My Knitting Club

Here's my idea of an exciting Saturday afternoon. Work on a sweater I'll wear once at most, and let the entourage pile on.



Until....the action starts. Here's the scene from my POV, looking way calmer than it is.

Angus, using some moves he learned in his years on the Brooklyn streets, "hugs" Boo.

Hey! You wanna piece of me? And the whole household is disrupted. (Hell, I'll blame the clutter on the cats too. )

Lessons on Faith from the Pileated Woodpecker

I was at the farmer's market a couple weekends ago, buying watermelon radishes, when who should be standing next to me, whistling over the sunflower sprouts, but Bill Talen, AKA Reverend Billy. I choked--I always choke when I see writers in public places--and didn't get the chance to say hey! I just read your book! And thanks! So I'll express it here.

I first encountered Reverend Billy about twelve years ago, when the two of us had a regular weekly gig together, a variety show put together by Galinsky of Manhattan Monologue Slam fame. Billy would, in his white suit and clerical collar, stand springloaded in front of us and preach like a banshee, and I often wondered where he was going with this persona, who felt to me more mayhem than message. It was the kind of religious parody that made me edgy, being a good preacher's daughter with respect for my father's beliefs and work (even if I don't share them).

But now, judging by Bill Talen's memoir, WHAT SHOULD I DO IF REVEREND BILLY IS IN MY STORE?, I realize he wasn't exactly sure himself where the persona was going. He was embracing the character on instinct, and he thankfully didn't give up. His approach to art had more in common with my father's community than my art did: he was going on faith. He was getting to know Reverend Billy on those Thursday nights twelve years ago, and in the years since has found a message I can really get behind, embodied by his Church of Stop Shopping. The message: if we wean ourselves from the temptations of genericized consumption, we'll lead better lives.

But I don't want to dwell on the message, you can read that for yourselves. What impressed me in the book was his method: the attentiveness to his environment, the courage to make an ass of himself, and foremost, his faith that if he doesn't know exactly where it is going, it is still worth doing. It is especially worth doing. He embraces the risk of real "story," where the happy (or meaningful) ending is not assured, and has been lucky and tenuous enough to generate some interesting narratives along the way.

I, for one, always love a peek under the hood of art. Like the part where Talen meditates on the Pileated Woodpecker before invading a Starbucks with his choir, then dissects his process a little:

About the Pileated Woodpecker: I was a bird-watcher when I was a kid and I was alone a lot. Now that I'm getting older, these long-dead feathered souls are soaring with me for my political performances. I've been doing these actions more and more, and I now have been revisited by Storks, Anhingas, Loons, Pelicans, Ravens...Their presence seems to make the vulnerable ego something I can leave at home.

...maybe the aviary of memories has power for me because the species I love are disturbingly eccentric. Night herons, fish eagles, snowy owls. They have mutated happily away from the mainstream pigeon on the street.

I recommend this inspiring book, where religion becomes a metaphor for art--and vice versa--where God is odd, where supermodels are called out as the "state terrorism" they are. Let's join Talen in his fight against "marching into dominant, commercial narratives."

I'm Reading with boni & Clem

It's this Thursday, 7PM, KGB Bar in NYC. Kathleen Warnock was nice to invite me to guest host and read, while she is tied up with her play, "Rock the Line," which is another great cultural activity I intend to partake in.

Here's more on the reading:

Drunken! Careening! Writers!
Thursday, February 16
KGB Bar, 85 E. 4th St.
7pm
FREE
www.kgbbar.com

With your Special Guest Hostess, Anne Elliott

Anne Elliott is a poet/ukulelist and publisher of Big Fat Press chapbooks. Her fiction appeared most recently in Pindeldyboz (web edition), and she blogs on writing, reading, handicrafts, and feral cat management at assbackwords.blogspot.com. She currently seeks a home for a first novel, THE GLORY HOLE, and a short story collection, LIGHT STREAMING FROM A HORSE'S ASS. Her excuse: she is a preacher's daughter.

