Still shhh

I still can't fully reveal the details of yesterday's secret, for various reasons. Maybe by next week I'll be able to. I didn't mean to be coy, of course, though it was kind of fun to have my own little secret. A few of you know so keep in mind it's still hush-hush.

But I think it's probably ok to give you the broad, non-specific outline. I found out yesterday that Notes for My Body Double has been accepted by a pretty great press.

I'm really quite ecstatic. It's been arduous, to say the least, getting this book out into the world. So to everyone who put up with my whining, I say thank you for not shooting me.

In the face. With a bazooka.

Shhh

I have a secret. That I cannot tell you.

Not yet.

Go read

"Neighborhood Light" by Mr. Theodore Worozbyt at Verse Daily.

Walking in

The interview went pretty well, I think. Of course, they hired me on the spot. And gave me a six million dollar signing bonus. And gave me one of these.

Kidding about all that.

I think I did do pretty well at the interview, though. It really does help to try to prepare beforehand, I find. I've been through a few of these by now and there are certain questions that go with the territory, so I always think through my answers, even write them down, just to reach a kind of fluency to balance out the times when the idiot gene begins to assert itself.

It's perverse but I almost enjoy interviews. Almost, mind you. But it's challenging and, for better or worse, it's a chance to talk about ideas about poetry and teaching. That can't be so bad, can it?

I even got one good laugh out of them. Asked about dealing with sentimentality, I talked about student work that resembles crudely borrowed song lyrics and how best to address that. Somewhere in that I said something to the effect of, "And, of course, Britney Spears isn't really known for being a wordsmith." Score two for me. ;)

So we'll see how it goes. I feel fine. If it happens, great. If not, well, not great. But I'll manage.

***

I forgot to mention it was a phone interview. Which is relevant in that I hung up and dashed out the door to catch Superman Returns.

Awesome. The opening credits, if you're my age, if you remember the original, are surprisingly perfect. Bullyseye on the geek pleasure center. As for the rest, serious majesty going on throughout. The ending is about 10 minutes, maybe, too long. Not really a problem, though.

So bring on the World's Finest movie. I'm there.

Oops

So I'm interviewing tomorrow for a position at the University of Memphis. That's one of my highly jinxable concerns I haven't mentioned. But now I have. And the jinx is on. So wish me enough luck to counteract the jinx.

Not particularly nervous right now. Not giving it much thought, really. It'll shake out as it should. Whatever that is.

Metropolis

I'm ill tempered today, a little at least, and in need of distraction. A lot going on besides anything I've mentioned here. I've become vaguely superstitious somehow, afraid to even whisper for fear of jinxing something.

Agh.

***

In honor of, homage to, Superman Returns, which I'll be seeing sometime tomorrow, here's a picture of me on a windy, bad hair day, the last I ever spent in Illinois.

It won't take long

Work beginning on the chapbook. I'm asked if I have any ideas for cover art and really, I don't. I'm giving it some thought. It's strange to have this other project, a third, to think about. Notes takes primacy, followed by the memoir, and now the chapbook has jumped on board. I don't really know many artists, so I'm not sure where to go.

***

England vs. Ecuador: not the greatest game but I enjoyed it. Cool to see Beckham's tremendous free kick goal followed by bouts of on-field vomiting due to heat/dehydration.

***

I sometimes get down on myself, thinking things like I haven't written very much good since leaving Tuscaloosa in the rear view mirrow. But thoughts like that are often not based in reality. Looking at the latest manuscript for Notes, I realized only 13 out of 45 poems date from those days. And all of them were written just before my book came out, so most of the book has been written in the last two years. I feel very strongly about it. It's good to rediscover things that way.

No!

Joining Cornshake, 5 of my suggestions are up for the awesome Jon Pak Approves or Disapproves site.

First one to guess correctly all 5 gets a free copy of my book.

HINT: They were all posted today.

Update: Since so many have been posted today, whoever gets 1 first gets the book.

Th.

Well, that was probably too much to read online, or everyone hated it, so I took the memoir excerpt down.

***

USA vs. Ghana about to start. Awesome.

***

I have a kitten crawling around on me.

Fireball

I had no idea my question about cupping would garner that much response. I knew that it was not really part of Reiki or consistent with its practice, but my addled brain couldn't come up with alternative medicine. Oops. So thanks, A., and everyone else, for cluing me in. When I was Googling it, using words like heal and fire as search terms, I was mostly getting tips and hints for D&D. So I know how to cast a mean flame arrow or conjure a lesser fire elemental. Watch out!

