Category: Announcements

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I look so thin!

The long and short of it: I didn’t want to feel more alone.

For much of my life I had desires about who I wanted to touch and see naked that nothing in the culture around me supported or made me feel good about. I was gay, in other words, and while I didn’t grow up around homophobes I grew up adjacent to enough homophobes to know that what I desired made me worrisomely different from people. It kept me out of what I saw as the community. One of the more courageous things I’ve done was decide to leave that community and find another where I could feel happy being who I am.

I’m in a place where I might need to find another new community, but I’m afraid of leaving behind the one I’ve spent my life among.

You might argue with me how political orientations aren’t the same as sexual, that the latter are fixed by biology more than the former, but I can point you to studies that argue the opposite. Regardless of which of us is right, this is how 2015/2016 has felt for me: like being in the closet again. When I’ve told people that I was voting for a third-party candidate?maybe Jill Stein, probably Gloria La Riva?I’ve been met with bemused condescension at best and verbal shaming and belittling at worst.

2016’s biggest lesson: people on the left are just as intolerant as people on the right. There are shitty, hate-filled people voting alongside me this year.

People have called what I’ve wanted to do “protest voting” or “throwing my vote away.” That has felt at times like hearing I’m “going through a phase” or that “maybe I’m just not good at bedding women.” I’ve found very few people willing to listen to where I am and how I’ve come to my decision, that when I look at the Socialist Party’s platform I agree with every single point, and when I imagine working to make such a future possible I’m filled with hope and happiness.

But when I was finishing my ballot?five pages long, front and back, full of local and state-wide referenda I researched one-by-one?I had one more decision to make. I had to choose someone for president, and after days of putting the decision off I chose the person everyone else I know in my life is choosing. I chose, this time, to stay in the community.

Or maybe “stay” isn’t the right verb. I didn’t leave my community when I came out, I just clarified my position within that community. That’s why I’m glad, I think, to have voted for Clinton: I can do the political work I see making me happy and fulfilled within the very community (i.e. the Democratic Party) I see as problematic.

Also, I’m happy to be part of the public that put the first woman in the White House. This morning, in church, I found myself thinking about 2024. (I know, yikes.) In 2024, the 18-year-olds who will be voting for the first time will only know a U.S. that’s been led by a man of color and a woman. White men running the country will seem quaint, maybe old fashioned. I don’t think white men are per se a problem, but I’m keeping those 18-year-olds, the world they might help bring about, in mind on election day.

We’ll keep doing things as a country that give me shame. We’ll keep killing civilians in drone attacks. We’ll keep protecting corporate profits at the cost of public health and financial security. We’ll keep ignoring environmental destruction and putting guns in the hands of anyone who wants them. I know that if I want things to be different I have to work outside the election booth to get it done. I hope some of you in my life will join me.

Today my publisher, Indiana University Press, set up a Twitter chat to talk about the new book. I’d never done one before. I found it to be enjoyable and anxiety-producing. For those actually getting work done at 9:30PST on a Friday, and as all my tweets get deleted after 30 days, I figured I’d post a link to the archive IU Press did.

You can read the whole chat (in reverse, unless you scroll to the end and work yer way up) here.

My debut fiction collection is out June 1 from Indiana University Press. To sell a few copies and meet good people, I’m going to hit a bunch of bookstores in the Great Plains / Midwest with friends Tyrone Jaeger, author of So Many True Believers and Theodore Wheeler, author of Bad Faith. We’ll be reading short stories together, among other things, and I can promise a very good time had by everyone.

Here are the dates:

Omaha
The Bookworm
Wednesday July 6, 6pm

Minneapolis
Magers & Quinn
Thursday July 7, 7pm

Milwaukee
Boswell Book Company
Friday July 8, 7pm

Chicago
The Book Cellar
Saturday July 9, 6pm

Iowa City
Prairie Lights
Sunday July 10, 2pm

Des Moines
Beaverdale Books
Monday July 11, 6pm

Lincoln
Indigo Bridge Books
Tuesday July 12, 7pm

Would love to see you all and read stories to you and grab drinks after, and probably also before. Happy summer, everyone.

