IWSG, March 2021

I have recently joined the Insecure Writer’s Support Group, which I discovered through the excellent blog of author Jean Davis.

And as a newly active member of the group, this is my first IWSG monthly first-Wednesday question:

Everyone has a favorite genre or genres to write. But what about your reading preferences? Do you read widely or only within the genre(s) you create stories for? What motivates your reading choice?

That is a very good question. Two things motivate my reading choices: a diversity of reading, and that one book I just gotta read right now. And there are secondary concerns, such as books which have been sitting around forever, and when my mind is in a particular space in which it will only be satisfied by e.g. poetry or Russian literature. Or Russian poetry.

I take as my guiding star Karen Lord‘s advice to “read well”. Find the books which are good examples of the kind of book I would like to write and, well, read them!

That doesn’t mean everything I read is practice for something I hope to write. I am motivated more than anything by curiosity. In my library I have scores of anthologies covering a great many subjects and styles of writing. My day job is mentally demanding and I am happy to indulge in purely escapist reading as time and opportunity allow. For example, last summer I did a deep dive into the Forgotten Realms novels and read the first twenty or so Drizzt Do’Urden novels by R.A. Salvatore.

Then again this past October I participated in the Sealey Challenge and read 31 books of poetry in 31 days. And a couple of weeks ago, after almost three decades of attempting it and failing, I finally read the entirety of The Brothers Karamazov.

So what motivates my reading? Ultimately I think I read whatever it feels important that I read next. And that could be anything.

And on a tangent, this wide and varied reading habit helps me through bouts of writing block and imposter syndrome. Usually if I am reading something which is too close to what I am writing I start to compare the one with the other, and therefore reading something outside of that channel is a good way to reset myself, mentally and emotionally, so I can get return to the writing practice with a clear mind.

What motivates your reading? Let me know in the comments!

 

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February 2021 Reading List

I have finally done it.

After about 25 years of trying and failing, I have finally completed reading all 364,000+ words of The Brothers Karamazov. It was magnificent, and difficult, and dense and occasionally fragmented, and absolutely worth the time and effort I put into the seven weeks it took to read the book from the beginning to the end.

With Dostoevsky out of the way for the moment, I turned my attention to the embarrassingly large stack of books in translation I have collected over the past half-dozen years, but not read. Items 7 through 12 on the book list below are the results of that first pass. These shorter, non-Dostoevsky books just seem to fly by.

Because I have been reading so many books, my short fiction reading has sort of fallen by the wayside. Still, a dozen or so in a month is pretty good.

Books

  1. Wilkerson, Isabel, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2021.02.03)
  2. Dostoevsky, Fyodor (Pevear, Richard and Volokhonsky, Larissa, translators), The Brothers Karamazov (2021.02.12)
  3. Giorno, John, Great Demon Kings (2021.02.15)
  4. Berti, Eduardo (Coombe, Charlotte, translator), The Imagined Land (2021.02.16)
  5. Tenev, Georgi (Rodel, Angela, translator), Party Headquarters (2021.02.17)
  6. Masatsugu Ono (Turvill, Angus, translator), Lion Cross Point (2021.02.18)
  7. Baltasar, Eva (Sanches, Julia, translator), Permafrost (2021.02.22)
  8. Yoss (Frye, David, translator), Super Extra Grande (2021.02.23)
  9. Bae Suah (Smith, Deborah, translator), A Greater Music (2021.02.24)

Short Prose

  1. Buckell, Tobias S., “The Bars at the End of the World”, Patreon (2021.02.01)
  2. Goder, Beth, “History in Pieces“, Clarkesworld #173 (2021.02.02)
  3. Laban, Monique, “The Failed Dianas“, Clarkesworld #173 (2021.02.02)
  4. Bookreyeva, Anastasia (Nayler, Ray, translator), “Terra Rasa“, Clarkesworld #173 (2021.02.02)
  5. Ulmer, James, “Gardenia”, Coffin Bell #4.1 (2021.02.03)
  6. Rodgers, Craig, “Return Policy”, Coffin Bell #4.1 (2021.02.03)
  7. Bernardo, Troy, “Smoky”, Coffin Bell #4.1 (2021.03.02)
  8. Woolf, James, “Mackenzie’s Leap”, Coffin Bell #4.1 (2021.03.02)
  9. Punzo, Andrew, “Hair and Nail and Blood and Bone (You’re Beautiful)”, Coffin Bell #4.1 (2021.02.03)
  10. Rusch, Kristine Kathryn, “The Last Surviving Gondola Widow“, Clarkesworld #101 (2021.02.14)
  11. Clare, Gwendolyn, “Indelible“, Clarkesworld #101 (2021.02.20)
  12. Robson, Kelly, “The Three Resurrections of Jessica Churchill“, Clarkesworld #101 (2021.02.24)

