Preparing to Remember

I’ve been saying recently that until I wrote the novel that’s currently floating around to publishers (called The Va-va-va VOOM! but may end up being retitled North Side Girl), I’d never really written about the neighborhood where I grew up.

I was wrong.

I wrote two short stories. One of them was called “Neighborhood,” and the other was called “The Tigers of Wrath” (I think, I don’t have a copy around for me to confirm). I also wrote at least one poem, “Michele Constance,” and maybe a lot more in a book-length batch of poems I’d never dream of inflicting upon you, called Intensive Care Ward.

The poem wasn’t bad. I forget where it was published, but it did get into print (now I remember – it was the magazine Paul Hoover and Maxine Chernoff edited called Oink!). The stories were probably good, too, or better than I’ve thought they were for a long time. They were pretty much universally rejected, though they received some interesting notes from editors. They were strong stuff. They dealt with revenge and cruelty. They had a very hard edge, and there was really nowhere to place such stories at the time.

The literary magazines and journals were looking for “New Fiction,” which was fiction allegedly all about itself. It was about technique, and cleverness, and blandness, and about being above your material. It was about the authors discovering that fiction was fictional, which was about as profound as discovering that an iceberg is made of frozen water. But it was all the rage, and no one was interested in a story about how the iceberg was going to sink the ship everyone was sailing upon.

The stories were sent to dozens of places. They always came back. I consigned them to the back of my file cabinet until Northern Illinois University asked me if I wanted to contribute some of my papers. They received them, and a number of other stories I couldn’t sell, and I never thought about them again, until now.

You probably wouldn’t like them anyway. A lot of bad things happen in those stories. The language isn’t buffered. The cruelty isn’t cloaked in innuendo. The narrators are sick, though they not sociopaths. They are deeply injured, and they do terrible things. The stories do not absolve them, nor do they allow their narrators to absolve themselves. We see more than the narrators think they are revealing. One might compare them to early Nelson Algren being grafted to early Hubert Selby, Jr. The implicit message was: danger! These people are there. They have wounds we can’t even imagine how to begin to heal.

We see those same wounds today, still festering, still incurable, still unanswered in our culture. And those same wounded people, I humbly submit, are still infecting the culture (or what’s left of our culture).

In way, they were horror stories, but they did not contain the one or two things that would qualify them for the short fiction “horror” markets, so those publications had no interest in them either.

So I wrote that stuff. And it didn’t sell. I moved on and wrote other stuff, because writers don’t give up after a couple of stories. And writers don’t keep on writing the same kind of stories over and over again, do they?

Not that I was going to write that 1970s-era “New Fiction” malarkey, which is still highly praised. Much of it, though, to me reads like a package without a product – an empty container.

At least my packages always contained something, even though when the editors opened them, the contents bit them. My submissions came with return stamped envelopes, and editors were unanimously all too willing to use them.

I do, now, remember one rejection, that came from a college literary journal, and it was sent by one of the assistant editors, one of the first readers, not from any of the “big” editors – big as one can get when the circulation of the publication was no more than 250. It was like once of those comments whispered to you when no one else is looking, one of those comments that begins like, “Don’t tell anyone I said this, but …”

The rejection went on to say, I’m paraphrasing, from memory: This is really good, uncompromising, vivid … but we can never use it at our publication. We haven’t the guts. I hope this story finds a place that does.”

At that time, I was a fairly depressed kid, or young man, stuck in a dead-end job, my academic training unused and apparently unusable. Wrong place, wrong time, wrong world. It wasn’t that I missed the bus – the bus stopped running. I was built for one job – making stories. I didn’t know much about how to make them, but make them was what I had to do. Except – kids from my part of the world weren’t supposed to do those kinds of things. And the world wasn’t ready to break any rules just for me. I was going to be one of those in the multitudes of failures – one of those who may have not failed for lack of ability or determination, but for no good reason at all. Like one of those millions of soldiers in millions of battles in millions of wars – the soldiers who didn’t survive for no other reason than that the bullet went here instead of there.