I needed it for a section in the memoir where I've fallen and hurt my ankle and knee fairly badly. I was in quite a bit of pain. The man who was my assistant at the time, Tony, was from Romania and was completely insane. This cupping practice soon comes into play.

Maybe I should post the section?

Q:

I've been enjoying the World Cup, and have for years, but the outrageous flopping by players is hard to take. A player for Costa Rica was just given a yellow card for touching the sleeve of a Poland player. The Poland player, feeling the hand graze him, goes flying, his face contorted in a comic expression of agony. And the referee falls for it. Time and time again. Players fall with what look to be mortal wounds, judging by their reactions, and once the foul is called or not called, they're up again, healed. It's absurd.

But I am loving the games. Soccer was the only sport I was ever good at.

***

Memoir: 17,056 words. I slowed a bit for a few days toward the end of last week. But I'm back on the horse again. Properly formatted, it comes out to 80 pages. Which is kinda cool.

Memoir question: does anyone know anything about the practice of using fire to heal? Is it some offshoot of Reiki? It's when a flame is lit on the skin, with alcohol, I'm guessing, and a jar is placed over the fire. The fire burns out, creating suction that, I assume, sucks out the sickness/impurity/etc.

Anyone?

Fair

My favorite search phrase ever which brought someone to this blog:

"Matty Stepanek sucks"

I will pass on without comment. I report, you decide.

FYI

Best of the Net

Question for the memoir

Do I include the sex scene?

Bebop

I blame Adam for this. You should too. Over at his blog, he posted a video of this uber-daffy girl talking to her webcam, about her webcam and other topics, including anime, her nose, or lack thereof, and her few friends. I got the impression it was fake. And it turns out I was right. She's a budding filmmaker/internet personality. But, all the same, I found her weirdly adorable/adorably weird. I wanted to fix her a bowl of soup. Or write a poem. This is quick, not great, but kinda fun as an exercise.

FOR THE SAD-EYED ANIME GIRL

Someone will soon say to me you aren’t real.

That I loved you for no good reason.

He’ll be correct, an acolyte of accuracy,

and I’ll begin to forget you, discount

this poem, assign it to the binary netherworld

of the hard drive, never to be

posted or printed or perfect bound

for one thousand people

to whom I’d profess some bogus bit of biography.

Did we meet in Baltimore

beside the scalloped bay

while February made a fist of snow?

I don’t think so. Why would we ever stop

in the midst of so much

slush for the flare of the erotic

to catch fire? Down cobblestone

we’d never go to my bad

hotel, to my room beside the vomitous

ice machine, gurgling all

the night long while we

laughed at nakedness

as though it had been this easy, always. No,

it wasn’t Baltimore

that would make a good lie

of our lives. Nor would New York be

much better. Better to choose

nowhere, better to fold

the map back into the glove compartment,

better to begin thinking

of the last person

to actually store gloves there

and not maps of Iowa

and not proof of registration

and not a gun like the movies have taught me

to expect, which is a kind

of imagination. If we met,

I would lie to the last

and you would never know me

for my name. You could

love me as I loved you,

falsely, for a moment, unassailed by fact.

refuse

IN PRAISE OF THE DEFECTIVE

When the best of it is prized from the dung

of the Sumatran common palm civet,

sweetened like a cherry in the gut

of this little island cat, I feel better

about not drinking coffee, sipping instead sweet

tea crude as a hammer. I feel

better that I never read much

Tolstoy, stopped at the bulwark of so much

French. I should begin

a second life. I should not dream

of my macrobiotic afterlife

in which I am what I do not eat

and the animals I loved enough

to eat grass, to pretend one thing was another,

purr and sing and chirp

sweet hosannas outside my bedroom window

where sometimes we made

love but never continuances

of our selves which we’d name

Hank or Emily while saving up for Harvard.

I feel better that none of me

works well at all,

that for twenty years the fog

has never lifted

from the landscape I mean to cease defiling

someday. Thank you

cards I should have mailed

and gifts given

and favors repaid with crippling interest

I grow to love

the way I once loved

shame. What will I do with my days

now that my nights

are sublimely alone

and how will I make use of this wound

I carried like a map

so that I would never, never

lose you?

You say you're looking for someone

Carbondale days continues. It's nuts. It's getting harder, in some ways, to write: I'm writing about a me that's really me, and not that 12 year old, who seems like another person, another life. It's easier, somehow, to write about events that are so far beyond your control, about events which happen to you, wherein you're almost irrelevant. A tidal wave doesn't care what it washes over. But when you begin to write about an adult self, in which you're a full participant in your life and world, you have to face up to the specter of regret, among other things. That becomes hard.

