The Only Thing(s) to Fear

There's a review of Monkeytown in The Brooklyn Rail this month. Thanks to Stephen Cicerelli for his kind words. Also, thanks to the Rail.

one of us will have to destroy this shell

No One Told Me I Was Going To Disappear

By J.A. Tyler and John Dermot Woods

Jaded Ibis Press

Released January 13, 2012

124 pages

Reading J.A. Tyler is a hardcore meditative discipline-inducing experience like that grizzled old dude you see in the park sipping from a brown bag and staring at the same chess move for several decades until his head explodes and leaves a pulsing trail of elegantly jarring (i.e. read this 5039403832 times because it’s that good) and unsuspected verbiage leaking onto his idle opponent’s scuffed white New Balances. It might not be the easiest shit to get into and you might not remember any specific phrases once you’re done, but once you’re in you’re sucked in and you will leave scarred – in a good way. It’s like this cumulative dosing of deceptive emotional wreckage that sucks you, all unique-like, into a frantic level of whoa, a story told around a story around a place you’ve never been but where you think you might like to sit down and chill for a while but you can’t because it’s that hot. No One Told Me I Was Going To Disappear is no different and no joke, although there are a few of those. The book is “about” maybe some conjoined twins or maybe they were stapled together in some time before time, or something.  And they split. So basically a love story. One of the most wrenching. I know this because:

The words I am using are a scream. The words I am using are a mask. I don’t want to be the mask to your mask. I want us to wear the same mask. I want us to mask the same thing, to be the same mask, to think that when we move our fingers we are moving our fingers.

This us and we that we are or are not anymore.

But it’s also a messed up death-slumber neo-ghostly riot that might make you sad because severed ghost twins is relatively heavy subject matter these days, I hear:

Cradle me in your bones. Cuddle me in the wind of your lungs. Grapple my eyes into your head and bring this back to how it used to be. Bring this back to when we two were one and there was no link between except and everything was a link and there was no wreckage, we were absolute. Go back to there. Be in the past. This one of us two now.

Am I of us the only me that wants this back?

The book has sky-blue pages and flowers and other amazing images drawn by John Dermot Woods – boy in blue hat cunnilingus-lover to a TV goddess sporting disengaged man-mask, Jesus procuring pulsing heart-candy to bystanders, re-entering a mother’s womb to lovingly bomb it in the hopes of relegating past abominations to a more savory unreality – so you know these are no companion drawings but text enhancements, visions within a distinct vision. I stare at these still. People think I’m weird. I think not staring at this book is weird. 

welcome to the end times

Had a couple reviews come out last month -- J.A. Tyler's "A Shiny, Unused Heart" in The Brooklyn Rail and George Williams' "Gardens of Earthly Delights" in Prick of the Spindle. Both of these guys are in my top 8 books of 2011, so check 'em out, now. Actually, now that I mention it, I should just share my top 8 books of 2011. Why keep you anxiously salivating? And why 8? It was my number in baseball and water polo and I'm too lazy to think of 10. Boom. 

1. Look! Look! Feathers by Mike Young (Word Riot)

2. A Shiny, Unused Heart by J.A. Tyler (Black Coffee Press)

3. The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories by Don DeLillo (Scribner)

4. Gardens of Earthly Delight: Stories by George Williams (Raw Dog Screaming Press)

5. The Indefinite State of Imaginary Morals by Rae Bryant (Patasola Press)

6. Us by Michael Kimball (Tyrant Books)

7. The Blue Tower: Poems by Tomaz Salamun (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

8. Animals by Janey Smith (plain wrap press)

Also, I was going to announce to the five people that read this sporadic attempt at bloggery that I would be taking a more or less complete hiatus from posting for the next several months because of my involvement in two top-secret projects. However, one of them, a movie-related thing, has fallen through as those things tend to do. So my list of covert projects has been reduced to one, a kind of online literary monstrosity, a collaboration with novelist John Reed that is so totally sweet that the coolest hipsters are already checking it out before it exists. So needless to say, I will still be posting, probably with alarming frequency. I'm sorry. 2012 is the time to step one's proverbial game up (and to get pumped for Ridley Scott's ancient aliens-influenced Prometheus). Let's do it.

Budweisers and copyediting stole my 26th year!

You guys should check out an essay by the inimitable John Reed, “Arthur Phillips Stole My Bike,” in this month’s Brooklyn Rail. There’s a lot going on here: A heated dialogue about how best to create a new Shakespeare play using the Bard’s own hallowed (or hollowed) words; the value of community in a literary world that too often caters to isolationism; the controlled chaos inherent in being a working writer and professor; a touch of nostalgia for a Manhattan childhood and young adulthood; the complexity of getting anywhere on time in New York; a mysterious theft.

As personal essays written by NYC fiction writers are wont to do, I found myself considering my own situation as it pertains to literary things (solipsism alert!), and realized that this year has been somewhat of a setback. Sure I’ve tinkered with my novel a bunch (which hasn’t slowed the slew of rejections), published a bunch of reviews, an e-chapbook and a few poems, but I could have done so much more. I’m not talking about writing 2,000 words a day and finishing a novel and two books of poetry in six months, I mean in like, life.

Like, it probably wasn’t the best idea for me to sit on my boxered ass all day every day taking six hours to complete freelance work that could easily take three, thereby destroying any time to do work I actually wanted to do. Like, going to the same seven or eight bars and making no effort to look on either side of the Budweiser pressed to my rotting lips. Like, feeling fine continuing as a doorman for way too long when other opportunities have continued to slap my jaw and I do nothing but shirk. Like making, uh, not much effort at trying to meet girls and forming what could be considered the loosest of interpersonal post-friend-level bonds, and heroically sabotaging anything that might actually be good for my lonesome ass. Like, failing to immerse myself in the many coteries of writers this fine city offers (What John’s saying about the need for community and collaborating, duh) and remaining a mostly anonymous curmudgeon.

This ineptitude, coupled with the fact that my freelance contract of 1.5 years has ended without much of a warning (putting the “starving” back into my job description), has me feeling better and happier than I can remember. Spending one’s time working alone can only be justified by meaningful work, not mind-numbing “editing” work for a major corporation that will probably tank within the next few months. What my week now lacks in a nifty paycheck, it makes up for it with TIME. Time to write what I want, to finish/start projects I’ve been brooding over for months, to work on the literary magazine that I know can do big things. Not as much money to decimate my once-youthful body with toxins and lard, and I've never felt so fucking energized, baby!!!

Events will be attended, group projects will go down (including a Monkeytown screenplay collab I’m not at liberty to discuss)! Time to get excited, 2012 might actually turn out OK. Until December 21.

Also, I just wanted to mention that Short, Fast, and Deadly in its current incarnation has put out its final issue. I am eternally grateful to SFD for publishing many of my flash fictions and poems in the magazine and in the 2010 Anthology. I’m more stoked that I will be the staff chapbook reviewer at the bigger, badder Short, Fast, and Deadly Monthly, dropping this January. Watching the empire grow from within.

Stay posted, and stay fulfilled! Hoo-ah!