Rejection slips, the personal ones  – they were these little notes slipped to me that both confirmed and negated my status in a world I chose to live in. You’re good, but it just doesn’t matter. Good we got. Millions more good writers than we’ll ever need. Sorry.

Well. What can you say? I tried to do it right, and what I got was “Sorry.”

The literary landscape faced one way. I faced another. I could try to write the stuff the literary editors liked, but … wasn’t that what my teachers taught me writers do in the “popular fiction” markets? Wasn’t that the thing we were supposed to avoid because we were real, true artists who didn’t pay attention to the beck and call of editors and readers?

So – “literature,” the light of civilization, turns out to be the same sort of marketplace that guides and guards this world with invisible hands.

Not that I’m complaining, or was complaining at the time. All I regretted was that I didn’t receive the memo sooner.

If you’re going to the market, you better bring something someone wants to buy. Eventually, I found something I could sell, and sold it.

But it wasn’t my old neighborhood. It wasn’t the people I knew. It wasn’t all I had grown up with, the things I observed, the feelings and the explicit  expression of those feelings. Nobody wanted to read that shit, so I stopped trying to sell that story – until now.

Maybe this time I’ve figured out how to tell the story. Maybe this time I will find an audience that’s ready to listen.

Everything’s gone but this song (from "The Va-va-va- VOOM!" novel in progress)

Yesterday, I drove past the grand old building on the northwest corner of 63rd Street and Central Avenue. It's being prepared for demolition. It has stood in the same spot for over eighty years and now, for some reason, it's a hindrance to air traffic for the neighboring Midway Airport. Anyone who can't smell a scam about this deal must be having nosebleeds.

I bought comic books -- and monster magazines, and writers' magazines and paperbacks -- in the corner drugstore of that building. "Central Rexall Drugs." I had crushes on two of the cashiers. I bought my first Castle of Frankenstein there (and, as you all know, everything I ever needed to know I learned from Castle of Frankenstein). Steve Ditko. "Charlton Comics Give You More!" Turok Son of Stone. Magnus, Robot Fighter. Jim Steranko. Jim Steranko. JIM STERANKO!!! Monster Mania. Modern Monsters. Ray Bradbury . . .

Another personal landmark is about to go down.

What was the name of that book about Richard Nickel, the photographer who tried to save the legacy of Chicago's great architects, like Louis Sullvan? -- They All Fall Down.

So, with the imminent death of one of my favorite old hangouts, and the inundation of news about deaths near and far (Andrea Dubnick, Delphyne Woods, Fred Pohl, Lou Reed, Marcia Wallace . . . how many more?) the song below has been on my mind.

It comes from the world of my novel, The Va-va-va VOOM! It's not a spoiler (not a big one, at least) to say that this is the second song Cath (the narrator) wrote for Rad Tate and his band, The Knuckles. The song credit goes to Gideon Faust and "C. Ulaszek" (perhaps because Rad still believed that "Chicks can't write rock and roll!" -- a comment that triggered the first set of lyrics Cath wrote for the band, the title of which is where the novel takes its name). Rad Tate: vocals; Gideon Faust: lead guitar; Curtis Klucynski: rhythm guitar; Marlon Woodson: bass (the GOOD bass player!); Donnie Callahan: drums. Dutifully transcribed from the version only available on a Dutch compilation CD, long out of print -- at least in this universe. Please note: this music is coming out of cheap guitars and big amps, at a tempo that would get you a speeding ticket even in Montana.

Yeah, I know: everything goes. Then you move on. Get over it. But first . . .

EVERYTHING’S GONE BUT THIS SONG

E

Been around | Seen it all

E

Saw when they built it and I saw it fall.

A

Big world | Falling apart

E

Won’t be much left than when it all got start.

 

E                           B

’Cause it’s gone,

B                      A

Baby it’s gone,

A                    B                          A

It’s all gone, gone, it’s all gone

A                             G                                E         B

Everything’s gone but this song.

 

E

We had | A movie show

E

A little drugstore with a wooden floor.