Not Quite Normal, But Close

February was unexpectedly chaotic, though the ups and downs seem to be tending upward, in part due to a steadily increasing outdoor temperature and amount of sunlight. The lack of a card-carrying white supremacist in the white house also helps.

Three books arrived this past week. On the left is Neeli Cherkovski‘s biography of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, released in 1979, when Ferlinghetti was 60 (!). I picked this up from Third Mind Books in Ann Arbor, which is an excellent resource for anyone interested in the Beats, as well as the Modernist, New York School and Black Mountain poets.

Ferlinghetti died this past Monday, at the age of 101. When I get get my head sorted out about this I will post an article or two.

Next is Anders Dunkers’ Rediscovering Earth: Ten Dialogues on the Future of Nature, (OR Books) a collections of conversations with writers and thinkers discussing what may be and what will be the state of nature and our place in it, going forward from here.

On the right is Cuba in Splinters, a collection of short fiction in translation from Cuba. This was an impulse buy from OR Books, which I picked up when I ordered Rediscovering Earth. My attention was probably primed because I was in the middle of reading Super Extra Grande by Cuban science fiction writer Yoss.

I spent the last week reading books in translation, and completed three more of my backlog of such books – Permafrost by Eva Baltasar (And Other Stories), Super Extra Grande by Yoss (Restless Books), and A Greater Music by Bae Suah (Open Letter Books). Now for a change of pace I am reading Starship’s Mage by Glynn Stewart, which I picked up last year at ConFusion. I’m less than 100 pages in, and really liking it so far.

In writing news, I am working on edits to a short story I wrote for a call for submissions for the Grimm, Grit and Gasoline anthology published by World Weaver Press. The story was not accepted, obviously, but I think it has promise.

This past Friday I had the great good fortune to spend some time talking the story over with Jason Sizemore of Apex Book Company. The opportunity was made available to supporters of the Apex Patreon, which I am and have been for a couple of years now. I met Jason at ConFusion back in (I think) 2016, where we spent a few minutes discussing the ins and outs and ups and downs of the publishing business. Obviously Apex is doing much better than Caffeinated Press ever did, but there were many similarities in the experiences of running our respective independent publishers.

The increased reading and the access to a professional editor have me feeling reinvigorated, and warmth and sunlight are always energizing. It’s time to get writing.

Monday Music: Blue Öyster Cult

A series of unexpected life events have me feeling nostalgic, so here is a story about the first rock concert I attended, and associated memories.

I had been aware of Blue Öyster Cult for some years before I attended the concert, but had never really paid attention to them, other than to appreciate whatever of their music made it onto the radio in my nowhere farm town in rural nowhere in southern Michigan — “Don’t Fear the Reaper“, “Burnin’ For You“, and so on.

At the beginning of my sophomore year at Grand Valley State University (September 1988) I was in a mythology class, sitting next to a due with long hair, and out of nowhere he said “You like Blue Öyster Cult?” We got to talking, and suddenly I had a ticket to see BÖC in concert at Club Eastbrook (now The Orbit Room). December 4, 1988.

This was the “Bedtime Story for the Children of the Damned” tour in support of their album Imaginos. We stood in front of a bank of speakers, just left of center stage and behind a wall of big dudes in biker gear. The venue absolutely reeked of pot smoke, which was the first time I had smelled that smell and known what it was. In my defense, I was a sheltered (and isolated, socially, emotionally and geographically) child.

I don’t remember the opening band. I think they were regional, and in the dusty halls of my memory they seem to have been quite good.

