Perhaps Streetlife Serenade is the ur-flop that ignited my lifelong obsession with bad work by people I otherwise admire. The satisfaction one derives from an indisputably successful book or album or film is sweet, to be sure, but sometimes it strikes me as rote, unimaginative. In the case of Joel’s ill-fated third album, anger and jealousy are the engines of failure. To see Joel so hopping mad, and so openly uninspired, was fascinating to my 14-year-old self. As a young songwriter, I would happily scratch out a couple of awful songs exclusively for the empty satisfaction of watching the notebook pages fill up, and the A’s I was earning in English class were less the result of genuine effort than of self-satisfied, condescending cleverness. My teachers were, of course, onto me and my fundamental laziness, but they gave me the grades anyway – not, perhaps, unhatefully – and with those grades I was pathetically content, even proud. The spectacle of Billy Joel sucking was a kind of anti-inspiration, justification for my own dazzling mediocrity. (I’d like to think that, these days, my persistent affection for others’ failures springs from someplace less callow, more collegial. But probably not.)

I don’t think there’s another director as screenshottable as Lynch. A painter as well as a filmmaker, he understood the power of the still image, and let his camera linger where other directors might have cut away. He liked to make you look. Even though Mullholland Drive (2001) features one of the greatest acting performances of the 21st century — Naomi Watts’s staggering transformation from cheery Betty to tortured Diane — the turn we often remember as the most Lynchian is Patrick Fischler’s, as the terrified diner patron forced to confront his deepest fear behind the dumpster out back. That’s because he’s us — the viewer Lynch has captured, who can’t look away.

Any regular reader of this blog knows that I love a limiting exercise imposed upon my work; any regular acquaintance of mine knows that I can’t stand one imposed upon my actual life. Unfortunately, the latter is inevitable, especially in upstate New York in January. As I write this we’re in the middle of a weeks-long cold snap, and no cozy fire or bubbling stew can dispel my ever-intensifying desire to walk around in tee shirt in jeans, or bring the kids to a park, activities I will be taking for granted in a few months.

LENTEN A'CLAMPT • SHOALS TEWK • CHALKI • TIDBURY WHIMMERS • PATIENT 6 • WHIPPANY TEANECK • AVAST • JOHN SMITH • RAPUNZEL KECK • GREN G. ILKISH • LIL POP • FRIEND OF DARKNESS • JEANSY UNGER • JAWRENCE NEWVOLE • KIMMANY EBER • MOLAND DYCE • RUMMY • SENIOR ADVISOR • TEND KNIFECOACH • CHYP M. M. WEALS • THE VINTNER • CEAUSESCU EARP • DIAGNA BAULTHOLE • PUDDIN WHITFORD • BURNEEN HEARSE • F. HAPPY SLIGHT • D'DONOR • STAGG PARTI • HOOPS MEINHEIM • SUBMISION FI • THALIMAR MIDDLECHILD • EDITED BY VANITY SHEMMONS

“I have to go out now," said the man with the yellow hat. "Be a good little monkey till I come back. Have fun and play with your new ball, but don't succumb to your deepest natural instincts. Resist the wildness in your heart, until you are naught but a mere husk, neither monkey nor man, incapable of joy."

If time is a river — and a lot of people will try to tell you that it is — it certainly isn't the one they’re thinking of. It is not a slow, inexorable river, sweeping everything it touches into the sea; nor is it a fierce, destructive river crashing through an unpeopled wilderness. This river has no headwaters and it never empties. Its waters are not potable. You would not want to swim in the river of time, nor would you want to fish in it. Not that you wouldn't catch anything: you probably would, but you are likely to want to throw it back. Unfortunately, things fished from the river of time cannot be thrown back.

This past week I spoke with my friend Ed Skoog on our occasional podcast, Lunch Box, about nostalgia, and whether it is a force for good or ill in art. The latter, is of course the party line; the artist, at least in our latter-day western conception of the vocation, is supposed to shun the past and innovate, not look back fondly on what has come before. We associate nostalgia with sentimentality, naivety, weakness—a defensive longing for the past in the face of the the bleakness of the present. In our conversation, Ed points out that the concept of nostalgia—literally, homesicknes—began life as a medical condition, originally coined to describe the anxieties displayed by Swiss mercenaries fighting away from home.

The New York Times’s recent list of the century’s best books would be kryptonite to me even if I was on it. I love the democratic spirit of a box of oddments; my mind loves to generate methods of ordering it, then ordering it, then disordering it again. (If the Times had published a randomly selected list of 100 books published in the past 25 years, I would have been absolutely thrilled to read it. Imagine the triviality!) I spend as much time rearranging my home office as I do writing fiction in it, and I don’t think I could competently do the latter if I didn’t have the former to clear my mind.

Back in the late nineties I went on tour for my second novel, The Funnies. At a bookstore in Los Angeles, a bookseller introduced me as one of five siblings, the child of a famous newspaper cartoonist—that is, not by my own biography, but by the biography of the novel’s protagonist. I had to explain that the novel had nothing to do with my actual life, something that seemed to confuse the bookseller. If a bookseller didn’t understand what fiction was, how can anyone?