The other night my friend Jim Gavin came to talk to my students about his book—the very funny and moving Middle Men I quoted from in the last post. On our way from my office to the classroom, I had to piss. This is what I said to him, out loud: “I have to piss.” I went into the men’s room and urinated.

Then, last night, Neal and I were talking in bed before falling asleep, and during the conversation I had to use the restroom. This is what I said to him, out loud, in our bedroom: “I have to use the restroom.” I went into our bathroom and urinated.

I’ve been stuck all day on the question of which guy is the one I’m supposed to trust. Who was posing, and why? And Jesus: what the hell am I supposed to do if they both were?

ttp://archive.davemadden.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/hashtag.jpg”>There are days that I miss it, because I have friends I care about in my life and this for so long was how I kept in touch with them. Plus most of them are funny and write entertaining tweets. I miss those. I don’t miss them as much as I miss them, my friends, but I miss them.

Ever since I took Twitter off my pinned tabs, deleted the phone app, and set up WordPress to auto-tweet my blog posts, I log on maybe once a week to check for any messages or things. Sometimes I need to see what Margaret Cho is up to. Every time, I start scrolling and reading tweets, scrolling and reading, and I think about jumping back in to the fray.

But then I’m always stopped by some feeling of mild despair. Here’s how it went this morning. I logged in to reply to a DM I got from a fellow essayist I’ve never met in person, about which of the Andy Kaufman^[1] biographies was best^[2], and then started reading some of the tweets in my feed. Here’s one that another fellow essayist I’ve never met in person retweeted:

“Stories do not begin with ideas or themes or outlines so much as with images and obsessions.” #obsessed

This is precisely the kind of passion-centric writerly claptrap that turns my heart to murderousness. I opened up a tab and started hunting for evidence of any of the hundreds of classic stories that began with an outline or theme. It’s so flat and certain of a claim that I knew it would be easy to disprove. But before I found anything I thought: What the hell are you doing? How can any of this ever really matter? Don’t you understand you’ve got real work to do?

I can turn off retweets. I can follow the “right” people. There exist with Twitter fixes for this kind of feed experience. No one likes a tweeter of exclusively his own blog content. I hear tell of writers successfully using Twitter as a networking tool. The problem I need, I think, the interterm break to think over is this: How can tweeting and interacting with one’s feed be a creative act without becoming an exercise in self-absorption, and are those mutually exclusive?

We can’t use the Internet to discover who we are can we? I, too, am not a fan of iTunes 12. Few things are as vainglorious as the term superuser, but if you ask me the problem with Apple is that it keeps continually saying fuck you to its superusers with each successive OS and app upgrade. Good thing I’m teaching McPhee’s Oranges tonight. Otherwise, I’d be even less full of faith.

UPDATE:
For what it’s worth, in putting together tonight’s discussion notes, I came across in the New Yorker, on structure, which talks about his beginning a story with an outline (ABC/D) and Edgar Allen Poe’s beginning “The Raven”, in a sense, with a theme.

[[]]The Pittsburgher in me always misspells this Kaufmann.[[]]

[[]]I’ve read zero of them.[[]]

But if I were Stephin Merrit, say, I’d write a song about mustaches just so I could rhyme Mayim Bialik with Magnum P.I.-like.

Long-time readers (!) of this blog might recall that back in 2011 I tried to work on memorizing some prose passages. I meant to start with Cheever’s opening paragraph in “The Death of Justina”. Today is the first day I’ve been able to recite it in full from memory. Here, to practice, though you’ll have to trust I’m neither peeking nor copying and pasting:

