tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-69872065034985235482024-03-12T18:41:31.589-07:00Gary Amdahl and His Wretched Fucking BooksAnonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14409640039163593535noreply@blogger.comBlogger12125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6987206503498523548.post-9177005725210359082015-06-21T11:52:00.003-07:002015-06-21T11:52:50.144-07:00NARROW ROAD TO THE DEEP NORTH, from Gettysburg Review Summer 2000, Pushcart Prize 2002, and Visigoth 2006<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: Courier;">Narrow
Road to the Deep North<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I am
walking down a narrow hallway. A phone rings. I come to an open door at the end
of a hallway. The phone rings again. I stand at the threshold, convinced, as I
often am, that the room I am poised to enter is, for a reason or reasons
unknown or unclear to me, a room I should not enter. My mother appears. She
glances at me in a distracted, ready to answer the phone way, then answers the
phone. The house shifts slightly in the hot August wind.<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>My
mother’s face changes. She is recovering from surgery, so my first thought is
that the wound is hurting, but then she says the name of my aunt, her sister,
her only sister, Nada, gone now, too-- a strange name perhaps for
hispanophones, but she was christened so by Ted and Clara Nestegard, who spoke
only English and Norwegian, and however strange her name might be, it is
appropriate to this ominous and attenuated moment. My mother says “Nada” once,
twice, three times. My aunt and uncle are due in town, coming up for a visit
from Jackson, in southwestern Minnesota, where they farm a great many acres of
corn and soybeans. When they return from this visit, the purpose of which is to
cheer my mother, preparations for the harvest will begin. <o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>But here
is the news: my uncle will not participate in this harvest. He has been shot.
He is dead.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I have told this story a number of times.
The reaction is almost always one of disbelief. Because I appear to be telling
the truth, listeners want to believe me, but for reasons I do not fully
understand-- perhaps they do not either-- they want not to believe me, too.
Murder in Lake Wobegon? There can be no murder in Lake Wobegon; it is not
possible. Anything that disturbing must be absorbed by sly humor and
transformed into pleasant melancholy, the deeper pools of which are fenced off
by simple common sense. One cannot even tell the story of a murder there: the
words fly up from the teller’s mouth as if caught in a tornado.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Which is not the worst way to live, but it
is a narrow discipline and tends to make a certain sort of person feel
unwelcome: me, for instance, at least in the way I saw myself then, a tiny male
figure, neither man nor boy, on his back in a vast and neglected meadow of
foxtail barley and timothy, under a boiling, luminous silver- and-green sky,
telling a story that can be heard only as a roaring, seen only as a black cloud
funneling from his mouth.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I told the story to a psychiatrist once. I
was being bad in ways I do not want to recall, was depressed, had been
identified as a candidate for a course in grief management and spiritual
renewal-- and, more importantly, had begun to see the blackness of the
whirlwind as composed of equal parts self-indulgence (fear of my own sudden
death, fear of my own sudden murderousness) and shame over the uses to which I
was putting or knew I would soon put the story. I told the story sensationally,
for its shock value; I told it so that people might feel as sorry for me as I
did for myself, told it so that I might be seen as having heroically withstood horror,
told it knowing I would write about it and, while the rest of my family simply
grieved, profit from it. As Barry Hannah’s narrator says in the story
“Carriba”: “Murder is not interesting, friends. Murder is vomit. You may attach
a story to it but you are already dishonest to the faces of the dead. . . . I
knew I had no place arranging this misery into entertainment, a little <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hamlet</i> for busybodies and ghouls. . . .
My whole professional life reared up in my mind. I was a hag and a parasite. I
was to be grave and eloquent over their story. . . . They were to get nothing.
I was to get fame and good bucks, provided I was interesting. A great sick came
on me.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Such was the tenor of my conversation with
the psychiatrist. His response was remarkable. I realized only after I had fled
his office that he had simply chosen not to believe me. I gave him the murder
in précis, with a suggestion of the emotional discord I claimed to be
experiencing, and he said, “That’s interesting.” I waited a good long while for
him to continue. He was a kind of Kilroy behind his desk, getting smaller and
smaller by the second. Just when he was about to vanish entirely, he said, “I
make a special study of stories like the one you’ve just told me, but I don’t
recall reading or hearing about this one. Where did you say it happened? And
when? I’d like to check the papers. Your uncle’s name is. . . .?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I said that his name had been, when he was
alive, Art Storm. It struck us both, I think, as sounding made up, the name of
a character in a bad novel (if you punch up <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">art
storm</i> on the Lexis Nexis newspaper searching service, you get thirty
stories on Robert Mapplethorpe and one on my uncle), so I said, “Arthur William
Storm, Jr.” I then described <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">where</i>
pretty convincingly but was shaky on <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">when</i>,
which bolstered, I guess, my inquisitor’s sense that I was making it up, in a
play, I guess, for sympathy. He wrote a prescription for Prozac and sent me on
my way.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>That was the last time we chatted. Now that
I have gotten my facts straight, I want to share them. But I find I cannot
recall the name of this psychiatrist, nor when I saw him, nor, precisely,
where. The building was located in a downtown St. Paul backwater; the program
was part of that city’s social service safety net; and the decor of the waiting
room was dominated by fiery orange shag carpeting and dark imitation-wood
paneling. My fellow clients either spoke in harsh whispers to themselves (“Not
now, you fool, not here!”), turned in very small circles before the magazine
rack-- which had dizzied and deflected me, too-- or stared, stonily or
stonedly, into midair. They were both a fright and a comfort to me. Then there
was the doctor-- elusive, peeping. I took the Prozac for a month; it, too, was
both a fright and a comfort. I imagined I felt clear-minded, but predatory. I
felt as if the number of rods in my retinas-- those receptors responsive to
faint light-- had multiplied rather demonically. I could see in the dark and
had lots of energy for the hunt but missed both the peace of deepening twilight
and the nervous dread of a sleepless dawn. I failed to make my next
appointment, failed to have the prescription refilled, failed to balance my
chemicals.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>A violent act in a violent culture: what of
it? Violence can be both fun and rewarding, if you watch the right movies. And
I do not mean only those on television or in theaters; I mean the ones we film
day after weary day, loops of resentment and frustration and greed and fear and
ignorance in which we get the last word, beat senseless those who have annoyed
us, and sometimes even kill them, if the annoyance is grievously deep and can
be shown to be the cause of a chronic social ill.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Arnold and Sly and Clint simply make
entertainingly explicit the features and character of the man many of us
daydream about being: a good man-- i.e., one who knows how to fight but appears
to be reluctant to do so, one who is cool under psychological and moral
pressure but can explode like a volcano when he needs to, a man not prone to
doubt or confusion, a man of deeds not words, a man of action who can gather
and manage the collective rage of the savagely annoyed and perfectly righteous
people who have defined and approved his goodness, a man who can marshal the
virtues and skills his employers say are pertinent and conducive to good public
relations. I am talking about a man who can dodge bullets. What better man
could we possibly hope for! A man who can see it coming, who can turn aside
just in time, engage bad violence with good violence, use the flabby weight of
the enemy’s badness judo-like against him and hurl him into the never-never
land of soulless, heartless, mindless evildoers, a man who can perform the
Alchemy of the Good Man: make the lead of superior violence into the moral gold
of justice. Above all, I am dreaming about a man who can <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">remain alive and in control, no matter what, forever</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>My uncle’s a murderer, a Green Beret from
what is always termed the “tough” Eighty-second Airborne, honorably discharged
after the invasion of Grenada-- in which he saw action of an undisclosed sort--
and sophomore English major at Iowa State in Ames, knew all about this massive
fraud. “Thank you,” his suicide letter read, “for keeping me alive so long.”
The hero, hoodwinked and helpless. “Thank you for keeping me alive so long.” He
was twenty-four.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I turned eighteen in 1974 and thus was
spared the Vietnam that had troubled me so. Neither sincerely “born again” in
Jesus Christ (I did walk down the aisle in answer to that call but really only
to get the autograph of a Minnesota Twins pitcher-- either Jim Kaat or Al
Worthington, cannot remember which now) nor apostate, I sometimes felt a
Lutheran call to be obedient to the prince, to serve my country, and sometimes
felt a Christian pacifism welling up in me. But I was also a fan of Heroic
Violence. I even had a specialty: I was something, I fancied, of an
after-dinner speaker, a guy who could mouth off while trading blows with
pinheads.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>For instance, the episode that precipitated
me into the lair of the shrinking Kilroy: I fought a man on a highway. He had
rammed my car from behind, enraged by the way I had gotten in line ahead of
him, or “merged,” if you will. My first thought was to get his license plate
number, and I tried to read it in the rearview mirror-- difficult even if he
had not been hanging on my bumper. Then I decided I would get behind him. He
took the next exit, but I was in a rather taut-handling little German thing and
whipped in after him. Still, my only conscious desire was to get his number.