Partial

My browser is doing strange things: some bookmarks/links/pages won't load but instead take me to a Comcast page that wants me to first turn off all pop-up blockers, firewalls, antivirus software then download something. This has got to be a scam, some kind of virus or spyware. I've scanned everything with McAfee but the problem persists. I'm loathe to call Comcast because they'll say, run your anti-virus software. Did that. Oh, then, uh, pray?

I'll figure it out.

Update: Fixed it. Not a virus. Settings gone goofy.

***

Glad to write a poem. Still enjoying the memoir but give me poetry over prose every day of the week.

Memoir is somewhere north of 13,000 words. I spent 12,000 of them on being 12 years old in a rehabilitation hospital in a strange city. I've skipped ahead to 22, starting graduate school in Carbondale, Illinois, and thankfully for readers, if there ever are any, it's a lot more funny and a lot less gruesome. But I love the gruesome. Ha!

dove

DISTRACTION

A hank of newspaper, reef of white foam

broomed by wind into the corner

where the kung fu dojo and drug store

met, at least in my peripheral

sight I thought it to be a child’s slipped

sock or some other bit of nothing

anyone might ever miss. Looking

up, it was a plane I watched,

thinking of Chicago, a Vietnamese

restaurant which served

steamed catfish in a bowl made of river

clay. Looking up, clouds

distracted me from that city

and that meal, that night

threaded by the shudder of elevated trains,

looking up, whatever

the weather might become

in the next hour

addled me, the song that piped down

from the ceiling eased

my forgetfulness

but not the headache which felt like

the neighbors were pitching garbage from the roof

again, or setting fire

to something living,

webcasting the conflagration

and me fighting the urge

to look, to watch, to not think

of the next poem

or the girl buying Chinese food

for the first time

in her young life,

asking my help with the menu,

one more mystery

over which I’ll pretend vague

mastery, if only

that she not be hungry or alarmed

by all the ignorance

I’m saving for the afterlife

where such a condition has been promised

to be useful. See how

I’ve forgotten whatever it was

I did not see watching children

practice how to strike

me down, how to crush

my windpipe with ruthless beauty,

how to leave me

to imagine at last the limits of mercy.

Flip

Cars is probably Pixar's worst movie. Which means it's still great. But it's the slightest of their films and the least perfect, storywise. It's obviously a labor of love for John Lasseter, but I tend to think a fable about cars and that nostalgia-sodden decade, the 50's, connects most directly with him. It's amazingly gorgeous, funny, well-acted, but it seems more Disney than it does Pixar and that isn't exactly a bad thing but after a film like The Incredibles you had best bring your A-game. Cars is more like B+.

***

Word count: 10,166.

This makes me happy

Dear Ann Coulter

Red

Taking Ryan, Molly and Sally to see Cars today. This picture is a few years old now, so they've grown up lots, but you get a good idea of their evil, I mean, cuteness. I'd be going to see it on my own, anyway, but they'll enjoy it.

***

Obnoxious word count: 8,262. I'll stop reporting this at some point, I promise.

***

Has anyone seen the details for Tupelo's upcoming reading period? 35 dollars to submit your manuscript. And everyone gets a short critique. That's a lot of money for a short critique. I appreciate the need to charge a reading fee, but, that's steep. Tupelo is a great press and I own a ton of their books, but I can't decide what to think about this. Your thoughts?

Roger and out

6,300 words and I'm still 12; perhaps two weeks have passed in the memoir. Good grief!

My immediate goal is to get to 10,000 words. I think I can do that by the end of the weekend.

***

The Omen was pretty decent, all things considered. A few good scares, though of the cheap, gotcha! variety. Still, it's a handsome film, and it holds your attention.

I prefer the original probably. Gregory Peck, man.

This version does, however, have the single best, most realistic fall I've ever seen in a movie. When Damien knocks his mother over the bannister, the camera falls Julia Stiles all the way down. Usually, the shot would cut away, as there would be no credible way to show the impact.

Well, in this the camera never cuts. The mom literally bounces. There were audible gasps from the audience. I was pleased.

***


Contract mailed.