After the concert I bought a tour t-shirt. Three years later, when the t-shirt was past its prime, I wore it to my job at the GVSU student cafeteria, and some of the more conservative students complained to the management that one of the employees was promoting Satanism. I had to round out my shift with the shirt turned inside-out. This incident says a lot more about the conservative teenagers of the early 1990s than it does about BÖC.

I saw BOC again at Club Eastbrook on October 1, 1989, and they were just as good. Again, I don’t remember the name of the opening band. Thirty years is a lot of time gone by. I still have the ticket for this one, safely tucked into a scrapbook.

Somewhere in here I discovered the Michael Moorcock / BÖC connection in their songs “Black Blade” and “Veteran of the Psychic Wars“, based on Moorcock’s Elric of Melniboné novels. This inspired me to get the vanity plate “Stormbringer” for my car at the time, a gray 1977 Cutlass Supreme 2-door, with a 350 4-barrel and T-tops. I once beat a Porche out of a stoplight, which was amazing, because most of the time when I stomped hard on the gas, Stormbringer would sputter and stall.

And of course Blue Öyster Cult (“Black Blade and “Godzilla“, usually) often accompanied the many Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay sessions in my sophomore, junior and senior years.

All of which is to say, Blue Öyster Cult was a signifiant thread through my (still-ongoing) formative years, and my life is most definitely improved by their presence and influence.

And they still rock.

A Break in the Flow

This past week was one of those rare stretches of time where no new reading material arrived at the Library of Winkelman Abbey. That’s fine. I have more than enough unread books and magazines laying around to last me a decade.

Now that I have finally made it to the end of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and Giorno’s Great Demon Kings, I have turned my attention to shorter books, which is easy, because I can count on my fingers the books I own which are longer than The Brothers Karamazov.

For the past five years or more I have had subscriptions to the catalogs of various publishers of books in translation, which means for the past five years or more I have accumulated these books much faster than I have read them, and at this point I have well over a hundred works from Open Letter Books, Deep Vellum, Restless Books, And Other Stories, Two Lines Press, and Ugly Duckling Presse awaiting my attention.

In the past couple of years, as my lifestyle and available spending money have fluctuated, I have allowed my subscriptions to all but And Other Stories and Two Lines Press (and possibly Restless Books – it’s difficult to tell sometimes here in the Covid Years) to lapse. So now I have these shelves full of books sitting around unread as I slowly accumulate books from other places, and now I find that I need to archive some of the books on the shelves. As I only archive books I have completed, now is a good time to work through the backlog of these translated books.

In the past week I have finished three books – The Imagined Land by Eduardo Berti (Deep Vellum), Party Headquarters by Georgi Tenev (Open Letter Books), and Lion Cross Point by Masatsugu Ono (Two Lines Press). I am currently reading Permafrost by Eva Baltasar (And Other Stories), and hope to get in one more book before the end of the month. This is easy when the books are only 100 to 130 pages long, and at most 50,000 words, making most of them novellas or very short novels. For contrast, The Brothers Karamazov is approximately 364,000 words.

In writing news, I haven’t written anything new in the past week beyond some journaling, but I am beginning a round of edits for a couple of short stories which I hope to have in shape for submission by the beginning of May.

On the whole, the world is not necessarily a better place than it was a month ago, but some of the worst parts of it are gone, and sometimes a lack of bad things can be as energizing as the presence of good things. Selah.

Monday Music: John Giorno and the Dial-a-Poem Poets

This morning I finished reading John Giorno‘s excellent memoir Great Demon Kings. Among other things, Giorno was known for his Dial-a-Poem project which allowed the general public to call a phone number and hear recorded poetry from the greats of the time – William Burroughs, Amiri Baraka, Patti Smith, Anne Waldman, and many others.

I first became aware of Giorno when a group of us aspiring and working poets from Schuler Books got together in the mid-1990s to watch the 1982 documentary Poetry In Motion. Giorno’s performance made an impression.

All of the Dial-a-Poem poetry from Giorno Poetry Systems can be heard here on UbuWeb. This collection is a treasure.