Which I got, and began to calm down. But then we came to a red light. I pulled
up behind him and then thought, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I cannot
pretend this has not happened. I will seek an explanation.</i> So we tumbled
out of our jars of formaldehyde, this sales rep and I, and before I knew what
hit me, he hit me. “Is that the best you can do, Chumley?” I demanded to know,
but before he could answer, I saw the famous red haze. I began to choke him
with one hand, forcing him back to his car and wedging him between the open
door and the frame. His arms snugly pinned, his face darkening, I drew back my
free fist, in hopes of pounding his insolent face all bloody and askew. But I
came to my senses and saw only the natural colors of a cloudy spring day in
Minnesota. I released the man’s throat and stepped back. I was about to lecture
him, but he came flying out at me and landed a good one right in my mouth. The
light had changed, and traffic was approaching. I grabbed hold of him and threw
him directly in the path of a big orange utilities maintenance truck.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The driver of the truck managed to avoid
running over and killing my fallen foe, but the feeling that he had almost not,
that the sales rep was dead and that I was responsible-- that has stayed with
me. It is a perplexing feeling, not so much because it is not true, or because
I am filled with shame, but because it is a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">good</i>
feeling.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It was one of the first times I had acted
on an angry feeling, rather than stewing in my own bitter juices. While getting
out of the car, approaching the other-- right up to that moment when I started
smashing my fists against his window-- I was calm. I felt I was “in the right”
and was merely going to “redress the wrong” that had been done to me; I was
going to be forthright and reasonable. I had already noted the license plate
number and was planning on only an assertion of righteousness, acceptance of
which on the part of the sales rep would have short-circuited my decision to
tell on him, as talking to the cops has always been the last thing I want to
do. But the next thing I knew, he was sprawled on the road, and a huge truck
was describing a screeching salient around him. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I acknowledged, privately, the shamefulness
of my actions, noted the “mistakes in judgment,” and worked out the causes and
effects, but I could not help but interpret it positively. I had appealed to no
authority, handed off no responsibility, called out to no one for help or
confirmation of what I believed was right and what I believed was wrong. This
all seemed perfectly proper to me, even heroic. I had had a bone to pick with
an asshole and had nearly killed him. I had understood, in a flash of violently
heroic insight, that he was a bad guy, and I was a good guy, and neither of us
was going to brook recourse to armed bureaucrats. And I nearly killed him.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>What if he had had a gun?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>What if I had had a gun?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I had wanted one for a long time. I knew
some fellows who owned guns, and I liked them. I went to sporting goods stores
and priced them, listened to salesmen describe them, picked them up and hefted
them. I began saving money toward the purchase of one.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Television, computer, automobile, handgun:
they were all the same to me, tools of American cultural welfare. When they
were managed properly, nobody died. My adversaries would be only persuaded--
just as they would be by the rigors of any other religion-- and corrected.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>My uncle’s killer did have a gun, a Ruger
Security Six (a .357 Magnum revolver, serial number 156-52069) loaded with
Peters .38 Special copper-jacketed hollow-points. It was his father’s gun, but
having been a commando, he was no stranger to sidearms. I do not know if he
killed anybody in Grenada, but I do know that he was said to have “come back
changed” and that he had tried to kill himself once before. “The last time he
attempted suicide he went to Missouri,” his father was quoted as saying in an
Iowa newspaper. “There is no doubt in my mind he went to Minnesota to commit
suicide.” The implication is that he could not, for some reason, bring himself
to do the deed in Iowa, his home state-- an inability I found curious. Were I
planning to do myself in, I would most certainly get the hell out of
California, which I have designated as the last place I want to die, and go
home. But home, of course, is precisely where they keep you alive so long.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The next question is, why Minnesota? “It’s
strange,” said Eric Hagen’s mother, “but if you follow Highway 169 from here”
(“here” being the towns of Ogden and Perry in central Iowa), “Jackson is almost
straight north.” Put a ruler on the map, and fill the tank with gas. When you
run out, you kill yourself.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Jackson is about fifteen miles north of the
Iowa border and seventy east of South Dakota: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">coteau des prairies</i>, the first step up of the great high plains
from the Mississippi valley toward the Rockies-- the “true prairie” as it was
sometimes called, the tallgrass prairie, grass as high as a horse’s back and
occasionally even higher, up to twelve feet. It is often described as oceanic,
a vast swelling sea into which despairing pioneer women cast themselves and
drowned. But of that ocean nothing remains, as if ten million years have
elapsed from the time my great-grandparents appeared on its shore-- geologic
time, time enough for an ocean to vanish, exposing a bed infamously flat, across
which, in pesticide dispersal grids, immense machines move.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>For several years after his father’s death,
my cousin, who farmed in partnership with him (and who found him on the porch),
would sit high atop one of those machines in a little air-conditioned cube and
listen to self-help tapes while he plowed or sowed or cultivated or harvested.
Once in a while he would suffer what they call a “false heart attack” (which
seems as “true” as the other kind to me). He would become suddenly overwhelmed
by panic, feeling that his loss, his terror, was not in the past but was steady
and continual and happening <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">right now</i>,
and he would be rushed off to the hospital, where, after a while, the present
would expand enough to give his heart, again, the space to beat.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The Des Moines River runs roughly north and
south through the country, originating about forty miles to the northwest and
emptying into the Mississippi at Keokuk, Iowa. The land for no more than a mile
on either bank of the river is folded into hills, giving some parts of town a
little elevation and a view, and altering the character of some of the farms
along the river: basically, more livestock, less corn.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It was on one of these river farms that my
aunt and my mother grew up and that I was born. When I think of farms, this
one, and the one on which my father was born and raised (in northeastern Iowa),
are the ones I think of: hill farms, polyculture, cattle, hogs, chickens, corn
and wheat and alfalfa and sorghum, norghum and flax and beans, wagons and tractors
tipping over on steep hillsides-- “Just roll with it,” my grandfather
instructed my mother. There was no running water on the farm, no indoor
plumbing. There were bedpans and buckets and pitchers and basins, an outhouse
and a well. My mother carried water from this well every day of her life until
she left for college. My life on the farm lasted only a month, but what a
month! From there it was on to the unspeakable luxuries of Minneapolis: running
water, central heating (the farmhouse had a single big woodstove, with a grate
in the ceiling to heat the upstairs bedrooms), refrigerators, toasters-- luxury
upon luxury, to the point where I now do not think twice about jetting to
Europe or filling a large plastic bag every week with trash.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Rural America was pretty well electrified
by the time my mother was born, which meant, for her, two or three lightbulbs
and a radio. There was also a telephone. My mother speaks of her childhood as a
kind of idyll of clean and happy poverty-- and the orange and the pencil that
she got as Christmas gifts, the wood she chopped and the water she carried, do
indeed seem integral to paradise. I grew up in the suburbs but can hardly bear
to drive through them now. I do not even like reading novels set in the
suburbs. My father, who left farm life eagerly at eighteen, saw, with his BBA
and CPA diplomas, his income rise sharply the first eighteen years of my life,
allowing him to present me with a profoundly different world upon graduation
from high school than the one he and my mother had known. My brother and I had
already been to California, to Florida (and if I now know a more desperate and
corrupt Miami, I will never forget the way the palm trees rattled that first
night in the hot, muggy wind), to Jamaica and the Bahamas! I had fished for,
and caught, a barracuda. I had already known the impatience Liz Taylor was said
to have known in the Joan Rivers joke about slow microwave ovens. I had already
experienced the wave of hatred a motorist whose skills I judged to be subpar
could excite. There was more money. Our standard of living was very high. You
may have heard about this; sociologists and investment fund managers alike have
been advertising the phenomenon for years: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">rising
expectations</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I think rising expectations are what killed
my uncle, actually. How, I cannot say, but I began to think of the .38 Special
hollow-points emerging in the bright smoke of the muzzle flash as merely the
exploding fragments of the grotesquely ignorant and self-righteous sense of
expectation and entitlement that-- I began to think-- characterized American
culture.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I knew nothing of the killer. I knew he
felt strongly enough about what he had done to kill himself (“Justice will be
done by me,” wrote the hero), but what I wanted desperately to understand, was
how, step by step, he had come to my uncle’s farmhouse porch and shot him in
the head. This is perhaps the way in which the story became a black whirlwind:
uneven breathing in which inquiry became panic slowly rotating clockwise around
a void, the void slowly sinking from brain to heart. The killer disappeared. I
looked to his country and lo, it was murderous. Each inhalation took in more
and more of the cultural atmosphere, each exhalation grew blacker and blacker.