So help me God it gets more and more preposterous, it corresponds less and less to what I remember and what I expect, as if the force of life were centrifugal and threw one further and further away from one’s purest memories and ambitions, and I can barely recall the old house where I was raised, where in midwinter Parma violets bloomed in a cold frame near the kitchen door, and down the long corridor, past the seven views of Rome—up two steps and down three—one entered the library, where all the books were in order, the lamps were bright, where there was a fire and a dozen bottles of good bourbon locked in a cabinet with a veneer like tortoise shell whose silver key my father wore on his watch chain. Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos (no less) and we can accomplish this only by the most vigilant exercise of choice, but in a world that changes more swiftly than we can perceive there is always the danger that our powers of selection will be mistaken and that the vision we serve will come to nothing. We admire decency and we despise death, but even the mountains seem to shift in the space of a night, and perhaps the exhibitionist at the corner of Chestnut and Elm streets is more significant than the lovely woman with a bar of sunlight in her hair, putting a fresh piece of cuttlebone in the nightingale’s cage. Just let me give you one example of chaos and if you disbelieve me look honestly into your own past and see if you can’t find a comparable experience.

The idea, I guess, is to know certain writing by heart, in all that this idiom connotes. I’m in love with the way this paragraph moves. I love its leaps and grounding returns. Maybe I’ll glean something from it subconsciously, but mostly I just like having it close when I need it.

Next up for memorization is this gem from Didion’s “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”:

Of course the activists—not those whose thinking had become rigid, but those whose approach to revolution was imaginatively anarchic—had long ago grasped the reality which still eluded the press: we were seeing something important. We were seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum. Once we had seen these children, we could no longer overlook the vacuum, no longer pretend that the society’s atomization could be reversed. This was not a traditional generational rebellion. At some point between 1945 and 1967 we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be playing. Maybe we had stopped believing in the rules ourselves, maybe we were having a failure of nerve about the game. Maybe there were just too few people around to do the telling. These were children who grew up cut loose from the web of cousins and great-aunts and family doctors and lifelong neighbors who had traditionally suggested and enforced the society’s values. They are children who have moved around a lot, San Jose, Chula Vista, here. They are less in rebellion against the society than ignorant of it, able only to feed back certain of its most publicized self-doubts, Vietnam, Saran-Wrap, diet pills, the Bomb.

They feed back exactly what is given them. Because they do not believe in words—words are for “typeheads,” Chester Anderson tells them, and a thought which needs words is just one more of those ego trips—their only proficient vocabulary is in the society’s platitudes. As it happens I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one’s self depends upon one’s mastery of the language, and I am not optimistic about children who will settle for saying, to indicate that their mother and father do not live together, that they come from “a broken home.” They are sixteen, fifteen, fourteen years old, younger all the time, an army of children waiting to be given the words.

339 words to Cheever’s 280. See you in 2018.

A service post; maybe Googlers will find it. I had this problem a while back on my late-2010 MacBook Pro. I’d insert a disc and it wouldn’t recognize there was anything to load. None of the fixes I found in online forums did the trick. One day it suddenly fixed itself on its own. Or, more specifically, something I did made the Superdrive function again.

Well it’s been malfunctioning for a couple months now and I couldn’t figure out why. Then I did this:

1. I wanted to make sure a Firefox Add-on was working properly, so I did Tools > Add-ons and they opened in a new tab.
2. I noticed a number of my add-ons were waiting for a Firefox restart.
3. I clicked “Restart Firefox”.
4. I heard my Superdrive make a little whir, as though it had just ejected a disc.
5. Excited but incredulous, I put in a DVD and it played immediately.

So maybe try restarting Firefox through your Add-ons tab and see if it helps? For what it’s worth, here are the Add-ons I use:

• Adblock Plus
• BarTab Lite
• Coupons at Checkout
• DoNotTrackMe
• Download Status Bar
• DuckDuckGo Plus
• feedly
• Flash Video Downloader
• Flashblock
• Greasemonkey
• Xmarks

Why do I feel as though I’ve just shown you my underwear drawer?

If I invite you over to watch the Oscars (or the Super Bowl if you’re a straight guy), I am asking you to share an experience with me. Does that experience consist mostly of inflicting ourselves to advertisements together? Essentially yes. Whether it’s movies we should pay to see or football teams whose identity as commercial enterprises (even you, Packers) can’t be argued, televised events take place to sell us things.

