Are You Ready for the Country?
Q&A in City Pages also has a link to our new lavishly produced video.
Add comment January 26th, 2012
May 15
Here are the Powell’s and Amazon page for Boarded Windows. I think in the next month or so I’ll have a revamped website at this same address.
Add comment December 7th, 2011
Rock Show Next February
Dylan Hicks and the Toughies will play the Red Stag Supper Club on Wednesday, February 22. I’ll be playing my red keyboard and will be supported by the Toughies: Terry Eason on guitar, James Everest on bass, Erik Mathison on drums, and perhaps some guests. Most likely we’ll play all the songs from the forthcoming Sings Bolling Greene, and other, to-be-determined material.
2 comments November 30th, 2011
Loft Class, Lightly Plotted Fiction
Hey, I’m teaching a class this fall at the Loft Literary Center. It’s called “Lightly Plotted Fiction,” a workshop-based class in which we’ll try to figure out how to hold a reader’s interest and build momentum without a great deal of plot. In addition to student work, we’ll read Lydia Davis, Padgett Powell, Borges, and others. If you follow the above link, you can read a course description.
Add comment September 7th, 2011
Evan Lavender-Smith interview
Here’s an interview I conducted for Rain Taxi with Evan Lavender-Smith.
Add comment June 2nd, 2011
Omis io
Here’s a very engaging and intelligent essay by Brian Evenson (seek out his fiction!) in the most recent Collagist. I won’t attempt to summarize it, because I don’t really have time, and because then you might not read the thing, but for those who have read it, I’ll raise a few quibbles. One—a quibble, again—is that Evenson’s argument that David Markson, for instance, gets less attention than Pynchon or Wallace because he was a master of omission, and maximalists are inherently more attention-grabbing, seems (fittingly?) to leave so much out. For one, Pynchon and Wallace are/were much more deliberately crowd-pleasing—not compromised, just more broadly entertaining—than middle-late Markson. If Markson’s late books are, as Evan Lavender-Smith put it (I’m paraphrasing), porn for English majors, Pynchon’s and Wallace’s books are often joke books for Monty Python fans. And they employ other devices that tend to seduce a broader audience. Since critical attention tends to follow more than lead (relative) popularity, it’s natural that we’ll hear more about them. That said, Markson’s books are by no means neglected; he’s almost a Velvet Underground figure in internet literary bohemia.
Monoparagraphical fiction, as in Beckett, Bernhard, Lavender-Smith and others, seems to straddle the in/out divide. Obviously it does without traditional compositional rules, and sometimes goes hand in hand with omission of punctuation, but it just as obviously runs counter to the creation of space Evenson discusses throughout the essay. The lack of breaks in Bernhard certainly enhances the feeling of anxious breathlessness found in the often sprawling sentences; the effect seems as much of surfeit as of sparseness, though, sure, lots of key things are left out. I doubt many of us feel a hard sense of partisanship here, but it seems possible to put many writers in either camp, depending on one’s mood or objective.
Add comment May 20th, 2011
!
I’m majorly excited to say that, in 2012, Coffee House Press will be publishing my first novel.
2 comments April 8th, 2011
The Jeans
A few years ago, I discovered a moderately slim-fitting, traditionally waisted jean from America’s runner-up denim maker, and in doing so put an end, I thought, to my long jeans struggle. Worn with boots, these jeans might help me blend in at the more accepting honky-tonks and rodeos, but I’ve found they serve well in urban settings too. I often feel proudly unpretentious while wearing them, sometimes like the stylishly unconcerned, mirror-less man I’ve always wanted to be. Still, there are times when I’ve felt the need for a trendier jean. I will often wear jeans with a sports jacket—almost always a stupid look, I know, whether worn slickly or cloddishly, at art openings or airports, but nonetheless I will often put on a tweed jacket over my jeans, and there are times when my favorite jeans seem too bumpkinish for this, almost always stupid, look.