After the garden

Neil Young's Living with War is a complete gas. If you love Neil, as I do, you love him for many reasons, one of those being a perverse daffiness that's often off-putting to some, but to me has always been charming. This album, recorded quickly, is a broadside aimed at President Bush and his catastrophic presidency. It's tuneful rock with a slight twang over which Neil rants and raves and rolls. You wouldn't think such an album would make you smile but it delights me and I can't stop grinning. In "Let's Impeach the President," contradictory Bush sound bites play in the background while Neil and a choir shout "flip!" then "flop!". It's hysterical and damning, all at the same time.

***

Spending a lot of time writing the memoir. Will top 5,000 words today. Onward!

My song is love

Received in the mail yesterday my contract for Exit Interview, which was neat. How weird to be talking about this little project, that I put together quickly, without so much invested in it, as in a manuscript, which is nice, refreshing. I'll send it back out today.

***

Memoir continues. I have about 3,000 words now. I just want to get to a point where I can show it to someone. It's going very well, I think. I'm not sure why this time out is different from the past few abortive attempts, but I really think I'll bring the damn thing in this time.

***

God help me, The Omen today.

Unruhe

Busy weekend with weird dreams interspersed: one was the kind that made perfect sense within itself, within its dream logic, but upon waking I have a difficult time even conceptualizing it, let alone verbalizing it. It was something about some kind of next-generation weapon, a ray gun of sorts, I think, but then it ventured off into something about fractions and other really weird esoterica. Another dream was much more mundane but entirely pleasant: at some kind of conference, AWP or its twin/clone, seeing friends, and somehow Mark Halliday appears, which is really strange. I like his work well enough but, well, the next thing you know somebody will be dreaming about me. And that way lies madness, friends.

***

Lots of writing, even on the memoir. Unbelievably, I might just do it this time. I will pass out.

***

Watching the fourth season of The X-Files, which continues to be a tremendous show. I never watched it while it was on, though I did go see the movie in Carbondale. I knew enough about the gist of the show, the characters, through cultural osmosis to follow the film well enough and was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. Thanks to dvd and Netflix I've been watching it for some time, probably about halfway through my viewing of Buffy.

Which gets me to thinking about Joss Whedon and his current stabs at a feature film directing career. Which I think is misguided. Television is a writer's medium and his particular and peculiar gifts are in writing: characters, dialog, story, arcs, mythologies, etc. He's a fine director but not so distinctive as to blow away the world.

So he's off writing Wonder Woman and preparing to direct it, but I can't help but think he'd contribute more playing in his own sandbox.

But I was talking about The X-Files. Fox Mulder is a surprisingly, to me anyway, moving and compelling character. Eternally the wounded little boy, bereft of his sister, grabbing at straws.

And I just watched an episode set in Chattanooga, which was pretty cool.

***


Lots of my friends have been at or near the beach. Wilmington, Daytona Beach. But not me. Something is wrong with that.

NMP

Winner and finalists of the New Michigan Press chapbook contest

bunk

AGAINST SCIENCE

According to the rigors of science, sex

every seventh second was what

I thought about. But that was all hokum,

bad science, so I’m left to wonder

what was I thinking when

I thought it was sex I was thinking

about. The six seconds between

the imperative permutations

of possibility and position

seemed an oasis from the dismal desert

of so much yearning, a Casablanca

of the flesh. Free to watch

a spider rappel the wall

or the shadow of a robin recede,

I did not think of your

hair or hands

or the temperature of your skin at dawn.

The water I drew for a bath

held only enough

for me. The book I read

distracted only time,

at least the six-sevenths that was not

devoted to burning

the way pious acolytes love the flames

they bear. Love, I hardly thought

of you in that other life.

I never needed science

to tell me that.

But so it has and while outside the sun

lengthens ever towards me

and I’m glad for its touch

there was romance still

at the edges of a flat earth

circled by the sun

and all the stars I once wished upon

thinking of you.

1004

I knelt low to the ground of my grandfather’s driveway, tensed on the balls of my feet, ready to run away as fast as I could. But not yet. I had broken in my hand a Black Cat firecracker, the kind sold in gaudy oases on the sides of the interstate, snapped it open so that its lode of curiously desiccated gunpowder shone silver and dry. In my pocket was one of my grandfather’s cheap plastic Bic lighters that were everywhere in the house he had built himself in the 1950’s. I propped the broken firework on a small rock so that its inverted V pointed up, the broken junction ready for the fire.

I can’t remember where this idea originated, though I know that it was something I learned in the kindly addled care of my grandparents. My grandfather, known to everyone as Rip, had been an alcoholic all my life and my grandmother, Mary Lou, was pleasantly fogbound after a stroke some years before. He would keep buckets of these Black Cats and bottle rockets and Roman candles around the house all year round. If it burned, if it exploded, if it whistled like a hellish tea kettle, he would buy them in bulk and I loved him for it.