boni joi has performed at numerous venues such as The Knitting Factory, Estrogenius, Dixon Place, Gecko's Night of the Living Divas & Chicks Cook, Jennifer Blowdryer's Smutfest, The Carmen Mofongo Show, and The Atomic Reading Series. She has performed in Mortified, a show where readers perform work from their teenage diaries. boni joi was part of Da Bips: Da Bowery Improv Poets, an improvisational poetry troupe directed by Galinsky. boni has read at Amanda Stern's Happy Ending Reading where the readers are asked to warm up the crowd by performing 80's cover songs, which she did, with her musical husband. Her poems have appeared in Arabella, Long Shot, Driver's Side Air Bag, Big Hammer, Mind Gorilla, Torch, The Brooklyn Rail and many others. She is author of The Jaw-harp Aphorisms and hasself-published the Matchbook poems, a series of succinct poems printed on matchbooks.

Clem Paulsen was trained as an architect and practiced architecture for over a decade. His notes from those years have grown into a sprawling comic novel, Drawing a Blank. He lives in Hastings-on-Hudson where, with medication and exercise, he has managed to keep his workaholism under control.

And Kathleen's Play:

"Rock the Line," will run at Emerging Artists Theatre, 311 W. 43rd St., 5th floor through Feb 26. It's the story of seven hardcore fans who follow a rock star, and what they do while waiting for the doors to open on the day of the show. (It's inspired by Kathleen's own not-so-lost years following the Queen of Rock, Joan Jeeeeeeeeeeeeeeettt).

For more info & reservations (and a couple of pictures of the cast), visit www.eatheatre.org

A Rough Day for Feral Kitties

Well, as they say up in Buffalo, we got dumped on. I, for one, am grateful for a warm home, plenty of food, and good company. Hubby and I tested the Subaru's all wheel drive this morning to go to the diner. We were the only customers there, so we blasted Sinatra and Meatloaf on the juke box. Wilbur is getting his belated white Christmas, and has enjoyed digging and having snow thrown on him.

We haven't seen much of the outdoor cats, obviously. Lots of tiny tracks in the snow...which is deep enough to be over their heads. Junior is hiding in our garage, which has not successfully kept out the snow. Vince crept out of his warm basement in the apartment building next door, and begged to come inside. Against my better judgment (he still marks territory), we let him in. I He likes the fire just fine, and doesn't mind the dog too much either.

More Audio Discoveries

You already know I am hooked on spoken word audio, so I may as well share. I haven't stopped reading, or listening, during my little blog hiatus, and found a few more good ones.

New York Public Library has audiobooks available for download now, free to any library card holder. You have to also download their reading console software, but that's not hard. Some of them allow you to burn CD's too. Now I'm listening to Sol Stein's STEIN ON WRITING. They have lots of books on pdf too, which I imagine would come in handy for students doing last minute research.

The Tattered Cover bookstore in Denver podcasts writer events on its website, Authors On Tour Live. Next week they'll be featuring Zadie Smith, and I'll be listening.

Barbara Demarco-Barrett does a great author interview, and podcasts from UC Irvine on her show, Writers on Writing. The focus is also on the business of writing, and we get to learn the story of how each author sold his/her book.

This Blog Bear Coming out of Hibernation (For Now)

Friends, I've reached my word-cut goal of less than 100,000. The novel may resemble a pincushion now, with all the poking I've been doing, so I'm going to leave it alone for a few days.

One more word-count tool to share: have you discovered the Text Stats feature on Amazon? To access it, go into a book's description page, then hover your cursor over the book's picture. (It only works for Search Inside books, and not all of them even.) Among the menu items that pops up is a stat summary. In addition to word count, you get words per dollar and words per pound, and a comparison to the word count of all other books. There are other stats too, like Fog Index, relating to reading difficulty.

I looked up a few benchmarks for fun. Mitch Albom's THE FIVE PEOPLE YOU MEET IN HEAVEN is barely 41K words. But Gregory David Roberts' SHANTARAM, which I blogged on recently, is 383K words. (After 300K, you might as well quit counting. And Amazon also tells us that 99% of books in their database have fewer words.) And James Frey's A MILLION LITTLE PIECES, the current benchmark-of-benchmarks, is 170K words. That's 16K words per dollar spent. I wonder if this words/dollar figure will influence the outcome of those reader lawsuits.