Everything about the United States seemed designed to encourage or induce
murder: capitalism, technology, the law itself-- all nothing more than
oppressive religions. I repudiated them, just as I had Christianity and the
Lutheran Church that has aided-- not frightened-- and comforted many of the
people closest to me, my mother and my father particularly, whose devotion is
genuine and whose freethinking returns them again and again to the bosom of the
Savior. And as I went about perfecting the terrible beauty of the black tale--
the writer of fiction assuming the pompous posture of truth-teller and coming
more completely undone by the duplicity of it than he would have, had he simply
told lies-- the little farmhouse on the prairie came to seem a psychic refuge.
By the time I began to think seriously about the place, it had been abandoned
for decades. I dreamed of inhabiting it like a character in a Beckett story, or
like a Timon of the Great Plains, spitting and howling malediction. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It was not just that my uncle had been
murdered, but that my uncle had been murdered <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">and</i> I could not make a living. My gifts were being rejected or
ignored. My wife had left me once already and was drifting toward a second
departure, and I felt sorry for myself: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">nasty
country, run by knaves for fools, or vice versa, I do not know which</i>. I
closed my ears to the drip and hiss of agrochemicals, to the to the firm, quiet
phrasings of agribusiness executives, and told myself that if I were not the
lazy man of letters that-- at best-- I am, I would be working in a field
somewhere , walking neat rows of beans like my grandfathers did. I walked
around the farmhouse in my mind, saw the fireflies in the twilight, heard the
grossly articulate speech of cattle and hogs-- the grunt, the bellow, the
squeal, the moan-- and the black tale became a murmur and a plume of cigar
smoke. Then, in that fairyland of peace and sociologically verifiable
contentment, the phone would ring. The farmhouse disappears as suddenly and
violently as if a nuclear wind had blasted it. I can see it up there in the
tornado swirling down upon me, just like Dorothy’s house in Kansas.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The violent act in a violent culture: every
one of us is familiar with the ethos of murder. As Freud pointed out, where
there is a grave taboo there must also be a powerful desire. The most popular
question in the story of my uncle’s killing quickly centered on the randomness
of it: why would a Green Beret turned English major quit his job as a hired
hand on a farm, drive one hundred and sixty-eight miles north, choose a farm
out of the blue (the green, rather, a million acres of it), and shoot to death
the first man he saw there?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It sounds like a joke: to get to the other
side?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“We felt, I guess, all along that this
looked like a random deal,” Jackson County Sheriff Pete Eggiman said at the
time. The random deal of the rising expectation: the quintessence of our time
and place. Randomness is all the rage, because cause and effect degenerate so
quickly into name-calling and scapegoating. But insofar as randomness is a special
effect or a magazine cover or a business fad, it is a useless idea, a
fraudulent one, a dead end—because, after all the cool graphics and
inspirational speeches, it is about precisely what it says it is not: control
and manipulation. I used to write videoscripts for business seminars and was
amazed to see so many people, day after day, equate <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">excellence</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">chaos</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">huge profits</i>. Mid- and upper-level
managers taking a day or three off at a convention have a very different
understanding of chaos than the guy who appears one fine morning on the loading
dock, armed to the teeth and “disgruntled”: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I
want my job back, I want to feel needed, I know I”m weird, I know I lack people
skills, but I am a human being anyway, after all, oh it’s too late, it’s too
fucking late, I’ve killed someone</i>. Chaos cannot be measured along a
spectrum: there are six billion varieties of chaos alone, and the only taxonomy
of importance concerns the ways in which these forms disguise and display their
essence, the celestial matter at the bottom of the deep well (this is a line
from Neruda to which I came via an epigraph in a book by Gina Berriault) into
which artists are forever falling.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I am a novelist (proud to say so, and
equally proud to admit that only one-tenth of one novel has seen the light of a
bookstore) and operate under the belief that novels and people are ideally
suited to each other. Reading a novel is all about the immersion of oneself in
the comfortingly familiar incomprehensibility of life and living, in observant
incomprehension, in the disorder and beauty of the houses and languages and
minds build, in the disordered architecture of language itself. And of all the
thoughts I have had of the murdering soldier and his short life, the most
compelling is that he was a frustrated writer, that if he had so much as been
able to begin to think about a novel of the invasion of Grenada, about a Green
Beret who had “never wanted to be strong” (I am quoting his suicide letter
again), all would have been well. He would have returned to Ames and Iowa
State, continued to read, study literature, write. My uncle would still be
farming. His friends would never have had to say things to reporters like, “He
was gentle and affable, the nicest guy you could hope to meet.” My aunt too, I
believe, would still be alive (only in my mind did she die of causes related to
my uncle’s death; everyone else chalks it up to the tumor on her colon that was
to be removed—prognosis for recovery, excellent—and the sudden heart
attack—“sudden” in that she was not in any of the risk categories and was only
sixty-four), and my mother would not feel quite so lonely, would not wake up
every morning to memories of her sister, would not feel the need to wear my
aunt’s sweater, trying to reconstruct the warmth of her hug. I would be hard at
work on an unpublishable novel, not cashing in on private grief and the public
taste for mayhem, Or maybe reviewing Eric Charles Hagen’s novel, listening to
him on a panel with Tim O’Brien and David Rabe, though he was not that good a
writer; although, on the other hand, the only work of his I have read was
written at a time of profound emotional distress, and he had really only just
begun.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Why? For what? <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Everyone has tried to help. I love mom and dad and Sandy and Mike and
Jer and Julie and Tami—all those that tried their best. But I saw this coming
in a walking dream, seems like years ago. I have to be so much alone, though I
love the animals. I realize now I won’t leave this town. I’m not going
anywhere.<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Thank you
for keeping me alive so long. There were beautiful times. I only wish I could
come back.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I’m no
criminal, just scared and falling.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Directed
inward or outward—pain is still pain.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Sandy—I
wish I could meet you again. Stay strong, your strength held me together for so
long, I love you forever.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Not only
couldn’t I change the world, I couldn’t even keep it still. There is such a
surcharge of violence in me that is not safely directed at anything in this
spectacular mystery of a world, though the violence may die, I will not survive
as a piece of dust, a fallen leaf, tranquil, unawake, forever a part of this
world, forever more at peace. No one should blame themselves for what I have
done save me, and justice will be done by me.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I never
wanted to be strong.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It is
strange that the future can be foreseen, but not averted.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I am
allergic to love, a fatal allergy, and in the end I have discovered courage, it
is a calm (my first) and it is facing the world face to face, and only seeing
the mirror.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 3;"> </span>Finis<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 3;"> </span>end
of game<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 3;"> </span>no
more<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 3;"> </span>will
I quench this thirst<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 3;"> </span>the
drink is too ugly<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 3;"> </span>the
love lost<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 3;"> </span>is
too great<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 3;"> </span>these
are terrible times<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 3;"> </span>sometimes<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 3;"> </span>we
danced<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 3;"> </span>we
laughed<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 3;"> </span>those
memories<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 3;"> </span>I
bring to the wind<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 3;"> </span>the
lightning storms<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 3;"> </span>were
beautiful<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 3;"> </span>on
the front porch<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 3;"> </span>and
the purrs and<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 3;"> </span>wagging
tail<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 3;"> </span>knowing
that then<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 3;"> </span>I
was home<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 3;"> </span>I
miss you<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 3;"> </span>I
miss the simple sanity<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>But those
friends cannot die.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I’m not
sure what I have done but I have a horrible feeling, win the battle to lose the
war.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I wish I
could explain<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I wish
there were words to express the love I never showed<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I’m
hearing voices, like, the whispers of last fall but stronger, all too clear<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I am
barely here.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The letter was written sometime in the late
afternoon or evening of Friday, August 21, 1987, after the death of my uncle,
in a room at the Danish Inn Motel in Tyler, Minnesota, a town a little less
than a hundred miles northwest of Jackson. The motel was not open for business,
but the owner sometimes rented rooms anyway. Hagen paid for his room with a
fifty-dollar bill, which turned out to be quite important in knowing who killed
my uncle. Once he had rented the room, he went for a walk. Passing Mrs. Bruce
Meyer, he noted her pregnant condition and greeted her. “You’re pregnant,” he
said, smiling and friendly. “You could probably use some money.” He tried to
give her two fifty-dollar bills, which she declined to accept. Hagen carefully
placed the bills on the sidewalk, weighting them with a chip of concrete. This
was about 9:30 P.M., right around the time I had gone to my friend’s house with
the idea of borrowing one of his hunting rifles, thinking, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">sooner or later I’ll be close enough to “this guy” (Hagen), and I’ll
kill him</i>. By eleven o’clock my “murderous rage” had passed, and Hagen had
written his letter, crawled into bed, drawn up the covers, and killed himself.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“We knew Jackson was missing four
fifty-dollar bills,” the Lincoln County sheriff said, illuminating the
foundation of what we mean when we talk about closure. There was also
“bloodstained clothing in the room not related to the suicide.” The state
Bureau of Criminal Apprehension ran ballistics and blood tests, checked Hagen’s
fingertips, and found they matched prints on a red disposable lighter found
between the porch (the porch!) of my uncle’s house and the driveway—it was
spotted first by my cousin, who, according to deputy Leonard Rowe, shouted <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“Watch out for that lighter!”</i> as if it
were an exploded bomb.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>And that was that. Special Agent Dennis
Sigafoos put it this way in Item Seven of his “Report of Investigation”: “The
homicide of Arthur William Storm, Jr., has been cleared. The perpetrator of the
crime Eric Charles Hagen committed suicide ending this investigation."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Once upon a time, a young man who had been
working on a farm in Iowa took his father’s car—a white Volkswagen with a black
tail fin—and his father’s gun and drove north for three hours. A few miles west
of the town of Jackson, Minnesota, he saw a remote and prosperous looking farm.