Ads are increasingly entertaining, which is to say fun, and there’s nothing wrong with having a kind of mediated, managed, delivered fun together. It’s why I think you’re going to accept. We’ll together make our own constructed fun in the form of pretentious-speech snickering or tasty dips for chips. It’s part of the promise of inviting you over.

The problem with live tweeting*, I dunno, the VMAs, is that you haven’t accepted my invitation to do so. Which means you haven’t volunteered to submit yourself to advertising alongside me, and make no mistake: any tweets I—or you—might come up with about Miley Cyrus are advertisements for Cyrus, MTV, and whatever upcoming companies want to try to capitalize on 2013’s favorite dance-craze/wacky-word twerking.

No longer wanting to work as an advertiser for a product that saw me as little else is why I left Facebook. As a writer, I like the constraints of Twitter too much to abandon it, but here’s a practice I can happily ditch.

Now, can I encourage others to do so?

—
*Live Tweeting‘s a redundant term, in that without third-party apps you can’t schedule tweets for later. It’s a hypercorrection or maybe a malapropism on live blogging, which—at least commercially—refers to something beyond the norm: posting blog entries immediately after they’re typed. I write this, but no way I’m going to change people’s usage on this one.

We looked at 24 different places in three different cities over five days, and then despite our belongings and homebody interests we took a small one-bedroom in San Francisco.

It means we’ll need to keep a lot of our stuff in storage. It means that friends and family visiting won’t be as comfortable as we’d hoped they’d be. It means whatever dinner parties we throw will be for two others, max, or held at a restaurant. It means, overall, a far vaster change in our way of life than we’d presumed all those months ago, when the idea of moving to San Francisco became an actual event to plan for.

But it also means we’ll be two blocks from my new office at USF, four blocks from the Whole Foods on Haight Street, one block from the free USF gym we get to use, and zero blocks from Golden Gate Park. (We’re just across the street.) It means we can save a lot of money to use for the kind of traveling we haven’t been able to afford for years. It means we have free parking in a garage for our car we don’t use much, and two bus lines that pick us up right outside our building.

See?

And from there, while we wait, on a clear(er) day, here’s our view:

We hope you visit. We’re going to get such a comfortable couch.

It’s been a bad-news year. It’s been a great newsyear, which usually amounts to a bad-news year. You all know why. As I’ve slacked on the output on this blog of late, I want to do a personal 2013 recap thus far.

JANUARY
I was in Boston for the MLA conference, interviewing for only one job. One job I didn’t end up taking. The trip wasn’t a bust, in that I got to spend a day looking through the Bill Dana Comedy Archives at Emerson College, which was maybe the most urban campus I’ve ever seen. A set of buildings along one stretch of downtown Boston. The library was on a certain floor of a certain building. The archives a certain set of rooms on the floor above. A fruitful visit. Plus I got to stay with my friend Jay and meet his wife and stepdaughter. The rest of the month I sat on the couch and ate poorly while playing the guitar and singing off key. N was staying with family in South Dakota, applying and interviewing for jobs in Omaha. I remember nothing else of the month, other than going gluten-free for two weeks with no noticeable effects to my digestive health or energy. I probably drank too much.

FEBRUARY
N came back, just after his birthday, having not found a job in time to retain his many professional trading licenses. It was a dark time. This was the very inevitability we’d worried about for months, the one that drove me to the job market in order to give us some options other than stagnation. I was flown to the campus for the MLA-interview job. I was flown to San Francisco. The former place was too remote for N to find work. The latter place too expensive for us to afford. UA’s faculty-in-residence program, which I interviewed for last summer and got far along in the process of, put itself on hold, making our plan of using free housing to save up enough to buy a house fall completely apart. It was a dark time. Then I got one job offer, and then I got another. Then job negotiations revealed a way to afford living in the Bay Area. By the end of the month we made a decision: I’d take a job in the MFA program at the University of San Francisco. We’d move this summer to California.
Continue reading 2013

I.
B.G. as Bob Cratchit is Scrooged‘s most inspired casting decision.

II.
Charlie Day is the heir to B.G.’s comic genius.