Will I Ever Blog Again?

Just checking in briefly to let you know I'm still alive. Thought I'd give you some stats on my novel shrinkage: at the beginning of the month I had 111,000 words, with a goal of 100,000. Right now I have 103,200, so that's about 7 words per page yet to cut. The read-outloud software is helping greatly. It's getting there. Got the whole weekend to take the axe out and hack some more. Taking Monday off of work too.

One of the nice side effects is I'm getting to know my characters better, so that will help me with the pitching/explaining part later.

Unplugging now. Onward!

My-Novel-is-on-a-Diet Blues

Hey, friends, sorry I've been posting so infrequently. I've been UNPLUGGING my network cable and moving the computer to another room, to facilitate Project A: making my big novel less so.

Part of the novel workout is focused on "problem areas." Tons of cellulite in the first few chapters, so I'm going through the same damn text over and over, looking for more to jettison. A fellow student in my writer's class is revising a novel too, and he mentioned that he is using text-to-voice software to hear it outloud. I went WOW! I have been reading it outloud, but if you know how I read, you know that is no help. If the text is bad, I do a pretty good job of covering that up. Not to be full of myself, but my voice makes the little darlings priceless and hard to kill. I can't help it. But a computer voice? I'll try it!

So last night I did. I used free ReadPlease software I downloaded from the net. You can select from several Stepford-wife "readers," both male and female (they even have pictures!), slow it down, pause it, etc. All you gotta do is paste your text into the little window. Here it is reading the imperfect page one of my novel:



It sounds like a distraction, but it actually helped me cut 300 words toward my 10,000 word cut goal last night. The real distraction? Um, blogging...

So, I'm gonna unplug again now, because this capturing-the-screen-shot thing took way too much time.

Fall in Love With Jim Carroll (Again, If Applicable)

More web audio! I've just discovered the Naropa University Archive Project on Archive.org. Among the many downloadable lectures (taught by Ginsberg! Burroughs! Baraka! Creeley! Etc!) is a one hour reading by Jim Carroll. He leads with a monologue/story about hanging out with his amusingly superstitious junkie friend Curtis, then gives several kick-ass poems, closing with a tearjerking rendition of "People Who Died," accompanied by the Fugs' Steven Taylor on guitar.

PW Podcast: Sigrid Nunez

Podcasting has saved my sanity and faith in the world, I think. All my 1980's fantasies of having my own pirate radio station have exploded into the universe of truly free radio. And even better, if I hear something great, I can rewind and hear it again.

Among the many literary offerings, Poets & Writers magazine has joined the party. Paste this string into your ITunes to subscribe:

http://www.pw.org/audio/PW_podcast.xml



The first installment is Sigrid Nunez reading from her new book, THE LAST OF HER KIND. After listening to the excerpt, I can't wait to read it.

More of Why I Love Brooklyn...

The Polar Bears hit the beach! Complete with a serenade from the beautiful Hungry March Band, some brave souls made their way into the icy Atlantic on New Year's Day. People splashing and shouting in all sorts of languages. Others, wimps like me, watching from the rocks nearby. More Tuba!

Special thanks to my husband for taking this groovy photo. He says, "let's go in the water next year!" True, it looks fun, and we do bother to come down every year, why not jump in? But I'm not ready yet. So, the typical answer from me: "we'll see."

What They Said

“Punk classicism, wherefore art thou pierced? Straight through the cerebrum, that’s the Elliottic goal. Once there was a gang of five, the Pussy Poets were their name, and Anne Elliott appeared at that pulsing point where the poem and the perfing of that poem generated a new poem. Far beyond the speed of lite, she gets heavy without weighing you down. Pressed into action like a pair of pants.”
--Bob Holman, Poemfone: New Word Order

“Anne Elliott is our fourth slammer. She has a classic Northern European look, which is an extraordinary contrast to the first three poets’ presences. Her projection is melodic, though her verse is a muscular line of thought woven delicately and interlaced with musical accents. She is ‘the all new Gregorian chant,’ as Holman has just characterized her from the stage. The audience has felt at one with his characterization, and indeed it is in sync with what we now begin to hear. Someone from the audience exclaims, ‘We are in the intestines of a dark devil!’ This judgment is anonymous, it is impossible to identify who among the 250 people present has said it, yet it goes directly to the heart of the matter.”
--Miguel Algarin, Aloud: Voices From the Nuyorican Poet’s Cafe