He went to the door of the farmhouse. The farmer who lived there was in the
kitchen making lunch. He heard a noise on his front porch and went to see who
or what it could be. No one knows if words passed between the two men when they
met. Some people believe that a struggle ensued, for life or death, for life
and death, but a man who professed to know said that the few minor bruises he
found on the two bodies did not indicate any such thing. Silently or not,
struggling or not, the younger man shot the farmer four times, twice in the
head and twice in the upper torso. There was a large and bloody hole in the
farmer’s back, and smaller bloody holes in the back of his head, the hair of
which was well known for its tendency to rooster-tail. When the sheriff’s
deputy arrived, he noted that “it was real obvious the party had expired.” An
investigation revealed the absence of four fifty-dollar bills from the farmer’s
billfold, money he had just taken that morning at a coffee shop in town as a
down payment for a truck he was selling. A cry went up that a vagrant, a
drifter, a madman had appeared, had robbed and murdered, had fled, and was at
large. But the truth was that by the time most people heard the story, the
killer was dead.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Fifteen hundred people filed past the open
casket at the wake. The farmer’s nephew, at the end of the line, was seen to
thump his uncle’s hollow chest and cry out. At the funeral the next day, the
church was filled with the sound of people sobbing loudly, people who made a
point of being cheerful and strong in the face of disaster or misery or
sorrow—or at least strong, or at least stone-faced and dry-eyed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>After the service, in the basement of the
church where mourners ate plate after plate of cold cuts and hot dishes, roll
after buttered roll, slice of ham after slice of ham, news that a young man who
had killed himself in a town to the north had been “positively linked” to the
murder of the farmer made its way through the crowd. Each person looked into
the eyes of the person nearest, then quickly at another and another, saw tears
filling those eyes and spilling from them in stern, exhausted relief, felt the
force of a hundred spines burning like fuses, shook hands all around to keep
those hands from trembling, and smiled, then looked away.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The subject of the death penalty sometimes
arises when I tell this story. I am opposed to it, and I present myself as a
“crime victim.” I say, murderous rage flashing whitely, blackly, in my mind,
that if the murderer were alive today, I would want to forgive him. To which
the obvious reply is that the murderer is not alive. My feeling, however,
continues to be that once you get to know someone, it is hard to want to see
them dead.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: Courier;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Plus, what is two plus two? It does not add
up to a novelist weakening under a load of ominous dread, every day more and
more frightened by—simply and frankly—other people. Clearly, the only way out
is to find the well of other souls and drink from it.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14409640039163593535noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6987206503498523548.post-50150650998513829022014-03-13T19:13:00.000-07:002014-03-13T19:13:03.962-07:00THE INTERVIEW OF THE CENTURY<a href="http://archive.kpfk.org/mp3/kpfk_140312_200050bibliocracy.MP3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"><strong>Kpfk 140312 200050bibliocracy</strong></a>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14409640039163593535noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6987206503498523548.post-73029851242796789942014-03-12T16:12:00.000-07:002014-03-12T16:12:01.215-07:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUNr7zgng33zoSMExpA_6AX5AnXzXLXI7Jzu6vRG9L5N6IRUS6UGclwZl1h6D4U_7U0sf9yf5EFv8gQ1NTGKBN2uzLFY_1DpLnLo4C1374UWKcf-JdC5CjLwMdy67Jj0LsuPkXZ7NKkeps/s1600/kertesz+001.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUNr7zgng33zoSMExpA_6AX5AnXzXLXI7Jzu6vRG9L5N6IRUS6UGclwZl1h6D4U_7U0sf9yf5EFv8gQ1NTGKBN2uzLFY_1DpLnLo4C1374UWKcf-JdC5CjLwMdy67Jj0LsuPkXZ7NKkeps/s1600/kertesz+001.jpg" height="258" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="text_exposed_root text_exposed" id="id_5320e89f5afa84e07845905">
<span class="userContent" data-ft="{"tn":"K"}">Wednesday night at 8 on Bibliocracy: GARY AMDAHL. I am an admirer of both the writing of Gary Amdahl and the topics he chooses, of the politics and the dreamful associations, and of that alchemy which seems to occur when he begins a story and, as with few other writers, I am absolutely with him at each and ever step of the story, as if always at the beginning throughout, sometimes so much so tha<span class="text_exposed_hide">...</span><span class="text_exposed_show">t when his beginnings meet up in character kismet and symmetry and poetry and an obviously and creatively calculated or inspired dénouement or pause or plot development I am made giddy and breathless. Two things you should know about his work: Amdahl cannot finish a thought, and for that we readers are so much better – as thinkers and co-conspiring imaginists. And, yet, he simultaneously just does not know when to stop, which is our good luck too, because his peeling of the onion, layering of the story, reassembling of onion and brain and heart and even history is about as much serious, sincere fun you can have, as they say, with your pants on. Amdahl’s newest is the first novel published by the playwright, poet and short story writer boostered by Sven Birkerts and then Milkweed and now a small house which has established, of all things, the Gary Amdahl Library. Across My Big Brass Bed is a novel posing as an intellectual and emotional memoir, an elegant and seamless and endlessly self-reinvigorating big story meets autobiography meets political wish fulfillment meets love and sex and empathy-story, with motorcycle racing, music, sex and love, anarchism, the Viet Nam War but always those amazing, long, textured, funny, startling Gary Amdahl sentences, here more than 400 pages of them. A sane Holden Caulfield, perhaps, a Proustian rememberer and a fabulist, too, Amdahl’s adolescent to recollecting grown, lonely man narrator writes the whole book in a single day, unbelievably or, no, not unbelievable, totally believable for an Amdahl narrator. It’s a real joy to host Gary Amdahl, and to hear him read from and talk about the new book. Thanks for listening, on the radio or online, or later as a free download anywhere, any times you like.</span></span></div>
<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14409640039163593535noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6987206503498523548.post-52922520897203775012014-01-14T14:10:00.001-08:002014-01-14T14:10:25.187-08:00TWO CONSIDERATIONS OF MASCULINITY: PHILIP THE BASTARD IN A SCENE FROM SHAKESPEAARE'S KING JOHN AND A RETELLING OF A CHAPTER OF HALLDOR LAXNESS'S GERPLA...now available in SPOLIA:<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.spoliamag.com/downloads/issue-seven/">http://www.spoliamag.com/downloads/issue-seven/</a>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14409640039163593535noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6987206503498523548.post-55984612607967312882014-01-09T14:04:00.001-08:002014-01-09T14:04:44.734-08:00FABULOUSLY REALIt is due back from the printer any second now, magically (it still is and always will be magic) transformed from manuscript to book:<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiPlCJ4LIzVE03kVwd1_iCGJD6_SkRzmEPuOmKOIdDYI1SgxV58_zkMq1d2DsUTTUUj77k0KpGAlcEZ6XwlMKQQHCwGabEBChiNYdgeGQapFv8R8hFsYWOYJJrT5Z4heXe0CBbOL8A9DCy/s1600/AMBBB_Wrap.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiPlCJ4LIzVE03kVwd1_iCGJD6_SkRzmEPuOmKOIdDYI1SgxV58_zkMq1d2DsUTTUUj77k0KpGAlcEZ6XwlMKQQHCwGabEBChiNYdgeGQapFv8R8hFsYWOYJJrT5Z4heXe0CBbOL8A9DCy/s1600/AMBBB_Wrap.jpg" height="225" width="320" /></a></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14409640039163593535noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6987206503498523548.post-86544718509951810432013-12-26T05:24:00.005-08:002013-12-26T05:24:52.243-08:00MY CHRISTMAS GIFT TO AMERICAN LITERATURE: THE FIRST FEW PAGES OF THE NOVEL<br />
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: center;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 16pt; line-height: 200%;">ACROSS MY BIG BRASS BED<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<br />
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: center;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";">AN
INTELLECTUAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN TWENTY-FOUR HOURS<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div align="center" class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: center;">
“There he stripped
himself naked</div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: center;">
and engaged in a
wrestling match with no one,</div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: center;">
proclaiming
himself victor over no one,</div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: center;">
bowing to an
audience of no one.”</div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: center;">
—Euripides, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Herakles</i></b><o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div align="center" class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: center;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">PART
ONE:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“THE OPEN SOCIETY AND ITS ENEMIES”<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<br />
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<o:p> </o:p></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: center;">
“I would make
these nymphs endure.”</div>
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<span lang="FR" style="mso-ansi-language: FR;">—Stéphane Mallarmé, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">L’aprés-midi d’un faune</i></b><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="FR" style="mso-ansi-language: FR;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
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“My want of
success with women has always been caused</div>
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by my excessive
love of them.</div>
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—Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Confessions</i></b><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";"><o:p> </o:p></span><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";"><o:p> </o:p></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";">Barceloneta, November 28<sup>th</sup>,
3 :00 AM, fine rain, high as a kite<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";">I
drove, aimlessly but alertly, fighting traffic, around the basement.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I pressed the big red plastic button in the
middle of the knurled steering-wheel with the heel of my palm, but the horn
didn’t work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I recall it clearly:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the
silent horn in my mind</i>. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If it was
powered by batteries, and those batteries were dead, that was a problem I could
solve.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Already a problem solver, because
my parents and I had been in the business together—never seeking a profit, only
union—from the beginning.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I recall the
silent confidence in my mind as clearly as its silent envelope or cloud of unknowing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Were there lights too?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In mind or car?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Two little flashlight beams for our perpetual
twilight?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There was a radio to be sure,
my red and white transistor, with its two little serrated wheels for tuning and
volume, propped on the seat next to me, hissing and crackling.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I kept it for years, like a teddy bear.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And when I lost him I truly lost him:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I do not know how it happened.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was simply gone.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Maybe the horn was an air-horn, like clowns