Thus began a seven-year period of terror at the hands of the mustache-dominated political machine. Mayor DeBevoise, now nicknamed “Mindless Flesh Host” by the mustache that controlled him, demanded that every man, woman, and child in Long Island City wear a long, luxuriant beard. Initially unpopular, the “Beard Act” of 1877 eventually led to a cultural renaissance in the region, as women of means competed to sport the most extravagant horsehair prosthetics, children fashioned false beards, called “rustlers,” out of old newspapers, and taverns overflowed with men exchanging tips for growing, styling, and pacifying their facial hair. Stage plays of the era dramatized the class conflicts among various beards and mustaches (affectionately nicknamed “Scratchums” or “Furry Playfellows”), and racy illustrations of clean-shaven men and women licking each other’s faces exchanged hands in backrooms and dark alleys.

In traditional rock recording, a “demo” refers to a casual take of a song, either tracked in the band’s practice space or in an inexpensive studio, without much concern for virtuosity or audio fidelity. A collection of demos usually serves as a rough sketch for an album, which would be recorded “for real” with a reputable producer and engineer. But in an era when musicians can record their own music on the cheap, and make it sound pretty good, a demo can be something else. For me, it’s kind of a sonic Ship of Theseus—I just open the multitrack sketch I made and start replacing things, this time trying really hard to get each right.

A big part of my job as a professor is getting my students to make their prose more efficient—to help them eliminate unintentional ambiguities, untangle nests of dependent clauses, cut unneeded or distracting detail, pull back on arbitrary similes and metaphors, and leave more open to the reader’s imagination. My own writing, like my house, tends to be fairly tidy (though not always—in the writing and house both). I sometimes give students an exercise called Subject Verb, that asks them to write a story using only two-word sentences, a subject and a verb. The goal is to show them how much of their distinctive style comes not from their syntactic elaboration, but the kind of ideas they get, and the order they put them in.

A sentimental old saying has it that a stranger is just a friend you haven’t met yet. I think that, if I had to choose a single notion that best characterizes my life’s work, it’s that a friend is just a stranger you think you actually know. The impenetrability of even the people you love the best is a source of fascination and, of course, horror for me; perhaps the reason I like books so much, more than any other artistic medium, is that they come closest (maybe?) to channeling the nature of consciousness.

The “Institute” was this little storefront by the creek on rte. 96, same building Gimme Coffee is in now. It was run by this lady who seemed old to us at the time but I guess she was in her late thirties. We thought of her as kind of a burnout (she sold us the pot) but she had an inheritance and owned the building. Her name was, I swear, Jules Rainbo. The place was kind of a new age information center, with pamphlets and short-run books, plus some poetry and nudist magazines…my boyfriend and his friends would go in there and try to steal those until she started stashing them under the counter.

Hey,

This shit is wild, thanks for posting. Do you have the one where there’s a restaurant that’s an aquarium or something and this pervert kidnaps a kid? I swear my uncle had it, he would let us get stoned with him and listen to it. This was in Rochester in the eighties. There was this one kid, he borrowed the record from my uncle and never brought it back and then later they found him at the bottom of the reservoir and his parents burned their house down for the insurance money (not sure if related)?? It had a blue cover with a shrimp on it.

Thanks, this really brought back memories

Vince B.

The one definitive trait that you could reasonably apply to grunge culture was self-mockery. And so its pinnacle, its unimpeachable masterpiece, could only have been a mockery — both of the things grunge was mocking, and of the mockery itself. Weird Al Yankovic’s “Smells Like Nirvana” is that masterpiece. It is the most grunge thing possible.

I was talking to a graduate student the other day about her novel-in-progress. She’d taken a lot of notes on her protagonist’s psychology, motivations, personal history, and so on, and wanted to know if I found this kind of exercise useful. The answer was yes, sure—character sketches and outlines are a boon to a novel, especially if you haven’t tried writing one before. But I also warned her against the pitfalls of hewing too closely to your notes. Reading over mine for Subdivision, I’m struck by how wrong I was about it; if I’d remained committed to including everything I thought I should, the book would have ended up stiff and uninspired. What you think you want to do might turn out to be a jumping-off point for what you really want to do.

The new collection, Let Me Think, came together much more slowly and uncertainly, first at random and in little bursts of energy, and then grindingly, with excruciating deliberation. It contains 71 stories, culled from more than a hundred, many written contemporaneously with the other two collections. (The oldest in the original draft were written 20 years ago; the oldest in the final version is from, I think, 2004.) Many of them were drawn from a folder on my hard drive labeled “Miscellany,” which, in 2016, I printed out, spread all over the floor, and rearranged with my own two hands. (I have long romanticized this task, which I think of as something poets get to do and, these days, document on social media. I did it! I photographed myself doing it and put it the photo on social media.)

Last week, my mother-in-law sent me a photo to touch up. In it, she and my father-in-law are posing outdoors with their new grandson (aka my new nephew, thank you very much). They are mostly in shadow, except for my mother-in-law’s forehead and part of her hair, which are anointed with bright sunlight, distracting from the main subject, the baby. Could I get rid of this anomaly? I did a local adjustment in Lightroom, dialing down the exposure and color temperature of the affected area, so that it now looks like they’re standing fully in the shade. Of course I can’t resist contemplating the rift in reality I’ve created—from now on, we will all misremember my in-laws as standing six inches to the left of where they really stood! I feel this weird sense of disconnection every time I touch up a photo, like I am creating an alternate timeline, diverting the river of reality.

There was something impure about actually playing, and failing at, the games I ostensibly knew the secrets to, and something sacred about the ones I’d never see. These chapters might as well have been metafiction, and I read them in the same spirit I’d later read the Oulipian pastiches, exercises, and borrowed forms that have inspired my creative midlife.