, in January, in a Mid Atlantic state? You heard it here.) I'm sure I'll have more to say about what I'm writing in the months ahead, but in the meantime, I wanted to pass along these pictures of Wildwood and Cape May, which looked soulful and dreamy in their off-season starkness.

Wildwood:




Cape May (Congress Hall, the oldest resort hotel in the U.S.):

Thaw

Greetings from Asbury Park. Actually not Asbury Park, but stormy Cape May, where Mark and I are giving a reading tonight. But we did stop at the former on our way down here Friday. It was a beautiful night, close to 50, which felt practically June-ish in this hard cold winter. Buildings, birds, plants, people: all relaxing into themselves. And further south, even the marshes started to smell like marshes again.

Radar and Mr. Cat

That's Big Boy, who came with the Key West condo in which we stayed two Januaries ago.

1. My "Mr. Cat" appears in the new Mississippi Review as part of a selection of flash fictions edited by Kim Chinquee. Among the writers in the issue: Diane Williams, Mary Akers, Randall Brown, Kathy Fish, Tiff Holland, Meg Pokrass. Excellent company.

2. The last time my work appeared in the Mississippi Review was twenty years ago with a very early story titled "Radar." The story evolved from the first chapter of a novel--what I call my "first" first novel, Bad Florida--that I eventually put away. These pages were written in 1988 for my first workshop at Iowa with T.C. Boyle. It's funny to see my obsessions playing out all the way back then. Failed housing developments, subtropical plants, swamps, Florida, identity anxiety, rootlessness, homelessness--all there. Funny, too, to think of how the two pieces talk back to each other. A long time, and no time at all. Twenty years.

The Burning House

I'd planned to write about something completely different today. I'd planned to say a few words about coming upon my late friend Denise's emails, and feeling present with them in a way I couldn't just few months back. Her cadence is so strong in them that they shake up everything I thought I knew about distance, time, linearity--and where we begin or end. I've felt her around all week, which has helped some to shift my relationship to all those who have gone on in the last years, including my mother. I go to bed at night. I say their names. I see them, more clearly than I've seen them in a long time. Maybe this state of mind has something to do with the fact that I've been writing a lot these days.

So who would have expected to find out that my novel The Burning House, the novel I've worked on so long, is coming out in Spring 2011? Word came in at five tonight from Philip Brady, the editor at Etruscan Press. In truth, the world of publication has been the last thing on my mind these days. It's curious to think about the fact that I'd already dedicated that book to Denise, that the two female characters were inspired by her, at least physically. Unseen forces moving things around? I don't know. But I'd like to think that she's congratulating herself tonight.

A few pictures of the boreal beach at Amagansett this afternoon, just before my news--and an Arctic cold front--came in.

I Am Not Your Enemy

Click here for a link to my story "Palo Alto," the first edition of SmokeLong Weekly, edited by Dave Clapper. The art is by my friend Genine Lentine, whose first book of poems, Mr. Worthington's Beautiful Experiments on Splashes, is just out from DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press.

Love, Hard Work, and It's Worth Every Minute / Abstract is Still Life, Real Life Kinetic

Coming back to myself after a happy, packed Fairfield residency. Mark off to Merida to teach for the week. Snow filling up the driveway once again--yes, again. And could it be that I actually have the next two weeks to write? Exciting and alarming. My laptop, my desk, and me.

And this song--which has been playing in my head for the last two weeks. If hip hop is officially dead as a genre--as the New York Times wants to claim (outlandishly)--then maybe genres need to die in order for invention to begin. The pressure to please the casual listener is beside the point, and all things are possible once again.

(I should mention that I came to this song through reading Victor LaValle. The title of Mos Def's album is named for Victor's novel The Ecstatic. I cannot imagine a more exciting thing: to see one's book title used for a Mos Def title. I'd settle for-- for-- well, no need to make a corny joke right now.)

Anyway, the goal for the next two weeks: to write some prose that moves like this! The spontaneity captured, the multiple levels of diction and tone. Unexpected turns. Elegance, wit, control. Some loose threads. And the gift of letting the reader/listener in on the secret: the hybrid coming into being.

Roses - Mos Def

***
Some pictures from New Years' Eve--at least my travel back home. A three-ferry night. (The view to St. Edmond's Chapel from the window of my room--that's Fishers Island Sound behind it. An anchor at the ferry terminal in New London. Visceral ropes on the Orient Point Ferry. A passing ferry in the night.)