used, its rubber bulb collapsed with long use.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Maybe it had been an entirely
false horn from the first moments of its design, a play-horn, a big button
connected solely to my imagination.</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The cause was beside the point; what mattered was that I didn’t let it
get the best of me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Don’t let it get the best of you!</i> was my motto.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Mom and Dad agreed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If the horn didn’t work, couldn’t work, had
never worked, that was of so little consequence I almost had to laugh. I made
do as I came around the furnace with my own vocalizations, the beep and
variations on the beep:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the honk, the
air-raid siren, the fog-horn.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My voice
is my soul.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I prefer to think in tones
rather than words.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Every now and then I
would <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">feign astonishment </i>(perhaps the
only trick of that sort in my bag just then) at the incapacity of my fellow
drivers and shout something like, “Look out!” or “Hey, watch where you’re
going!”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then suddenly it was over and I
was nosing my vehicle into a far dark corner, sighing with relief at the end of
another long and mysteriously bootless day.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I made careful, silent egress from the faintly rustling and creaking
plastic car, and tip-toed my way up the stairs, which also creaked, to the top,
where I silently opened the door to Carla’s mother’s kitchen.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I stepped around it and silently—<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">save a single soft click of the hard, fat
tongue of the latch on the strike plate as it lodged in the shallow dish of the
frame</i>—CLICK—closed it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the depths
of the gloomy basement, had Carla heard that subtle but singular sound?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Did she now feel alone?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Perhaps abandoned, deserted?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Did she feel in her inarticulate way a loss
of mutually sympathetic unity?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I took a
moment to collect myself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The floorboard
creaked.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I took a deep even breath,
exhaled it in a perfectly meditative demonstration of balanced respiration, and
took another.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I was the Master of
Breathing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was very quiet in the
kitchen, in the house, in the neighborhood, because President John Fitzgerald
Kennedy had just been—new word— <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">assassinated.</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is of course old news now, most people
have, I think, heard about it and if they think about it, it is very like a
thought about, say, Abraham Lincoln, who got his brains blown out too, enjoying
a stage show, in the District of Columbia, our nation’s capital, but not a
state in its own right, in 1865, after having emancipated—older word but still
deep and glossy with mysterious meaning—an immense population of Negro slaves
in the revolting South , while Kennedy was waving and smiling in celebration of
a New Golden Age of universal civil rights and civic responsibilities in the
backseat of a long black convertible in the midst of a motorcade—new word—in
the midst of a parade, in Dallas, a big city, much bigger than Minneapolis and
Saint Paul, where Carla and I lived, a mythic cowboy city in Texas, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">but only possibly that out-and-out bona fide
state’s capital</i> (I was ashamed to realize I didn’t know, when it seemed
only yesterday that I had all forty-eight down, AND the two new ones)—that is
to say, both of these gigantic, heroic men had been laughing and enjoying
themselves in important places and important times at the instant their brains
ceased to cohere, the gelatin melted, the electricity failed, the chemicals
decomposed—but, as I began to say earlier, the news <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">then</i> (I had seven years of acute and penetrating observation, and
gently guided study with Mom and Dad already behind me) was brand new, without
precedent, and it was being televised, which was also a brand new means of
intense study and mind-blowing imagery, though most households had owned a set
for, on the average, dare I say, a decade:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>devoted, however, for the most part, to the limitless variations of
comedy,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>every house on my street,
Washington Boulevard, left on 105<sup>th </sup>Street, and left again on
Terrace Avenue where Carla lived, had looked closed up, as if every family in
the neighborhood had gone on vacation, drapes pulled across livingroom windows,
mothers and wives watching in sorrowing disbelieving silence—in silence again,
both in mind and mouth, the silent black-and-white TV images of the riderless
horse and the flag-draped coffin in the—new word—<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">rotunda</i>—and the wholly incomprehensible scenes from the parade, the
motorcade, the sudden speed and inexplicable moments, blurred and ominous and
deeply strange.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some houses between
Carla’s house and mine even looked abandoned, as if their occupants had been
unable to bear the assassination and the scene in the rotunda, the
simultaneously sped up and slowed down scene in the back seat of the
convertible, unable to hear those somber words and unprecedented images without
breaking down, without some kind of flight.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Whatever it meant to be human, President Kennedy could no longer manage
it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I listened to the silence in Carla’s
house for a moment, holding my breath, then flung the door open and pounded
down the stairs, banging the flimsy boards as loudly as I could.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When I reached the bottom, when I was
standing as it were in a pool of light, the first of many, honestly if not
brilliantly illuminated, my face clear and shining, complete, good, proud, but
feeling the light make and unmake tiny shadows as the dangling bulb continued
to shiver in the eerie vacuum of my thunderous descent, I shouted, “Honey, I’m
home!”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And I was.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I felt it in my blood, in my bones, in my
humming brain.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Carla rushed in upon me
from the damp gloomy darkness of our little apartment, and we embraced
passionately.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Her hair was dark, wavy,
lustrous, and it bobbed around my face as we hugged and kissed and awkwardly danced
our interpretation of family life, offered, to ourselves, a representation of
the great and good love that grows so strongly and beautifully between husband
and wife and their children.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We had no stratagems
for power, for one’s domination of the other.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Our fantasies of each other were wholly defined by adoration and desire
tempered by the knowledge that the greatest desire was a mystical, sympathetic,
constantly turning yin and yang union.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>There was no room for resentment or secret calculations of how love
might be destroyed, if it had to be.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Carla was a lovely little girl.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>She looked like a six-year-old Italian movie-star.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As far, in those days, as I understood
physical feminine beauty and “sex appeal,” she was irresistible.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When I played soldier—those days when I could
not go to Carla’s house and ravish and protect her in the damp dark basement,
with its mildew-stained concrete-block walls and cobwebbed window wells and
those two bare light bulbs, the one shivering at the foot of the stairs, the
other over the washing machine, those days when I was out in the fresh air with
my friends killing, being killed, arguing the finer points of death (how much
movement constituted life, did you have to hold your breath, and most
importantly, how long did you have to stay dead, yesterday we’d agreed that
death was no more than a ten-count, but today…?)—those days when I was alive
and stretched out on my bunk in Africa, Carla was like a pin-up girl to
me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Her picture was painted on my
fuselage.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I was deeply affected by her
beauty:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the glossy hair, the dark eyes
and thick lashes, the soft chubby cheeks…but what sharpened it—whatever “it”
was, my evolving desire? my apprentice appreciation? my innocent willingness to
proceed?—what sharpened <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">it </i>past my
understanding, were her teeth, her front teeth, which were bucked.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I loved those teeth so much I wanted bucked
teeth of my own, and went around, publicly, privately, at school, at home, with
my bottom lip tucked behind the less magnificent, tetracycline-stained central
incisors I would have to live with.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
loved Carla’s teeth.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I wanted them in my
mouth and I wanted to admire them in her rosy mouth.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I wanted to touch them with my lips and
tongue, with my own inferior teeth.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
marvel at such intensity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We were
playing house.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We knew we were playing
house.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We set out explicitly to do just
that, to pretend we were husband and wife in the mode of our parents but
innocently unaware of the torment, the hatred, the despair, the mania, the
depression that actually constituted married life, family life:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Carla poured me a rich steaming cup of
imaginary coffee in the morning and made sure a hot and nutritious imaginary
meal from all four food groups was waiting for me when I came home after work,
and she asked me how my day had gone.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Not well, I told her, hugging and laughing, one soul but two
stories:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’d just had a piano lesson
from a woman who frightened me so much I had begun to hallucinate, the piano
tipping up on one end and then the other, so that I was playing vertically most
of the time, as if on a storm-tossed ship at sea. I closed my eyes and
continued to play, seeing flashes of bright light on which a kind of text or
score was barely visible, and vivid luminous primary colors in a kind of swirling
river of a landscape passed before me. I confessed some of this to my mother,
who played the piano beautifully, and she<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>confirmed an apparent ability on my part, a seemingly genuine magic, to
make myself sick, genuinely ill, with a fever, to avoid those terrifying
lessons—and I thought, wait, I am making myself sick?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No, no, no, it’s the witch at the piano!—but