A

We had | A corner tap

E

An all-night diner and all sort of crap

 

E                    B

But it’s gone,

B                      A

Baby it’s gone,

A                    B                          A

It’s all gone, gone, it’s all gone

A                             G                                E         B

Everything’s gone but this song.

 

E

It’s gone | It’s all gone.

E

May stick around a while but not for long.

A

It’s gone | Everything’s gone.

E

I never said if it was right or wrong.

E                           B

But it’s gone,

B                      A

Baby it’s gone,

A                    B                          A

It’s all gone, gone, it’s all gone

A                             G                               E          B

Everything’s gone but this song.

 

E

My friends | Were pretty cool

E

We’d hang around a lot right after school.

A

In the garage | Or down on the street

E

We made a mess of every place we’d meet.

 

E                           B

But they’re gone,

B                      A

Baby they’re gone,

A                    B                                 A

They’re all gone, gone, they’re all gone

A                             G                                E         B

Everyone’s gone in this song.

 

E

My chick | Was pretty slick

E

Met at the bar and got it on pretty quick.

A

Made love | Every day

E

We kept on ballin’ ’til they took her away.

 

E                    B

Now she’s gone,

B                      A

Baby she’s gone,

A                    B                            A

She’s all done, done, she’s all done

A                             G                                E         B

Everyone’s done but this one.

 

E

It’s gone | It’s all gone.

E

May stick around a while but not for long.

A

It’s gone | Everything’s gone.

E

I never said if it was right or wrong.

E                    B

But it’s gone,

B                      A

Baby it’s gone,

A                    B                          A

It’s all gone, gone, it’s all gone

A                             G                               E          B

Everything’s gone but this song.

 

E

Went to work | At a couple of jobs

E

In some old fact’ry for a couple of slobs

A

Lousy work | Lousier pay

E

Didn’t miss it when it all went away.

 

E                           B

Now they’re gone,

B                      A

Baby they’re gone,

A                                   B                         A

The work’s all gone, gone, it’s all gone

A                             G                                E         B

Everything’s gone but this song.

 

E

Who gives a fuck?  | Who gives a damn?

E

Your old man’s dying and your mom’s in a jam.

A

Your stupid sorrow and | Your stupid pain

E

Just watch it all going down the drain.

 

E                                  B

’Cause they’re gone

B                           A

They’re all gone

A                                          B                          A

The whole thing’s done, done, it’s all gone

A                         G                                    E         B

Everyone’s gone in this song.

 

E

Big world | What is it for?

E

We stick around until they show you the door.

A

We’re gone | Everyone’s dead

E

You didn’t hear a word that I just said

 

E                                B

’Cause you’re gone,

B                           A

Baby you’re gone,

A                         B

You’re all gone, gone, you’re all gone

A                             G                                E         B

Everyone’s gone in this song.

 

E

I’m gone | You’re gone too

E

Nobody knows us and you know that’s true.

A

We’re gone | We’re all gone

E

The only thing that’s left’s this fuckin’ song.

 

E                             B

’Cause we’re gone,

B                         A

Baby we’re gone,

A                       B

We’re all gone, gone, we’re all gone

A                         G                                E            B

Everyone’s gone but this song.

 

E

It’s gone | It’s all gone.

E

May stick around a while but not for long.

A

It’s gone | Everything’s gone.

E

I never said if it was right or wrong.

E                    B

But it’s gone,

B                      A

Baby it’s gone,

A                    B

It’s all done, gone, gone-gone-gone,

A                                                                                      

Everything, Everything, Everything, Everything’s –  

E

It’s gone | It’s all gone.

E

May stick around a while but not for long.

A

It’s gone | Everything’s gone.

E

I never said if it was right or wrong.

E                           B

But it’s gone,

B                      A

Baby it’s gone,

A                    B                          A

It’s all gone, gone, it’s all gone

A                             G                               E          B

Everything’s gone but this song.

E

. . . So long!
 

Photo from James stoneofzanzibar on his Flickr page (many thanks), taken January 30, 2012. This great photo accents the Aragonese terra cotta facade. A building of true architectural distinction in the neighborhood of Clearing -- about to go down, probably to be replaced with some wretched little brick box.