I pretty much summarized this situation to the salesman at a Vampire Weekend-ish boutique about ten miles from my house. The salesman showed me a dark, plain-pocket jean, made in France (gosh!), then for some reason went into a tedious disquisition about the history of jeans, explaining that after the rise of Marlon Brando and James Dean a great many Americans suddenly wanted to dress like workingmen, as if this were news to me, and that there was a certain marvelous loom once common in the States that is now only found in France and Japan, as if this were of interest to me. The jeans I was now considering, he said, were vanity-sized, and accordingly I should try on a pair purporting to be two sizes smaller than my normal waist size. In the dressing room these close-fitting, low-rise jeans were difficult to button and gave me some testicular discomfort. They’re painful, I told the salesman, who explained that the jeans would expand significantly during wear, by as much a two inches in the waist, and quite a lot in the thighs too. If the top button of the jeans could not be buttoned, he said, the jeans were probably the right size. I guess that logic had some Orwellian appeal because I didn’t question it with much vigor. For best results, the salesman said, the jeans should be worn every day and never washed for six months, at which point their presumably considerable stink should be splashed and soaked away in the Pacific Ocean. Another body of salt water, I’m sure, would do just as well, but he mentioned the Pacific. On hand were a pair of jeans that had been given just that treatment, and I’ll concede that they looked fantastic, so soft (I stroked them) and faded and beautifully creased at the crotch and thighs, though not in that ersatz, off-the-rack way I’ve come to detest. They had much of the authenticity, in fact, of my country jeans, only Frencher.
Just for the sake of argument, I tried on a pair of the jeans vanity-sized for someone an inch fatter than I. They were comfortable, sort of, at least not wildly uncomfortable, and looked okay, I guess. I frankly wasn’t in love with the jeans in their pre-oceanic condition, but by then I’d invested a good amount of time on them, was starting to feel like their skeptical but inevitable owner. I asked again about the two-inch expansion. All jeans expand as one wears them, of course, and then shrink up again in the wash, but why, I said, would these jeans expand so far in excess of the expansion I’ve come to know over a lifetime of wearing jeans? (Really I was more tentative; I think I just said that two inches seemed like a lot.) The salesman returned to the previously discussed loom, repeated his strong recommendation that I make the jeans my exclusive and unwashed pants for six months, then find my way to the Pacific Ocean. I’m happy to wear a pair of jeans seven, even ten, times before washing them (and as a rule I keep them away from the dryer), but if I happen to sit on some of my kid’s doughnut frosting or whatever, I’m washing those jeans. So when I eventually wash them, I said to the salesmen, they will shrink, yes? By about three percent, he said. (Like any jean, in other words.) The wise course, it seemed, was to pass up the jeans altogether or buy the more comfortable pair. I bought the really tight ones.
I was only able to last about six hours before washing the jeans. They were so miserably tight and stiff and my deep knee bends weren’t helping much, so I figured I might as well wash them (gentle cycle) and let them drip dry. As they dried, I kept putting them on, because I was once told that wearing wet jeans is a good way to break them in and loosen them up. I got kind of cold doing this. Later I hand-washed them (really, I hardly used my hands at all) in cold water, Woolite, and what looked to be human hair (this just happened to be stuck to the bottom of the bucket). I was hoping the jeans would fade in some spectacular way. They’re fading slowly. They’re jeans, my wife keeps reminding me. They’re very tight jeans. I’ve been working at my computer with the top two buttons undone, even though I know this will slow down the jeans’ promised expansion. When I stand up for something, I rebutton them, unless I’m standing up to go to the bathroom, in which case I’m ahead of the game. They’re pretty good standing-up jeans, so I guess they’d work for my now biannual visits to nightclubs. They’re okay for slouching too. Still, I resent their tightness, resent the salesman, am ashamed of my ridiculous vanity, my ridiculous nostalgia for my vaguely hip youth that led me to buy expensive new jeans when I had perfectly fine jeans at home. Before long I felt compelled to destroy the jeans or at least get them out of the house entirely like porn or off-the-wagon liquor.
Last night after dinner I decided I’d earned a break from the by that point grossly constricting jeans. I put on my old jeans and sat back down in front of my computer. These old jeans felt a bit tight as well, and after a while I was forced to unbutton and slightly unzip them, as Janet Jackson did in her famous Rolling Stone cover. My waist hasn’t measurably expanded over the winter, nor have I notably gained weight. Granted, I don’t write down my weight and measurements, but I have a pretty good sense. It’s possible that I’ve been bloated these past few days. I’m more inclined to think, however, that my new jeans have so taxed my waist and groin that these parts are in a kind of recovery, so that any pressure causes discomfort, on top of which the whole experience has been psychologically stressful, leading to gastrointestinal suffering that obviously aggravates the tight-jeans problem. Also the jeans look stupid with my tweed jacket.
Something like this has happened to me before, more than once in fact. Often the problem was a shrink-to-fit miscalculation. I’ve always been weak on math and the hard sciences. I’m remembering now that I once passed down a pair of regrettably tight jeans to a slim friend, who was very appreciative, as far as I remember, and who now, it happens, lives in Los Angeles, within miles of the Pacific Ocean. I’ll wear my dumpy khakis to the post office.
1 comment March 30th, 2011