conversations like that, and the attendant gestures, the non-strategic
narratives of how the world was stacked against us and getting worse by the
day, mattered hardly at all.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Carla, my love, and I, went through those
motions because we wanted to hug and kiss.</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The fact that we were pretending, that the food was in our minds only,
that our love, because we were children and knew it, was childish—that should
have made even our passion a performance, a representation that pleased us on
the level of theater, not as expressions of real and therefore uncontrollable,
remorseless emotion.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Real desire, real
need.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Were her teeth merely a
fetish?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What I felt was raw, wild
lust.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I knew that as surely as I knew we
were pretending, playing, acting, imagining.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>How then did I reconcile such radically opposed perceptions of reality?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Was I simply a poet-in-training?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>An actor?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It would seem to be so.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It seems
to have been so.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I have been <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">wholly given over</i> to intensely felt
demonstrations of what I believed was selfless love, a kind of demented Don
Juan so lost in his “action,” so lost in his “character,” offering displays so
histrionic and void of actual meaning they are, in a way I can never understand
until it’s too late, false, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">exactly as
false as I was sure they were true</i>—consequently violent.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It must have been false from the beginning,
with Carla, because by Halloween I was through with her.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She taken to apparently uncontrollable
sobbing that smacked of bad acting, of histrionic play-acting…but which I
realized I often heard muted, coming from Carla’s mother in some nether region
of the little house.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When I decided our
selfless union had become corrupt or at least contaminated and strange, I went
to the class Halloween party dressed as Superman.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I wore my everyday blue-jeans and a blue
sweater upon the breast of which my mother had sewn a golden S.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My red cape was an old frayed towel, used and
threadbare, dyed scarlet.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One of the
other boys had come as a tiger in an elaborate costume that was the talk of the
party.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He would have been the most
popular boy in school had he not mistaken his judgment at a crucial moment and
frightened Tina, my new hope for selfless love, frightened her genuinely when
he had only been playing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“I’ll save
you, Tina!” I said, and lunged at the tiger, knocking him off his feet and
dazing him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I stood quickly, and when I
saw that he was still on the floor, grabbed him by his sturdily stitched tail
and dragged him toward some kind of tiny building that had been erected for the
holiday, either a jail—that’s how I remember it, law and order as some kind of
theme even as we celebrated lawlessness—or a castle.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When he finally got to his feet, I pushed him
hard into the building, so hard that he began to cry.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As authority figures swooped in, I fought my
way back through the cheering crowd to Tina, who was still in a state of shock,
still so frightened that she did not understand I had saved her, that it was I,
I who had saved her, who was hugging and kissing her.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She wept and I kissed the tears from her
cheeks, remembering guiltily how unmoved Carla’s tears had left me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When she hit me, I stepped back in pure
bafflement.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Again and again she hit me,
and I let her, because I was selfless, because I didn’t know if she was playing
or not.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I went from a completely heroic
mastery of the scene to fearful disorientation—in which I wanted unmistakably
to cry, too, but did not—ending in a completely anomic breakdown:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I felt entirely alone and despised the people
around me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Knuckleheads.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Weaklings.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>No chance of unified sharing of souls.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>A year passed, during which I guess I was working on my material,
because I emerged as a comedian.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Cheryl
Schmolke was the Queen of the Second Grade at Jefferson Elementary School, a
pretty girl with big eyes, brunette hair in a pony-tail, and an air of being
much older than eight—as was I.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We had
just finished an hour of instruction in the basics of geology, and Cheryl and I
found ourselves alone at the sink in the science corner of the classroom.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She was washing the dust and grit of samples
from her hands, and I said to her, “Cheryl, I didn’t know what your head was
made of, so I took it for granite.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
turned away, toward the classroom with its rows of desks and backs of heads
shooting out in lines of crazily skewed perspective that must have been the
product of incipient vertigo, but nobody was actively listening to us,
listening to us as I hoped they might be, like “kids” do in a play,
twenty-five-year-old Broadway stars pretending to be five-year-old Broadway
stars—when the “main character” says something outrageous, that big, wonderful,
sinuous rubber-necking double-take.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Nevertheless:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Cheryl giggled.</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Word spread quickly of my staggeringly
felicitous sense of humor, and the class appreciated my nascent sexual
superiority in the way that only children can, with dead-pan blinking and
delightfully grave suspicions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Had there
been no hub-bub, as I thought there had been, when I spoke?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Had everybody heard me?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Had Mrs. Erickson?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Was I truly amusing or would I be punished?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was possible, and I accepted the
possibility then as candidly as I do now, that I had been both amusing and
deserving of punishment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I saw, first
and foremost, however, how important it was to make women laugh, that nothing
of consequence could be achieved if you did not take very seriously their
senses of humor and their need for lively, energetic men.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I said, some time later, the next year, I
think, third grade, fourth grade, while I stood as if smoking a cigarette, with
that kind of tough nonchalance, next to the anchoring pole of the swing-set on
which Cathy Gibbs was swinging, nonchalant but like I was still working a
routine, the same routine:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>that what
sexy smart Cathy ought to do was to bite my cork.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I had no idea what a cork was, and, if I ran
through all the possibilities in my mind, no cork that I might conceivably call
my own was a thing that wanted <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">biting</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Still, that was what I said to her, and the
only discernible effect was a slight increase of swings per minute.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Cathy had given me the impression she was
earthy, from a different side of the tracks, working class and Catholic as
opposed to managerial class and Protestant, perhaps, I have no idea, had no
idea, only a sense of exotic permission.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>But it was permission for selfless union with a girl I thought I might
love.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It turned out that she admired me
as a partner in science projects and had no interest in selfless unions of
souls.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In consequence I suppose, I had
studied for a long time the cover of a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">National
Geographic</i> (my<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>grandfather, who
disliked farming and wished only to learn, had given me subscription for my
birthday) that appeared that spring:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>it
showed an American soldier walking through the jungle in Vietnam.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I knew
something had changed.</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It threatened
selfless union with attractive girls.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We
were no longer at Jefferson Elementary, they were busing us to wherever they
could find the space, and I must simply have felt, being cast about, without a
steady center to study, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">licentious</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>License, the inherent anarchy of being among
“others,” among people, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">id est</i>,
unlike those among whom we have matured, and whose conversation seems therefore
odd and therefore mad, the inherent criminality of comedy—all this must have
made the allure of uniforms, of a harmless, childish fascism, more than hard to
resist.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is possible, certainly, that
I had no inkling of political and cultural forces as vast and nasty as all
that—just the sense that something had changed in a place called Vietnam, the
only evidence for which was the attractive photograph on the cover of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">National Geographic</i>—and that I was
simply excited, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">thrilled</i>, to be
united (this is two years later) at a brand-new school with a brand-new girl
named Joni.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was a real marriage—if
common interests and enthusiasms, and proper sanction and ceremony are what
make marriages real—or at least a relationship acknowledged as valid and
binding by society:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>we were taking flute
lessons together, and had been nominated and elected to the twin posts of
Crossing Guard at Madison Elementary School.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>We were the most serious and talented children in the band, had genuine
responsibility, genuine authority outside the band, outside, even, the physical
plant of the school itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We went,
almost hand in hand, through hours and hours of intensive instruction, during
which it was made plain and repeated over and over that lives were going to be
in our hands, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the lives of our friends
and neighbors</i> in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">our hands</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We were going to be up against automobiles,
and we were shown lurid film-strips of what automobiles could do, did do
