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A Coming-Out Story

Clockwise from top-left: Justin Aaberg, Asher Brown, Ryan Halligan, Tyler Clementi, Seth Walsh, Billy Lucas, Zach Harrington.

I came out at the age of 25, after three failed relationships with girls, after months of regularly weeping myself to sleep, after seeing my future self in the abysmal drunkard that wrote the journals of John Cheever, after typing up and posting in visible spots in my apartment signs that read, for example, You will never, ever amount to anything real. Not ever. And you will always be unhappy., and after a night when I didn’t so much sleep as stare at the ceiling, feeling my body fall and fall and fall into the mattress. It’s a boring story. I tell it only because today has been designated by the powers that be National Coming-Out Day, and this feels to me to be a more productive way of observing the occasion than donating my Facebook status.
Continue reading A Coming-Out Story

Status Update 2

I’m on Cipro. Sick six days so far.

Taking ciprofloxacin increases the risk that you will develop tendinitis (swelling of a fibrous tissue that connects a bone to a muscle) or have a tendon rupture (tearing of a fibrous tissue that connects a bone to a muscle) during your treatment or for up to several months afterward. These problems may affect tendons in your shoulder, your hand, the back of your ankle, or in other parts of your body.

…says the National Institutes of Health. “Up to several”? Check back with me at Valentine’s.
Continue reading Status Update 2

Some Words I Read Tonight

Teachers of prose in America are often at a loss when asked to recommend studies of style. Such studies almost invariably talk about it in terms of texts the student has never heard of. One English theorist recommends, as a useful means for testing conciseness in English prose, quick translation into Latin or Greek. Americans, students or not, live in another world. They are trying to learn something about prose style without the whole context that has rendered prose style comprehensible and has given it meaning. They are trying to learn in a vacuum. And we may, of course, add as a footnote to the contemporary scene, the much-heralded demise of the book. American used to read only current fiction. Now they read nothing at all. For written utterance, they have as context only journalism. How accurate such prophecies of doom really are, I suppose few would want to say. But the teacher of composition, at whatever level, will speedily be reminded that he is trying to teach prose to people who, at least voluntarily, seldom read anything.

These words are older than I am, from Richard A. Lanham’s 1974 treatise, Style: An Anti-Textbook. Academics perennially love an illiteracy complaint.

“Stool Pigeon” – Vic Godard & the Subway Sect

I have a lot of work to do. I’ve been out of town for two weeks and work has piled up. But I don’t teach tomorrow, and there’s this song I can’t get out of my head and it’s by Vic Godard and so I needed to figure out the tab. Which I’ll share with you. Those Vic Godard fans out there who find this blog by searching for tabs can correct at will. Also, feel free to use these chords as a beginning to tabbing out the little guitar riffs during the verses. I don’t have quite the time for that.

But I got you the intro and interlude ones. That’s worth something?

Again, lyrics assuredly misheard:

INTRO:

e-------------------|-2------2-3-2-5-----|
B---------------2-3-|--------------------|
G---------0-2-4-----|------------------0-|
D-0--0--4-----------|----------------4---|

e-------------------|-2------2-3-2-5-----|----------------------------|
B---------------2-3-|--------------------|---2----2---------2----2--0-|
G-2-------0-2-4-----|------------------0-|-2----2----2----2----2------|
D-------4-----------|----------------4---|----------------------------|

VERSE:

D
Made a right track when the nude was bleeding.
E
Your new suit set me in motion.
G
I told everyone in my life.
A
Always betray when she's not my wife, and

D
all around town is a new decision.
E
The black fireworks are not as annoyed at me.
G
I'm told when the rockets fly
A
without wit or a reason to cry, like a

CHORUS:
D
Stool pigeon
E
Stool pigeon
G
Won't you take two and three?
A
Knock me around all over the place and then leave.

INTRO

VERSE:
Black and white lies appear the same to me.
Chant of voices on a wind so free.
Things are tough we can still picnic.
A nice bunny that became trees.

I and my money wrapped in dishonesty.
Feeling part of a page in a book.
Now rummage among the debris.
Me and my shadow in our eats, like a

CHORUS:
D
Stool pigeon
E
Stool pigeon
G
Won't you take two or three?
A                                           Bb
Knock me around all over the place and then leave


BRIDGE:
                          D
I once found a place in a sea.
Bb                                D
Roses, no one bothering me, and a view.
Bb                              D
sad expecting what was coming to me.
Bb                                A
Nothing right from anyone least of you

VERSE:
I and my money wrapped....