Have I Been Gone That Long?

A whole month? Really?

Really.

I keep thinking about blog posts then rejecting the ideas because I don't think they would be that interesting, or that they are interesting ideas that I can't possibly do justice to, or I'll fall back on the old standby that, hey, I've got more pressing work to do -- do you want to write, or do you want to write about writing?

It's been summer, if you haven't noticed. In summer, I often work late at night when the temperatures are down (okay, I work late at night during the other three seasons as well -- but summer gives me an extra reason). Late at night is a good time to work, but it can also be a time when all your insecurities come out. Who cares? Who really cares about all this junk?

I don't know. And, in a world which, at this time, is filled with a few million extra folks filling up blogs with posts on every possible topic, in every possible manner, of every possible quality, does it matter?

Good lord, what have I done with this month?

I have put together another e-book, by golly. It's called Into a Space Unseen and it features three published pieces -- the plan behind these e-books was that I would quickly put them together, hit the "publish" button at KDP and, badda-bing badda boom! I'd give the books some basic pluggerino because, after all, you don't go to all that trouble and just try to hide the damned things. Especially since it would be nice if a few people buy the e-books.

Part of this e-book experiment has to do with seeing if this sort of e-book publishing produces some viable revenue.

Yes, I am destitute. I broke open my last piggy bank to make it through the end of the month. I will not get paid for teaching until October. I would very much like not to have to make statements of this sort.

It's not that I don't enjoy the great cosmic uncertainty that faces me now. It's only a more highly defined version of the uncertainty under which everyone lives, for as long as they live. Try as one might, funds go south. Health goes south. Reputation goes south. Friends go south. I am living at a time and in a country where upheavals come every week (I was about to say, "With every morning paper," but you already know what happened to those). There's no way to get through this life without making a few gambles.

Of course, some folks are lucky enough to make gambles they can afford.

Others will say, "If you can afford it, it's not gambling."

By that definition, I'm gambling.

Forty years ago, when I entered the "regular" job world, I did so because I believed it would be a temporary thing. At some point, I would kick into whatever it was I best suited for, whether that was writing, teaching, sitting at a desk and sorting things out in a way that would satisfy some who might pay me, and satisfy myself that I was doing work that I was best suited to do, that added to my life and gave my existence what can be loosely defined as "meaning." I would take my rightful place in the world, be it as a subsidiary functionary or as a significant "voice," a "contributor," in some way, to the progress of humanity and civilization.

After a decade in the "job world," I realized I entered a trap. And I lacked the means to escape. The decision, it seemed, wasn't mine to make. You don't decide to contribute to the culture; the culture decides whether you will or not. Resistance may not be futile, but it's one hell of a battle without sufficient allies, funds, resources, opportunities, etc.

So, after I finally got thrown from the train called "Useless Shitwork" and dusted myself off, and upon discovering that a canned newspaper employee in his late-fifties isn't particularly desirable -- oh, hell with that . . . I was NEVER desirable as a hire of any sort -- when I did get hired it was on the strength of someone's recommendation or because I came through the door when the people hiring were desperate enough to hire anyone. I kid you not. Anyway, having dusted myself off, yadda yadda as before, I decided, "Well, I tried it their way. Maybe this time I can try it my way."

So here I am. Destitute.

Okay, so what else have I done during the dog days?

Headaches? Arthritis? And just the other day I picked up a stomach bug, or I might be enjoying my eighth ulcer. August is never good for my health.

Even so, I've really enjoyed most of my trips downtown on the Metra. The walks to the train station. The walks back. Running into colleagues and former students at Columbia. Meeting with my writing group over at Cafe Perla. Visiting the writing group Trey Thoelcke runs at College of DuPage (the Semi Os), all the work I've done hammering out a reading list for my fall Science Fiction Writing class. Likewise the Short Story Writing class I'll start teaching Tuesday (though I'm still rifling around looking for my master of Katherine Mansfield's "A Dill Pickle," which I want them to read for my first session).

