Man in the dunes

Thanks to the Provincetown Community Compact, I just had a chance to spend a great week in the dunes of the Cape Cod National Seashore. I lived in a three-room shack built in the 1940’s and moved in the 70’s to its current location in a sandy bottom about five minutes’ walk from the ocean. It’s a very quiet, fragile part of the world, a site of perhaps America’s first ecological disaster of European origin– when the Pilgrims of Plymouth deforested the area to ship lumber back to England and repay the debt of their passage.

Some nights the wind shook the old shack very loudly. I had no electricity or plumbing, but there was a wood heating stove, a propane range, and a small propane fridge. It wasn’t primitive, but it wasn’t modern either. The place felt stuck in time in maybe the beginning of the 20th century or even a little before. Based on the very interesting bookshelf, the shack now seems to be used by an intersection of different cabin-oriented groups, transcendentalists and artists and psychedelic explorers and queer colonists from nearby Provincetown. I read a lot from that bookshelf, and I got a lot of writing done too. Altogether I was pretty well convinced that living in a cabin is the way to go.

Pictures below. Be forewarned, they were shot on my cell phone, and there are no people in any of them. People were not a major theme of my week.

sunset from loft bedroom window

the shack

coming over the dunes to the atlantic

dunelands vista

sunset (beach faced north)

sleeping loft

work desk

brown water for washing

my good friend the woodstove

Three songs for the day

What I had on my headphones that morning, coming up above ground on 7th Avenue.

–

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXiBRBZ1F2g

The first artistic statement about it that I internalized, December 19 show at SOB’s. (The video won’t embed, click through.)

–

One year anniversary, I bought this album and took a walk in Central Park, where I ran into a large group of mentally handicapped people singing John Lennon songs. Those songs will remain in my imagination.

New season

Scattered updates as I calibrate my internal thermometer below 100 degrees for the first time in about three months:

1. “After the Party,” which was a finalist in the Diagram contest, can now be read online. This story had a great reaction when I read it in Austin last year. Stuck there on the page (or the computer screen), I’m concerned that it’s maybe half as much fun. So if you click that link, I strongly encourage you to read it out loud to yourself.

2. In a little less than a month, I will briefly reside at the C-Scape Dune Shack in Provincetown, MA. If you have tips for how to pass cold October evenings in a wood-stove heated shack in that part of the world, let me know

3. I have begun a screenplay. Though I’m vigilant about keeping my book the first priority, it’s been fun to mess around in a parallel genre. There are a lot of negative things to be said about screenwriting as an art, many of which are true (one piece of advice I got was not to use any adjectives besides “huge.”) But there is a non-negotiable central principle to it that I  like– call it the Awesome Principle. Every choice, every scene, every metaphor must be awesome. Yes, this principle is eventually unsupportable, and that’s why real life is not like the movies. If I had to describe a prime quality that I strive for in art, it wouldn’t be awesomeness exactly. But it wouldn’t be far off either.

4. Revision is hard. I’m getting better, though.

Reality

This update comes from Sebastopol, California, where the Odyssey Works Summer Institute is exploring key questions in experiential theatre:

-Given twenty-four hours and limited resources, what is the coolest experience we can create for a single person?

-How do we access and activate a sense of wonder? How are scale, narrative, terror, and humor related?

-What is the most delicious dinner? (Betting on stuffed eggplants tonight.)

-Can goats be trusted?

-Can five people live in a tent city and work eight hours a day for two weeks without driving each other nuts?

-Did Father Flynn do it? (Yes.)

-Which yogurt is ours?

-How can five people talk with one authorial voice?

-Meatpaper?

-Will anyone notice if I eat these blackberries?

-What if we got a hot air balloon?

-Did you see that meteor? What about that one?

-How long have we been out here, anyway?

-Is there a more real reality that we sometimes break through to, or does that feeling of breakthrough come from our acceptance of our current reality as real enough?

-Here comes the fog.

-That wasn’t a question.

-Everything’s a question.

-It’s only a question if you can answer it.

-We don’t do answers here.

-I need to be alone for a while.

-Okay.

-But I can’t stop this conversation now.

If you have answers to any of these, please leave them in the comments.

The Susan Lucci of short story awards no one’s ever heard of…

For the second time in a few months, a short story of mine has been recognized in a contest, but hasn’t quite made the cut to where I’d get, er, paid. I’m one of five finalists (out of about 400) in DIAGRAM’s $5 Innovative Fiction Prize.

The story, “After the Party”, will be published in DIAGRAM, a great independent journal that focuses on, you guessed it, innovative fiction, poetry, and schematics. If my story ends up online I’ll link to it at left.

Best summer ever

I’ve been locking myself in my room a lot lately, building something up.   I don’t have much professional or artistic news to report, but I did just get back from a bus trip in Mexico.  This blog has been idle for some time, so I offer the following dispatches:

May 31, 2009:  First day of the 21st century? I wake up in America.  GM says it’s filing for bankruptcy and I go to see UP in 3-D.  Looking around the theater, I’m sure that these kids will grow up scorning the flat Hollywoodization of emotional reality that made the 20th century possible.  I see (frighteningly) interactive entertainments just on the horizon.  Also, at some point in the last fifteen years somebody figured out a way to make 3-D glasses that aren’t different colors on each eye.

Joan Didion vs. John Berger. I read those two while traveling.  Both are gentle upper-class interwar babies, alarmed at modernity (and, in Berger’s case, everything since the industrial revolution), concerned with values, essayists at heart even in their fiction.  Both write like you could not possibly help but agree with their strong opinions.  This time, Didion is way ahead; reading her feels like getting a back massage, all my little knots worked out.  Berger’s G., an attempt at a postmodern novel (with intense authorial interjections, going so far as to sweet-talk his female characters), potentially has a role in my spending all night getting sick in a hotel bathroom without toilet paper and finally falling asleep, where I feverishly dream that Primo Levi gave up writing in order to spend all his energy saving one person every day, and this day he has chosen to save me from my food poisoning.  I wake up and the fever has broken.  Levi wins, a dark horse.

I’ve been listening to Nick Cave while the deserts and mountains go by my window.

The Oscars of short stories that nobody reads

I made a list of the 100 notable short stories published online in 2008.

If I get through the next round of judging, you’ll have a chance to vote for me.  You bet I’ll keep you posted.

Half a thousand words

I got a new gig reviewing art for the Texas-centric e-journal …might be good.  I like it because it gives me free reign to be highbrow, which is harder to do when you write for publications that make money on ad sales.  (MBG is donor funded.)  Several excellent local writers review for mbg, check it out.

My first review (first ever art review anywhere) is here.

SX visual mixtape

Here are the seven best shows I saw at South By Southwest this year:

anti-poetry

Lately, I’ve been carrying around a Blackberry with a concise OED and thesaurus loaded on it.  Not only has this changed the way I approach reading (I was never one to look up words before, and I admit that the line has been pretty fuzzy between “I don’t like this” and “There are so many words I don’t know here that my head is starting to hurt”)– it’s also given me a start on the technical vocabulary I would need to discuss poetry in print.  Here is my first poetry book review.