CHORUS TWICE

CNF‘s Quarterly Blog Roundup

Creative Nonfiction in its new format now accepts nominations for blog posts to reprint in its quarterly print issues. It’s a bit like the Findings section of Harper’s, I guess. Yes, you can in fact nominate yourself. I thought vainly this would maybe be a good idea, so I went to CNF‘s Web site to see what’s what:

We’re looking for: Vibrant new voices with interesting, true stories to tell. Narrative, narrative, narrative. Posts that can stand alone, 2000 words max, from 2010. Something from your own blog, from a friend’s blog, from a stranger’s blog.

Of more than 130 posts on this blog so far, I don’t think a single one qualifies. It’s never occurred to me to use this blog as a medium for recording narratives. It seems I have no true stories to tell here.

Am I a disappointment? I say aloud often that people have an innate hunger for narrative, and yet what I do here is all analysis and criticism. I have a tiny audience: would you rather get more true stories? Is narrative what people go to blogs for?

Here’s a true story. Since last Wednesday morning I’ve been spending twelve hours a day in ward 2C of the Francis Building at St. Mary’s Hospital in Rochester, Minnesota—part of the so-famous-I knew-of-it-before-I-ever-knew-how-properly-to-spell-mayonnaise Mayo Clinic. I sit those twelve hours just two steps away from the bed of my boyfriend who’s maybe seventy-percent of the way through a slow recovery from small intestine resection surgery. Wednesday, his surgeon expertly cut out a cancerous tumor the way a poor darner might fix a hole-torn tubesock—slicing laterally twice through the tube and sewing the two new open ends together. Except what the surgical team sliced out of my boyfriend was eighteen inches in length. “You’ve got more than ten feet in there,” Dr. Swain told me afterward. “He won’t miss it at all.”

Hours later they put him in a shared room, despite our requests he be given something private. Already, a large man lay in the bed closest the door, awake and curious, giving me and N and his nurses and his mother the thrice-over. His eyes moved like a scary cardiogram. It was Tyler Perry. The actor-writer-director-producer Tyler Perry was sharing N’s recovery room. I shook his hand and said, “I’ve only seen two of your movies, but I liked them. You have so many others, don’t you?”
Continue reading CNF‘s Quarterly Blog Roundup

Marriott’s “A Matter of Substance”

I want really badly to write the definitive piece of e-criticism about this phenomenon that is shockingly nowhere to be found online, despite its creators’ undoubtedly desperate wishes for it to have taken the Internet by storm, oh, back in August 2001 perhaps. But, to paraphrase Twain I think, I don’t have the time or the energy to write something short. So I’m going to have to just ramble in this discursive way, and apologize now, and say that I’ve been spending the last two days up here in Rochester, Minnesota, at the Mayo Clinic, for reasons that are worth telling but, again, I don’t have the time to get into in detail. The short version: something scary was afoot, and now everything is fixed, but we can’t leave yet until we know more things for certain. At any rate, it is tiring to sit in hospital rooms all day, just as it is probably tiring to sit in meetings all day when you are a worker traveling for business. This is a segue.

Here’s what I’m talking about.

Most Marriott hotels I’ve been to (most hotels in general) have their own TV menu systems that appear when the television turns on, which system enables you to see information about your room or your stay, or order porn, or get channel listings, or what have you. Marriott has some free programming. Workout videos is all I can remember. Workout videos and something it calls “A Matter of Substance”. This is like some kind of subnetwork that plays four programs, on demand, whenever you want.

Here’s what the programs are called:

Rest, Rise, Rebel, Rally
Continue reading Marriott’s “A Matter of Substance”

Franzen’s Freedom

Finished!

I liked it well enough, despite its cover and its title. I mean: I really, really liked it, though I’d like also for Franzen to write his next novel about something other than a midwestern family. Sure, his book expands to somewhat of a national/global scale at one point, but this one felt at times stuck in the rut of its characters. I don’t know how The Corrections avoided this, but maybe it was in its far superior title.

I don’t think I’ll ever get over this title.

Here’s J. Picoult’s complaint about the media hullabaloo descending on this book:

I think the New York Times reviews overall tend to overlook popular fiction, whether you’re a man, woman, white, black, purple or pink.

Which brings to mind that line from Lorrie Moore’s excellent (and a superior post-9/11 novel than Franzen’s) A Gate at the Stairs, which I don’t have in front of me right now, and so I have to paraphrase:

“Those people who claim they don’t care about a person whether he’s black, white, green, or purple. As if black were a nonsense color like green or purple.”