Have I finished writing "Dixon's Road"? No, but I'm close. And I feel as if I've finally found the moments where the story should pivot and kick my readers in the head. The science fiction readers/critics who do the reviewing and pooh-poohing in the field won't get it. They never get my shit. Because one thing I'm going to throw at them is the crazy notion that poetry has a "future in the future" because it isn't technological -- because it's verbal and visceral. And while they're chewing over this "old fashioned" notion of mine, they'll miss the rabbit punch about the "love story" between my protagonist and the woman he knew almost a century before and how the house he once lived in, which has become a museum, is part and parcel of the love story; that the people and the house and everything else is inseparable and lost -- they won't even notice that. Though I hope a good editor notices.

And the story I started called "The Agent," now called, maybe, "Reggie is Reggie"? I still have some rough rows to hoe. The main roughie is still going to be how Charlotte manages to meet the other kids in her little "cell" with all the draws from her attention in the social networking world? We have already learned to shut off so much marketing and data-mining "noise," how will Charlotte recognize that Reggie is bringing all these people together for something other than selling them more shit they neither want nor need?

I read another section of The Va-va-va VOOM! at the Gumbo Fiction Salon open mike this month, and it seemed to go over pretty well. I have to send it to the person at Tor responsible for sorting out authors and new editors after the departure of Jim Frenkel. I have over 60,000 words of novel, but I still have to hammer the outline down. Hasn't the outline always been the biggest headache?

And "The Man Who Put the Bomp"? There's still several important scenes I need to write, but the shape is getting there. Every saur story I write can't be just another saur story. It's not simply a matter of progressing the "plot." but in adding to the scope and outlook of the world the saurs occupy.

And something new has been coming into my head -- no not really new, but more like something I played around with before but now I think I can really try to work upon. It's a story I want to call "The Home Run," and it's about what might happen if Louis H. Sullivan, shortly before his death, gets a glimpse of the world of architecture 90 years on, in the form of the Roosevelt Tower, now situated just north of his Auditorium Building. I came upon a quote from one of his letters Friday, talking about the world of architecture and his own situation therein: "There may be a future, but there is no present."

Damn! If that ain't a kick in the head. I want it to be a brief story, just a couple of thousand words, narrated by an old colleague who comes to visit him early in April of 1924. It's one of those stories I blithely (and foolishly) imagine myself able to knock out swiftly and unequivocably, then find myself doing fifty drafts more and screaming because the one important link that brings the whole thing together has evaded me.

Oh well.

It's September now. I've still got a lot of plans (not even mentioned here) and a lot of work to get done (though I'm down one class, thanks to all the "prioritization" finagling going on at Columbia now). I might even manage to file a few more blog posts. It's a race between my native stubbornness and total disaster.

And the odds are always in disaster's favor.

Introduction to "Auteur Theory," Part One

Yes, yes, I know I should be working on new stories. I'm getting there, honest. But I'm still being lured into the whole world of e-books (or should that be "ebooks"? Shows you how little I know about this world). Hey, I used to have some of my old stories with Alexandria Digital Literature. Remember how well that worked out? Okay, let's not remember that ...

I've been working out ways of packaging the stories, of putting out the equivalent of little chapbooks, pairing the stories one way or another. The weekend of Father's Day it occurred to me that three of my stories featured dads. So I said, "Okay, how about we put "Auteur Theory," "Where We Go" and "The Cthulhu Orthodontist" together. That will be one book. And maybe I'll write an introduction for it, explain where the character of Andrew came about."

So I started working on the introduction and got this far. I wouldn't ordinarily bother you with it, but I'm still playing around with committing acts of bloggery. I'm sort of intrigued as to how far I might go. If I ever manage to make a point I might even learn a thing or two about my creative process or lack thereof.

"About the time I was in fourth grade, maybe earlier but certainly no later, I invented a father.

"Not that I didn’t have a father already. It’s just that I needed another one. One who wasn’t so – not to get too deep into it at this time – so … 'real.'