The Turbulent Uncertainty of Ordinary Days

 

Right now I have two small recently-fed orange cats soundly asleep on my lap. The comfort derived from this state of being stands in sharp contrast to a week of chaos in the immediate, local, regional, and national levels, as the banshee/specter/mummy hybrid which is 2020 refuses to let go of the flow of history and is increasingly infecting 2021 with its fatal toxins. We can only hope that with the turning of the Lunar New Year things will start to look up.

An interesting mix of reading material arrived this past week at the Library of Winkelman Abbey.

On the left is the new release from Two Lines Press, Rabbit Island, which was written by Elvira Navarro and translated from the Spanish by Christina McSweeney. This specific book came in a subscriber-only boxed editing wrapped in white faux-rabbit fur. I love it!

Second from left is The Rage of Dragons by Evan Winter, which I ordered from the best bookstore in Grand Rapids, Books and Mortar.

Third in is David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years, also arriving courtesy of Books and Mortar. I ordered this after receiving from Semiotext(e) The Making of the Indebted Man and Governing By Debt, both by Maurizio Lazzarato. This line of study follows the recent forays into the varying aspects of carceral capitalism, and the racist roots, trunk, branches, twigs, leaves and fruits of America, from its first day to the eternal now.

On the right is the January 2021 issue of Poetry Magazine, which arrives a week after the February 2021 issue of Poetry Magazine. Such is the nature of the postal system here in the 2020s.

In reading news, after six weeks (and about 30 years) I finally finished The Brothers Karamazov. This is a big deal because I have attempted to read it at least twenty times since my first Russian Studies class back in September of 1990. The farthest in I made it before 2021 was about a hundred pages. I guess my attention span is finally long enough to tackle 800-page books written in the 1800s.

Then again, I read Anna Karenina back in the mid- 1990s.

I am also close to the end of John Giorno’s Great Demon Kings, and will likely finish it on Monday. The writing is a little uneven, but the story of Giorno’s life is fascinating, and his view into the art and writing scenes in the fifties, sixties and seventies is both remarkable and valuable.

With these books out of the way, I think I will read short book for the next couple of months. Like, nothing longer than about 250 pages. And given the density of Dostoyevsky’s prose, one Brothers Karamazov if equal to about a dozen of any novel written in the past 50 years.

In writing news, I have written drafts of a poem or two, which is the most creative work I have done since early November 2020. Feels pretty good.

Happy Year of the Metal Ox!

Friday, February 12, 2021 is the first day of the Year of the Metal Ox. This past year, in all of its chaos, was the year of the Metal Rat. We can only hope that the Ox is more laid back than the Rat.

As an exercise of interest and curiosity, here is a not-at-all comprehensive list of what was going on in my life in the previous four (-ish) Ox years.

2009 (Earth Ox) – Age 39/40. Working at Peopledesign. Started the year by wrecking my car, a 2004 Subaru Outback. Bought a 2006 Subaru Forester to replace it, which I still drive. Dad died of lung (etc.) cancer. Spent some time in Covington, Louisiana with my brother and members of my step-family. I lost a lot of weight. Took a trip to the U.P. and camped at Tahquamenon Falls State Park. This was the last year I used Flash/Actionscript as part of my job.

1997 (Fire Ox) – Age 27/28 – Worked at Schuler Books and Music as special orders manager. Started helping the instructors in the kung fu and tai chi classes. Moved twice; once into one of six tiny apartments in a gigantic house, then into a room in an equally gigantic but undivided house. Involved with the renaissance festival scene. A little romance, but nothing which lasted. Wrote a lot. Experienced angst.

1985 (Wood Ox) – Age 15/16 – Lived at home in Springport. Was a sophomore/junior at Springport High School. Learned to drive. Was on the cross country, wrestling and track teams. Played trombone. I think this was the year I broke a rib in a wrestling meet. No romances, but lots of heartache. Spent a lot of time programming on my Commodore 64. Made money milking cows and stacking hay bales. Might have visited Dad in Louisiana.

1973 (Water Ox) – Age 3/4 – Lived in Jackson, Michigan. No job. Had to put away my toys now and again. Learned to read. Not yet allowed to drive, despite being obviously better suited to it than anyone else on the road.

1961 (Metal Ox) – In my previous incarnation I was a crow which lived primarily in the Appalachian mountains. I amused myself by imitating the sound of people arguing over personal hygiene habits, and dropping pine cones on small dogs.