Did I Not Blog about This Blog about Blogs?

Another blog endorsement, this one apparently defunct, alas. Look at This Fucking Idea for a Blog-to-Book Deal is the smartest satire on hip blogs/memes you’ll find.

You can read the entirety of it in a half hour, and it’s a worthwhile half-hour to spend. My favorite entry is a late one, called Road Signs for Carol. Behold:

This is the part of the post in which I was going to suggest other entries to look for, but then I realized I’d just list every entry in order.

Free Mac Solitaire: Avoid Boredom!

Most Popular Solitaire is a collection of only the best and most popular solitaire games.

We have looked through all the hundreds and hundreds of solitaire games and chosen only the thirty best games, the thirty games that people like to play the most.

These are the games that solitaire players from around the world keep coming back to play more often than any others. There are just enough games to keep you from getting bored, but few enough to keep it simple.

With beautiful playing cards, full undo and redo of all your moves, automatic game saving, and complete statistics, Most Popular Solitaire is solitaire the way it ought to be.

Free Mac Solitaire: It’s as Simple as That!

Computer solitaire is one of most popular games, ever. Solitaire games have been played for hundreds of years and remain to attract millions of card game players and we wanted to continue the tradition with Simply Solitaire. We hope you enjoy Simply Solitaire for Mac, the Apple computer, (Macintosh) as much as we enjoyed making it. Our aspiration is that you have a good time playing our classic mac solitaire games. If you’re here to find out about the specific rules for solitaire games, click above or click here: solitaire rules. It’s as simple as that.

Found Scholarship: Louis O. Mink’s “Narrative Form as a Cognitive Instrument”

Upgrading my office iMac’s Ubuntu boot to 10.4 took so long I had to get up and walk through the library. I grabbed at books under the LOC subject headings “Prose – Technique” and “Nonfiction – Technique”. Mink’s essay comes at the tail end of an anthology on the writing of history called, creatively, The Writing of History. He begins by setting narrative on a kind of continuum.

Even though narrative form may be, for most people, associated with fairy tales, myths, and the entertainments of the novel, it remains true that narrative is a primary cognitive instrument—an instrument rivaled, in fact, only by theory and by metaphor as irreducible ways of making the flux of experience comprehensible.

Narrative, to Mink (pictured above?), is the iconic union between theory and experience, much as comics, to McCloud, are the iconic union between language-signs and the things they signify.
Continue reading Found Scholarship: Louis O. Mink’s “Narrative Form as a Cognitive Instrument”

Is Louie C.K. the Zach Schomburg of Comedy?

No, probably not. This answer is why I’ve been avoiding this post I’ve been threatening myself to write since C.K.’s Louie premiered on FX, which if you’re not watching you’re missing out on one of the most incredible shows ever. And why I mean incredible is here is a show written, directed, edited, and acted by a comedian that is mostly unfunny, and which show’s unfunny moments are its most watchable and interesting. Its existence is incredible as in not credible.

And it just got renewed for a second season of 13 episodes!

But, like, look:
Continue reading Is Louie C.K. the Zach Schomburg of Comedy?

Blog Endorsement

Some people, believe it or not, like semantic arguments.

My friend Cara is one of these people, whose brains sort of open up a little more from semantic dickering, or like who see semantic dickering not as idiotic quests at being Right but rather as quick and fun investigations that yield certain small truths.

Behold: Continue reading Blog Endorsement

One Moment of Unwanted Falseness in Jeanette Walls’s The Glass Castle

Walls’s book is a memoir about her nomadic childhood with well-meaning but narcissistic parents. At one house in gold-mining country they live with many stray animals, including an injured buzzard her father brought home one day. His name was Buster. Just before the moment in question, young Jeanette has encouraged her father to drive the car as fast as possible on the highway, causing it to overheat and break down.

We sat there for a long time. I could see buzzards circling high in the distance, which reminded me of that ingrate Buster. Maybe I should have cut him some slack. With his broken wing and lifetime of eating roadkill, he probably had a lot to be ungrateful about. Too much hard luck can create a permanent meanness of spirit in any creature.

I hate this paragraph and all the lies it tries to tell. It’s like: just about every memoir I read would be so much better as a novel. Please, book industry, recover from your true-story addiction.

“Mega Secrets” – Family Portrait

Gone are the days that I discover new bands on my own. Here’s yet another new love found on a mix made by my good friend Steve. I don’t know anything about them. This track is from a split 7″, which indie rock bands, which still apparently exist, still do together, which makes me happy.