"Kids invent imaginary friends. Often, they invent other kids – kids who exhibit the qualities they desire in themselves, or who represent some part of themselves they cannot or will not express. I don’t know too many people who talk about their imaginary friends, but I’m sure many more had them than will ’fess up to it now, even among the people of my tribe – writers.

"My imaginary friends were all adults. I was no fool (an idiot, yes, but not a complete fool). I knew who had all the power and where all the fun was to be had. Adults will disagree with that assessment. I disagree with it myself, now.

"I claim to be no better or worse than the next stunted, insecure, psychically-injured-down-to-the-root-of-the-soul-type kid who grew up in a cultural desert of bungalows and raised ranch houses of the mid-twentieth century. All I know is that my fantasies had a slightly odd curve to them.

"You see, if I went to a movie like, let’s say, The Time Machine, I didn’t come back wanting to be the character Rod Taylor played, the time traveler rescuing the helpless Eloi and fighting off the scary Morlocks (or, as we used to call them, Morons). I wanted to be the guy who made the movie about the time traveler rescuing Eloi and battling Morlocks.

When I read a book, I didn’t want to be the hero of the story; I wanted to be the guy who wrote the story, or a story very like it.

"And so with the comic books at the Rexall. And so with music. And so with paintings in the Art Institute. I didn’t know much about art – Hell, I didn’t know about anything. You couldn’t get dumber than me without being scraped up, placed into a clay pot and watered twice a week. I didn’t know a thing about art – except that it was made.

"Made. It didn’t fall out of the sky. It wasn’t the product of air masses or sunspots. Even if you wanted to attribute art to a godlike entity, an intermediary did all the grunt work. Art is made.

"And I wanted to make it.

"Not that I knew how. I didn’t even know how to make my bed. I didn’t know how to carry numbers in arithmetic. I didn’t know how to bring home the correct change if my mother sent me to the store for milk (she did that once and once only – in my household, you had but one chance to do anything; if you screwed up you were forever labeled a screw-up and never, ever, trusted again to do anything of importance).

"But I knew I wanted to make some kind of art. Movies. Books. Paintings. Music. Whatever. I wanted to tell stories. Nothing could have been more important. In second grade, I had to fill out a questionnaire and one of the questions had been about what I wanted to be when I grew up. I ran out of space somewhere between doctor and paratrooper. But if I had filled out that form two years later, I most likely would have limited myself to movie maker, writer and, running a close third, paleontologist (look at it this way: if I wrote books about dinosaurs I would be telling their stories. Scientists can be storytellers, too).

"How to get there? I couldn’t see how, though I was very willing to try. But … to make it as plain as I possibly can, kids from the Southwest Side of Chicago did not grow up to be movie makers, or writers, or visual artists. Kids from the Southwest Side grew up to work in factories. Or drive trucks. Or pump gas (when such jobs could be had). That’s what I was given to believe. If you had high aspirations, you could apply yourself so that maybe one day you would wear a white shirt and a tie to work every day and not carry your lunch in a metal container. You’d be working for a company that manufactured screws, or cables, or plastic shims that would fit under your Formica-topped kitchen table. Or you’d be selling insurance, or keeping books for the company that made those ever-so-essential shims. But not much more than that. Nothing wrong with such a life. One does what one needs to do. Shims are valuable objects, easily worth their weight in … shims. That just wasn’t where I wanted to go.

"From where I stood, at my age, weight and height, the future looked like a still sea of death, smooth as glass.

"Of course I fantasized. Of course I invented a person who could do the things I couldn’t do. Of course I often imagined I was him and he was me.

"And even when I grew older, old enough to leave behind much of the world I created inside my head, every now and then my thoughts returned to that guy.

"He became the basis for Andrew Ulaszek, the retired movie maker of “Auteur Theory.” He showed up again in “The Cthulhu Orthodontist,” and once more in “Where We Go.” He’s the father of one of my most frequent narrators (see “Surfaces” and “The Ambiguities”). The old dude and his family get around.

"I’m not through with him yet.

"Or he’s not through with me.

"What's the deal with that?"