frequently and regularly, to human bodies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>When we passed that course, when we proved with our attitudes that we
had increased our knowledge and made it practical, rather than breaking down
and becoming undone by the horror of it, we were presented with certificates of
worth and accomplishment, and garments of webbed straps, bandolier-like, with
little plastic cups sewn just below the broadest band, the belt, in which we
were to insert our flag poles.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The flags
were orange with red stop signs, trimmed in white, and we were given white
gloves to further distinguish ourselves in the dangerous if ordinary milling
and shouting of the intersection.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But
what made the uniforms truly authoritative as well as snazzy were the
caps.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They were in the style of military
officers, pure white visors and crowns with orange bands circling the base of
the crown.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Black chin-straps.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Joni was nearly a foot taller than me but no
one seemed to care or notice, or if notice, to not think it odd, or if think it
odd, to interpret in any way detrimental to me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It was in the nature of things:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>we were in the sixth grade, which is the bottom of the heap, now, of
middle school, but which was then the top of the heap of the elementary grades,
and Joni, like many young women, had shot past most of us boys.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She had the beginnings of breasts and hips
and I had been secretly courting her for at least a year—it seemed like
forever, like no girl had meant a thing to me before Joni.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If it threw my notions of sympathetic
selfless union into disarray, I had high hopes that it was truer, a kind of
more mature love, and nurtured the relationship carefully.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I forbade myself irony and wasn’t even funny
most of the time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I was gentle and—most
important—knowing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That is to say,
knowledgeable beyond my age, and, for my age, wise.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’d given up everything for
scholarship—everything but practical understanding of everyday tools and
machines.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Like bicycles, for
instance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I was a straight-A student but
could flip a wrench back and forth in the palm of my hand, box-end to open-end,
open-end to box-end, like a switchblade.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>As often I could without seeming obvious, never two days in a row and
usually only once a week, I would rocket toward Joni’s house on 105<sup>th</sup>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Just as I figured I was coming into the view
of her bedroom window, I would make a face, theatrically big, to make sure it
would carry across her yard, of concern, and shoot a glance back at my rear
wheel.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I would squeeze the calipers
around the polished rims of the wheels, come quickly but adroitly to a stop,
and dismount—not with the least hint of annoyance or alarm, but forthrightly
and calmly with curiosity, readiness, and capacity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Those states of being or attributes of
character or whatever they are I now lack entirely; they are as absent from my
self as if they had never been part of it, and I am forced to ask <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">were they ever genuinely there?</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I thought so at the time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I was very clear about the difference between
the show I was putting on for Joni—monkeying around with chain, thinking almost
aloud <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">too much slack</i> as I
demonstrated that slackness, adjusting the cables with one twist clockwise and
one twist counterclockwise, tapping the spokes as if listening for some slight
tonal evidence of looseness—very clear about the difference between that and
the show I’d put on for Carla (much less the absurd posing for Cheryl and Cathy,
and the confusing, troubling affair with Tina):<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>with Carla I had been aping a love I knew I had no understanding of, not
even any real interest in, but which would allow me to hug and kiss the
beautiful bucktoothed girl, believing the frankness of the play (a frankness I
assumed Carla shared) mitigated the pretense and might even bear real
psychological fruit, somehow, later on, when I became capable of real love; but
with my bike and the mysterious new Joni, I was demonstrating real skill.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If it’s true that the call for the
demonstration was not quite honest, was in fact rigged, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">that nothing was wrong and I was only showing what I was capable of if
something truly went wrong</i>, it is also true that I thought it was something
that Joni would like to know, perhaps even needed to know.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When we were made crossing guards, I was
convinced that a force greater than my own will, greater than my transparent
wish to show-off, was confirming and encouraging me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The show may have been gratuitous, the
uniforms silly, but the skill, the sympathy that made the shows possible, the
childish street theater and the community service—those gifts were real.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But of course there is a great difference
between a sense of rightness and even confirmation, and action in the world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My instinctive belief was that once you
commenced to act, unease fell away; there were simply too many other things to
deal with, and in my limited experience with action, that was so.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But as I stood on my side of the street that
sunny mild September day in 1967, and felt my plastic crossing flag flutter
stiffly in the breeze, and saw Joni’s flag flutter in the same gust a fraction
of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>second later, I began to suspect that
unease might be more a shadow than a cloak:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>no matter how one occupied oneself, you could not throw it off, it would
still be there.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I began to act but felt,
if anything, more uneasy with each passing second.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Joni seemed troubled.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The width of the street was sufficient to
make my perception of her as “troubled” pretty clearly an exaggeration born of
my own anxiety, but she was not so far away that I couldn’t make out a kind of
uncertainty in her posture, a tentativeness that could have been the first
stages or signs of haste, of precipitate action.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nothing much was at stake, and if I give the
impression I sensed disaster looming, I must say I did not.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There was very little traffic, and none of
our fellow students had arrived yet at the intersection.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some men were laying sod on the oval island
that was the new school’s front yard, in the center of which stood a flag-pole
also so new it had no flag to raise.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
could see some parents coming up my side of the street, and some very small
children with them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Joni was schoolside
and couldn’t stop darting apprehensive looks at them, at me, back at them, back
at me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She was very tall, as I’ve said,
and though not in the usual way horsey-looking, horse-faced, she did strike me
as a filly about to dash off for the far side of the corral.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I wanted to wave to her, but was afraid it
would be interpreted as some kind of official gesture, coercive, one bound to
confuse whoever saw it, since it had no relation to public reality, merely a
private concern.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And yet I waved.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I couldn’t help myself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was a small, subtle wave that I hoped
would reassure Joni, even calm her if indeed it was panic that I thought I saw
approaching in the deep background of the picture, if the restlessness and
uncertainty I thought she was exhibiting were the simmering precursors of a
mistake in judgment or a breakdown of nerve.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>But I failed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I think I
failed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>How can I say?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was so long ago, the stakes so low, the
arc of the action so submerged in ordinary murk…but what I thought I saw was
that my wave was being misunderstood.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>What I remember seeing is Joni coming rigidly alert, then after a tense
few seconds of scrutiny, straining her head forward, opening her dark
mysterious horse-like eyes as wide as they could be, demanding, silently but
with clear impatience, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">what I meant with
the wave</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Suddenly there was a crowd
around me of mothers and tiny children and cars were approaching the
intersection from all four directions at once.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Joni, still giving me a look, stepped off her curb.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I made an even more subtle sign:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">halt</i>,
hand palm-up, facing out, but held very closely to my side, and waving just a
bit.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then I said to my pedestrians,
“Follow me, please,” and stepped off my curb.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Automobiles were not the military vehicles they are now:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>if you called a car <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">a tank</i>, it was an insult, a deprecation, a suggestion of awkward
ugliness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Our cars were long and wide,
to be sure, but very low.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Grills looked
like teeth—but not sharp teeth, friendly teeth, rather, smiling, and rear
fenders almost always had some kind of tail-fin swoop to them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They were sleek.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We had a Buick Electra 225, a long low blue
Greek tragedy of a car with a black vinyl top.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It had fins and a somber, ambiguous, classical smile, pistons the size
of one-gallon paint cans, eight of them banging up and down in their
storm-drain cylinders, the jets in the four-barreled carburetors spraying gas
like they were fire-hoses in a roar so perfectly muffled it purred rather than
rumbled.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It generated horsepower of a
nearly incalculable order.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But at that
moment, crossing the street for the first time as a professional, with eight or
ten of those wide, wide flashing grills suddenly upon me, I felt I could have
stopped anything, a ten-ton truck, everything.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14409640039163593535noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6987206503498523548.post-73104255918665722392013-12-19T22:12:00.003-08:002013-12-19T22:12:48.886-08:00a revealing passage in Across My Big Brass Bed, mid-novel....