Whenever I stayed with my grandparents, long stretches each summer, I was left largely to myself, given a few dollars for the convenience store down the street, Ross’ Thriftway, where I would buy candy and comic books: Batman, Iron Man, Captain America, Alpha Flight. Still cheap at forty and fifty cents, I’d buy two or three and begin to read them on my way back to my grandparents’ home, which sat atop one of the first hills that rose up to make a neighborhood called Beverly Hills. I loved the human heroes best and I filled boxes with the tattered copies, nicked and torn, rolled, read.

Every season could not have been summer but it seems that way now. The hill their house was built into continued to rise up steeply over the house and cut into the earth was a crudely poured concrete pool. At night, after dark, late but still warm and humid, I’d go with Rip up to the pool where he’d strip down to the ragged boxers he always wore and dive in. Most nights I’d join him in the water, warm as a bath. For him, it was a bath. He kept a bar of soap by the diving board and would soap up, his arms, chest, his face and dark hair. He called me and my brother crumbsnatchers or wickerdicks or worse if he was drinking. There was something about him I could not quite believe was real, actual. Years later, in graduate school, I would write too many poems trying to get at that elusive quality, that which is the stuff of myth, maybe. None of the poems were ever all that successful, not really. I gave up before long. The poem that should be his would probably be set in that pool he dug and poured himself, plain soap clotting his hair with suds while night bugs ticked against the light overhead.

He owned a junkyard in town, Bohanon’s Auto Parts. Better Used Than Abused was his slogan and the days I could go to work with him were spent climbing into the twisted husks of totaled cars that would slowly be stripped of the last of their remaining worth. Inside I would find battered old eight track cassettes, Elvis, Pink Floyd, Steve Martin. I’d find safety glass in its strange litter across the dashboard and seats. Holding it up to the light, it seemed an odd blue-green, a color like the sea. There was never money. Sometimes stuffed beneath the seat I’d find pornography, cheaply produced magazines with bored looking girls sprawled out across car hoods, their swollen breasts rising up. I felt wrong to look and I rarely did, returning the cheap magazines under the seat.

I would snap the hood ornaments from the cars or pry the fake crests that were affixed to the sides of the Chrysler Cordoba. I loved the Cordoba’s. Ricardo Montalban would espouse the unspeakable luxuries of rich Corinthian leather on television commercials that worked well enough on me. All these parts were pure contraband, however; I had to sneak them home, tucked in my socks, wedged into my back pocket. Often enough, though, he’d find me out, cursing me with gusto.

Rip owned farmland in Chickamauga, Georgia, the farm he’d been born on and worked until leaving to be a turret gunner in World War II. On that land he let me drive trucks, cars, motorcycles, without the least supervision. I was twelve years old.

It is a wonder I survived myself at all.

Somehow I had discovered a broken firecracker, carefully lit, would spew from its center, from its halves, streams of sparks like a sparkler. I had taken a few packs of Black Cats outside on that summer day to light them, to insert them in the overripe tomatoes that grew outside, to explode the red pulp in a shower. But first I broke one of them in half. I took the Bic lighter, flicked it aflame, and put the tongue of fire to the halved explosive.

There were no sparks. I felt a shock wave roll through my hand up the length of my right arm. My ear buzzed like the hives my grandfather tended behind the house. The day seemed muted now, draped in thick cotton, indistinct. I held up my hand, dumbly counting each finger, looking for the ragged absences of one or more of them. All were still there and I felt a second wave, nauseous gratitude pouring in like floodwater. I got up from where I crouched, still ringing, still shocked, and stumbled inside the house, speaking to no one, crawling in to a bed, willing myself to sleep, saying a panicked prayer I could not hear myself speak.

Is it getting better or do you feel the same

June the first and with its arrival my manuscript starts its humble way back out in to the world again. Four Way Books reads in June and allows you to submit electronically, which I both appreciate and also am suspicious of: is the reading experience the same? I'm guessing manuscripts that pass a certain level of reader are then printed out. All the same, I went ahead and emailed mine in. Ausable Press also reads in June and thanks to their not-for-profit status, they no longer charge a reading fee.

I'm excited. 43 out of the 45 poems in the manuscript have been published; one of those I've never sent out, the other has been out a zillion times, so there's kind of a zen-balance to that somehow and I'm ok with it. I think its time has rolled around, maybe, just maybe.