"Anne Elliott’s breakneck delivery may send the more techno-minded scrambling for their samplers.”
--Andrew Beaujon, College Music Journal

“Former Pussy Poet Elliott writes lucid, translucent dream-poems..."
--Evelyn McDonnell, The Village Voice

“...especially notable were Anne Elliott’s visceral renderings of stressful situations..."
--Ann Powers, The Village Voice

No White Christmas for Wilbur

Poor dog, snow everywhere, and all of it slushy and gross. Wilbur didn't get his usual Buffalo Christmas of fluffy powder. What's a husky mix to do? He romped in the mud, and had way too many baths for his taste. I kept thinking of watching the Iditarod one year when they had little snow. Not too fun for the dogs. Or the mushers.

Speaking of mush, here's a tired dog taking a nap next to my mother-in-law's tree. Lots of twitching and rabbit chasing, which entertained us all, since there were no children present. We had to make do with sleeping dogs.



And I got to kiss my sister-in-law's rescued horse Sundance, who kept checking my parka pockets for cookies:



Wilbur helped my sweet husband with the driving too.

Proj Time: Cat's Cradle Improvements.

Well, I experimented. I've been fooling around with graph paper and colored pencils, making "Anatolian" designs for crocheted blankets. I was so inspired on our trip to Turkey last winter, been wanting to try this for awhile. Here's the first foray. I've figured out how to make it reversible with minimal loose threads to weave back in later. It's machine washable, Red Heart Light n Lofty, all single crochet. And I think Boo likes it.

(You can see a little of a hooked rag rug my great-grandmother made underneath the cradle. She was inspired by the Navajo. Guess this cross-cultural stealing runs in the family. Local technique, with bastardized-colonized pattern.)

Here's a clean shot of it before he ruins it with his damn shedding (you can see a hair on it already!)

The Tiny Lions in Winter

You may have been wondering how our little feral cat colony is doing now that temperatures have finally dropped. The good news is that all six are alive and appear to have no new health problems. We don't see too much of them, since it's too cold to wait on the stoop for food. They come round in small groups when the hunger bug strikes. All but Rrose are receptive to petting. Their fur is cold.

Feral cat specialists have all sorts of advice on helping the furry ones survive the season. Groovy shelters made of styrofoam home insulation, lined with straw, are the best. Of course, frozen water is another problem. There's no low-tech solution to that.

Our guys seem to have formed cliques this winter. Pictured is one clique, Junior and Elvis Memphis, who have been keeping each other warm in the rafters of our garage. Better digs are available, but these guys are too afraid of the bigger cats to learn. They seem to be the battered geek clique. I want to tell them it'll be so much better after high school, I swear!

Vince is a clique of one. He appears to be bunking in the basement of the apartment building next door. I think he gets along with someone human over there, who leaves a window ajar. He begs to come inside by the fire, and I think he might be ready. Anybody want a friendly, but aggressive, drooling cat? (He drools when he's happy. Part of the kneading ritual. Some cats hump, this one drools.)

And the other three, Rrosie, Marcel, and Elvis Vegas, appear to be hiding out somewhere down the block, probably the same spot where Rrose used to go to give birth. Haven't figured out where, but it's likely a doghouse or warmer garage.

Meanwhile, the indoor crew is doing its best to keep the gas bill down, piling on top of us at bedtime in a big, snoring mass. Sweet dreams.

It's Really Happening

OK, day two of the transit strike, and like any crisis, it appeals to New Yorkers' vanity. Look how I solved this problem of getting to work! How clever we all are! I have a scooter! I have skates! I wore two pair of socks and walked!

Of course I'm reacting to people in the news media, because I haven't yet joined the fray myself. I'm telecommuting. Which from a vain New Yorker point of view is a totally pansy approach. I was thinking I could make my husband drive me to the 59th Street bridge, then I'll walk over. Or try to hitch a ride with strangers from one of the carpool staging areas. Then I'll be One of Them! The strong people walking over bridges and meeting strangers!