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">I could simply have learned how to play “Lay Lady Lay” and left it at that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But no:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I was <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">lofty aloof weird weird
weird</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A snob who thought motorcycle
racing and classical music demonstrated some astonishing cultural reach that
only a superior, yes, that was the word, a superior person could
apprehend.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Orpheus.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Marlon Brando.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Christ. Me:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I could not believe I even glimpsed these delusions, much less embraced
them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And yet….<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And yet I <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">was
a sexual prodigy</i>!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There was probably
no woman I could not seduce!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A daredevil
who played the flute!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A Christian
ascetic <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">and</i> a reckless playboy!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I could do it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I could in fact pull it off.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If anyone one were truly capable of such a
show, it were me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Lightning strokes of
transformation:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I felt it in my bones,
my loins, my pounding heart.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But to
parade it?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To confess it, so early
on?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nightmare would surely ensue. My
soul would be burned at the stake.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14409640039163593535noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6987206503498523548.post-5495171575289396112013-12-16T03:32:00.002-08:002013-12-16T03:32:53.308-08:00A VIEW OF THE NOVEL ON TUMBLR<a href="http://garyamdahl.tumblr.com/">http://garyamdahl.tumblr.com/</a>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14409640039163593535noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6987206503498523548.post-79038287026215921332013-12-15T20:58:00.001-08:002013-12-15T20:58:49.058-08:00advertisement for ACROSS MY BIG BRASS BED<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14409640039163593535noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6987206503498523548.post-5867355435555773442013-12-15T20:56:00.000-08:002013-12-15T20:56:21.896-08:00LITERARY BIOGRAPHY--THE GREATEST HITS
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<div style="background: white; line-height: 16.8pt;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "Georgia","serif";">Gary Byrdelle Amdahl was born in Jackson, Minnesota, on August 4th, 1956. He
was raised and lived in Minneapolis and Saint Paul, spent several years in
upstate New York and Connecticut, with a brief turn in Raleigh, North Carolina,
and now lives in Redlands, California.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div style="background: white; line-height: 16.8pt;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "Georgia","serif";">His plays, produced in the Twin Cities in the 1980s on
professional stages with Equity actors, include “<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Going Down</b>,” “<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Fall Down Go
Boom</b>,” “<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Dead Hand</b>,” “<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Tonight's the Night</b>,” “<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Muzzle Flash</b>,” “<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">The Border</b>,” “<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Hawaii</b>,” “<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Getting the Hell Out of Dodge</b>,” and “<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Night, Mystery, Secresie, and Sleep</b>.”
He was awarded two Jerome Fellowships at The Playwright's Lab in Minneapolis,
and was a participant in Midwest Playlabs.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div style="background: white; line-height: 16.8pt;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "Georgia","serif";">His stories, essays, poetry (original, translated, and even set to
music), book and theater reviews, and literary features articles and interviews
have appeared in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Agni, A Public Space,
The Massachusetts Review, The Gettysburg Review, Fiction, The Quarterly, Santa
Monica Review, Third Bed, Minnetonka Review, New York Times Book Review, The
Nation, the Washington Post, Boston Globe, The Hungry Mind Review</i>, and many
other monthlies, weeklies, and dailies. He was awarded a <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Pushcart Prize</b> and appeared in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">PP</i> anthology.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div style="background: white; line-height: 16.8pt;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "Georgia","serif";">His books are: <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Across My Big Brass Bed</i></b> (2014,
Artistically Declined Press) <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Intimidator Still Lives in Our Hearts</i></b>
(2013, Artistically Declined Press), <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I Am Death</i></b> (2008, Milkweed
Editions), <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Visigoth</i></b> (2006, Milkweed Editions, winner of ME National
Fiction Prize), and, with Leslie Brody, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Motel of the Mind</i></b> (2001, Philos
Press).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div style="background: white; line-height: 16.8pt;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "Georgia","serif";">With <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Intimidator</i></b>, Artistically Declined Press has begun The Amdahl
Library Project, which will see six more books published, one each January
until 2019. Much of this work has been previously published in the magazines
listed above; The Amdahl Library Project will see these books published in
complete, unabridged, uniform editions.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";"><o:p><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;"> </span></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRo-mQdSP6xVqFqDCaknVWz3w8lES2ZCMsdr2o4KsviqHHYAmpWesfvKATDeYm8Fs2vp4Ry7FEdj-dLGmQeToHnRUs5KzHnTRXvUqj9-5zzLyhg0fPl24Dz8V8_k9LCfDSlkBtOfo5FXiN/s1600/giordano_bruno-zdenek-janda.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRo-mQdSP6xVqFqDCaknVWz3w8lES2ZCMsdr2o4KsviqHHYAmpWesfvKATDeYm8Fs2vp4Ry7FEdj-dLGmQeToHnRUs5KzHnTRXvUqj9-5zzLyhg0fPl24Dz8V8_k9LCfDSlkBtOfo5FXiN/s320/giordano_bruno-zdenek-janda.jpg" width="235" /></a></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14409640039163593535noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6987206503498523548.post-70992208048713288262013-12-13T23:36:00.002-08:002013-12-15T21:05:03.143-08:00THE COVER!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiu4Sma-6tLimoEQU0hvVLhuRPw59OxMPdJKJcu4fD5blzKoKAXAgp-lhKsYz2raIbJof1_aFiQ5xk9WxfywDERU9OBaVtGDkJqpx4uuO-V_NF7ApXU04AdWaDdBk9iBpNNhRiNbkz3_NWL/s1600/Amdahl.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiu4Sma-6tLimoEQU0hvVLhuRPw59OxMPdJKJcu4fD5blzKoKAXAgp-lhKsYz2raIbJof1_aFiQ5xk9WxfywDERU9OBaVtGDkJqpx4uuO-V_NF7ApXU04AdWaDdBk9iBpNNhRiNbkz3_NWL/s640/Amdahl.jpg" width="420" /></a></div>
<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14409640039163593535noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6987206503498523548.post-51999946745157321242013-12-13T01:25:00.002-08:002013-12-13T01:25:35.172-08:00READING FROM THE INTIMIDATOR STILL LIVES IN OUR HEARTS at the University of Redlands, September 2013<div style="overflow: hidden;">
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Hello everybody.</div>
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I have a novel coming out on the 24th of January, from <strong>Artistically Declined Press</strong>. It's called <strong><em>ACROSS MY BIG BRASS </em></strong>BED. Some of you may know the first section of it (there are four sections, 100pp. apiece), as it was published by Sven Birkerts, Bill Pierce, and Billy Giraldi in <strong>Agni</strong> in 2009.</div>
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That is about all I can say in terms of publicity.</div>
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There is of course The Greatest Blurb of All Time, from<strong> Barry Hannah</strong>...comparing me to, wait for it, Camus, but while I certainly can't get enough of that, I am sure you can.</div>
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Nevertheless I am going to try whatever may be honorably tried, in the hope of busting a personal record: <strong><em>VISIGOTH</em></strong> sold 3000 copies,<em> <strong>I AM DEATH </strong></em>sold 900, and <strong><em>THE INTIMIDATOR STILL LIVES IN OUR HEARTS</em></strong>, by far the best book of the three, sold 72. <strong><em>ACROSS MY BIG BRASS BED </em></strong>is better still, and far less conventional. That is not to say it is bizarre or eccentric--but whatever it is.t does not conform to banal expectations. Perhaps you have to be a Navy SEAL-type commando of reading to handle, I don't know.... We are expecting, in any case. to sell approximately zero copies.</div>
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And what do you know, from out of the blue arrives a video of a reading I did at the University of Redlands earlier this fall. It's comprised of bits from the title story of the <strong><em>INTIMIDATOR </em></strong>collection, the funny bits, the bookseller-in-Los Angeles bits, with all the movie stars and weirdos.</div>
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Brings out the performer in me that I shoulda been all along, I guess. Any rate, I'm thinking that if I can be seen causing a relatively large audience (150) culled from the prime demographic (young persons) to guffaw, I may be seen as an author whose work may be safely purchased and enjoyed, in serene moderation, without having to take a class in Me Studies.</div>
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Take a look if you've got a few minutes. Pass it around it if you like it. And please, if you have ideas about marketing and publicity for a weary old amateur, lemme know? (And oh yes, thousand pardons to the magnificent persons with whom I sold books in those days, at Dutton's in Brentwood: you not only lived the story, you have heard me crank it up far too many times.)</div>
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<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKBWplSNpIc&feature=em-upload_owner" target="_blank"><span style="color: #0066cc;">http://www.youtube.com/watch?</span><span style="color: #0066cc;">v<wbr></wbr>=LKBWplSNpIc&feature=em-</span><span style="color: #0066cc;">upload<wbr></wbr>_owner</span></a></div>
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<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kw34XHtKpM" target="_blank"><span style="color: #0066cc;">http://www.youtube.com/watch?</span><span style="color: #0066cc;">v<wbr></wbr>=0kw34XHtKpM</span></a></div>
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