Tune down half a step, which all good guitar players do as a matter of course, right? I mean how else are you going to play a simple Eb chord…barred on the sixth fret?

BASS INTRO:
A-------------|---------2-----:||
E-0---0-0---0-|-0---0-4---4-2-:||

(This is often doubled an octave up on the guitar.)

LEAD INTRO:
G---9-----9-----9-|---8-----8-----8-|
D-----6-----6-----|-----6-----6-----|
A-7-----7-----7---|-7-----7-----7---|

B---6-----6-----6-|---8-----8-----8-|
G-----6-----6-----|-----6-----6-----|
D-7-----7-----7---|-7-----7-----7---|

(This, too, gets run up an octave later in the song;
mini-barre e, B, and G on fret 9 for ease in playing.)

CHORDS:
E
I can't do anything right, uh-uh-oh
E
When she says that we're going under.
E
It takes over, over and over,
E
Again, again, again, uh-ah-oh-uh-oh
C#m                                E
And then, she really wants to give in
                                   C#m
And then, she really wants to give in

And then, uh-oh, uh-oh.
E
Thenthenthenthenthen....

Repeat three times. The song is so elementary! And so worthy of repeat listenings!

Stolen Idea

I’ve finished revisions on the taxidermy book, coming in at 87,226 words in 283 pages, plus end notes. So now what? Well, to fill the writing time in the mornings until another longer project came up, I’d planned to write missed-connections ads and post them to Craigslist. These would be mini essays, nonfiction in every way, based on real people I’d encounter in my day as a new southerner negotiating a new landscape.

I’d figured such a thing had probably been done before: lyric missed connections, it’s such an obvious romantic form. But who would have thought such a thing would be going on in Tuscaloosa?

We’ve got a top-ten MFA program here, so I should have thought. And I would have taken tacks different from this writer:

In your first life, you were foolish–running where you shouldn’t be running, crashing into trees, touching everything you saw. In your next life, you were more cautious–ducking when things were thrown your way, jumping over crevasses. In the lives after that you began to understand the world that you were placed in: that things, terrible things, can come at you from behind, from underneath. To be swept off one’s feet only to fall again from the sky, curled up in a ball, rotating. When I saw you, surrounded, you were aware of the names of things–you knew that when you jumped you could move back and forth in mid-air like a balloon, like wings, like spiraling.

Like, I would have tried to be more concrete and honest. But now? I’ll try nothing. The excitement of the project is all gone.

Or maybe not. Maybe I can help turn the otherwise negligible tuscaloosa.craigslist.org into a literary thunderdome. Game on, wistful connection-misser! We’ll see whose inbox fills more quickly with desperation.

UPDATE: Some of these are actually quite awesome.

Jonathan Franzen, Jonathan Franzen

Sigh:

A raft of sea otters are at play in a narrow estuary at Moss Landing, near Santa Cruz, Calif. There are 41 of them, says a guy in a baseball cap. He counted. They dive and surface and float around on their backs with their little paws poking up out of the water, munching sea urchins or thinking about munching sea urchins.

The humans admiring them from the shore don’t make them self-conscious. Otters are congenitally happy beasts. They don’t worry about their future, even though they’re legally a threatened species and their little estuary is literally in the shadow of the massive 500-ft. stacks of a power plant.

One of the humans admiring them is Jonathan Franzen. Franzen is a member of another perennially threatened species, the American literary novelist.

Does JF court this kind of wretched coverage that makes him look always like America’s Greatest Living Twit, or is this just the way we can characterize those writers, reporters, and critics who like him a lot?

I like him a lot. I’m really excited about his new novel due out this month, though I’m wary of that title: Freedom. But I think I’d like JF a lot more if he never, ever appeared in the media. I guess what I’m saying is that “Jonathan Franzen” has done more damage to JF’s career than anyone. I’m no image consultant, but how hard could it be in this case to do a better job?

“JF, don’t let this reporter watch you fawn over otters.”

“JF, don’t demand Oprah’s logo be removed from your book’s otherwise uninteresting but perfectly fine cover.”

“No, no, JF, don’t write those personal narratives for The New Yorker!”

“In the Desert Air”

It’s not my best title, but I’ve got an essay up in the new issue of Noö. That is, the new Noö. It’s about a single night I spent with a friend on a cross-country trip taken so long ago it feels like ancient history.

Thanks to Adam for asking me to be a part of it, and to Mike and Ryan for putting together this guest-editor-rotating online venue.