But it doesn't make financial sense, using that gas, taking all that time, when I have a perfectly good net connection at home. So I stole my husband's comfortable desk chair, and I'm actually getting a lot of dayjob work done. I'm about to login now, so no more web for me today.

Therefore, no exciting strike stories from me, at least not yet. For kicks, I've been checking in on Overheard in New York.

I Haven't Been Slacking, I Swear

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

The Thaddeus Touch

I'll be honest: I'm biased, I planned to like TETCHED, Thaddeus Rutkowski's latest novel, and it went according to plan. I'm a fan of Rutkowski's fragments or "fractals," kernels of prose inside chapters and sections that echo the smaller kernels. Reading Rutkowski is like opening a matrioshka doll, playing with the parts, then putting her back together.

For fans of Rutkowski's first novel, ROUGHHOUSE, the first half of TETCHED returns to that home territory. We hang with the Caucasian, loose-cannon, stay-at-home father, who plots armed revolution, drinks, brings a drifter into the house, and blames his failed art career on his kids. We savor moments with the pragmatic, but enigmatic Chinese mother, who blends her medical knowledge with cryptic stories from her childhood. And we anchor ourselves to the loveable, unnamed narrator, an ethnic anomaly in his rural high school, who has a pyro streak and explores issues of control (and lack thereof) with his own body, through self-torture.

What makes TETCHED and the rest of Rutkowsi's oevre remarkable to me is the emotionally cool tone of the "fractals" of text. It is not cool-for-coolness'-sake. The unsafe terrain of home is inherently charged, and could become melodramatic in the telling. But the language here has an organic humor akin to the self-experimentation of its narrator, more curiosity than wit, more let's-see-what-happens than let-me-tell-you-what-happened. Instead of hearing a confession, we get to experience the snapshots of memory from a simultaneously detached and internal place.

The effect of this choice is interesting: instead of responding to emotional promptings in the text, I have a response to the cumulative effect of the cool-curious moments. In the case of ROUGHHOUSE I closed the book with a feeling of melancholy. (A friend had a similar reaction: she "just wanted to hug" the protag.) But in the case of TETCHED, while the material is similar in content, the emotional effect, for me, was far different. The key is in how Rutkowski arranges the pieces. TETCHED has a certain giddy glow.

The narrator of TETCHED does manage to escape the tyrrany of his childhood homestead, but he keeps his bondage/pain fetish, and artfully refines it. This is book is from the lighter, left-field category of bondage-lit, and this protagonist is one resourceful guy.

I won't give away too much more, but I will recommend. It's an especially good read for fiction writers transitioning from shorter to longer works, who might find his approach mechanically instructive. If you're not a Rutkowski fan yet, get a taste at one of these publications: Land-Grant College Review or Small Spiral Notebook.

I'll Be Reading December 11 and 13

December 11:
I'll read my own stuff, probably fiction, in my own borough, which I like. Sunday Salon Series, 7PM, 766 grand street, Brooklyn, 11211(L to Grand, 1 block west). My coreaders are Jackson Taylor, Ellis Avery, and Thomas Hopkins. More info at the link.

December 13:
I'll be reading a story by Max Ruback, who is unable to attend to represent Zing magazine at CLMP's Periodically Speaking series. I'm so stoked to be on the mic at the NYPL, I can't tell you, and honored that Max asked me. Also repped will be Tin House and Mad Hatter's Review. It's 6 - 7:30 pm in the DeWitt Wallace Periodical Room of The New York Public Library's Humanities and Social Sciences Library at Fifth Avenue and 42nd St. (Please use Fifth Avenue entrance). For more information, call 212.930.0876. Free.

Indie Press Book Fair--Shopportunity!

One of my favorite annual NY events is this weekend, December 3 & 4, the Small Press Center's book fair. Not only will books be available for purchase from awesome presses like Akashic, Soft Skull, and Manic D, but there will be panel discussions, author signings/readings, how-to-get-into-print info sessions, and even an open mic. I'll be there! Maybe this will wrap up my holiday shopping early.