I still buy books & other secrets

I'm popping in here for the weirdly contrarian purpose of sharing a secret or two. Secret number one is that I do still buy physical books sometimes. In the early years of this blog I wrote several times about my book-gathering compulsions--store-buying and library-borrowing--which tended to build to irresistible levels at certain periods. Namely, approaching holidays or vacations. It seems I had, and indeed still have, a horror of finding myself with plenty of time to read and an insufficient supply of choices. Just heard about, been reading to mean forever, and every category in between, there's no clear pattern to how and why I zoom around grabbing up books in the lead-up to leisure time. Older, tireder, but if anything more compulsive a reader than ever, the pattern still applies. And so, as my summer month off work draws near, I've been scouring my to-read list, other people's to-read lists, reviews, and so on, and cross-checking same with: the three library systems I use, the two e-library systems I use, online booksellers, and the Strand. And then, variously, borrowing library books physical and virtual, and, yes, when I find one or seventeen on the Strand's cheap shelves, buying them. I'm about to head up there on today's lunch hour, having put together a list of half a dozen I think I can afford. Meanwhile, I've got another three already on e-book library loan, and a dozen or so more on e-library hold. As to the Strand excursion and likely purchases, cheap though they'll be, sssh--please don't tell my wife. She's been on a get-rid-of-books kick for some time, and finds my resistance exasperating. She's got reason on her side. In a few years when I retire we'll be moving, and no doubt our next place will be smaller than the outrageously big Queens floor-through where we've lived for many years. Teresa figures we might as well start downsizing now, and in fact we have given away or sold plenty of books over the last few years, but yes I admit I've negated any progress by continuing to buy--not nearly at the rate I used to but still. Well. While the great majority of my reading is library books, some books I just want to have forever on our shelves. So, yeah, don't tell her, but a few more are coming home with me shortly.

The other secret concerns my current writing project. My second novel. Or should I say my third? After slowly plowing forward on a novel for eight or nine years, about a year ago I found myself much more excited about an altogether different idea. After bouncing back and forth between the two for the last year or so, I've now fully committed to the newer project and officially set aside what I'd long thought would end up as my second novel. So idea #3 will, if all goes well, end up as novel #2, and I couldn't be happier and, in a way, more relieved, because it represents a breaking out in a new direction for me, a refresh, which I hope the writing will reflect. I don't want to say much about this project--never a good idea with creative endeavors since who knows what might happen--but I will say this without getting specific about content. If I manage to make the book I'm trying to make, this novel will be a new take, a different angle, on dystopian fiction. Actually, and I guess this will sound either foolishly ambitious or, I don't know, pompous, this novel will be a rejoinder to the hopelessly tired, unoriginal, and deeply uncreative glut of dystopian novels with which we're endlessly bombarded nowadays. (By the way, I've aired this complaint before on Read Red. Here and here and here.) What do I mean when I dis these books, yeah why not say it, this whole genre, in this way? Without a single exception as far as I know--and no of course I haven't read them all, but I've read quite a few, and I've read about most of the rest--all these dystopias posit a future in which nothing really has changed. Yes, everything has gotten worse, much worse. But nothing basic, by which I mean the organizing principles and the human relations of the the fictive society portrayed, has shifted in any way. To put it plainly: capitalism continues. Racism rules, sexism triumphs, the rich are richer and control everything even more than they do now. And so on. There is not a single one of these dystopias--if I'm wrong please point me to it--that imagines a future in which human beings have gotten together and reorganized society in an egalitarian way. Not one novel in which, even though capitalism has wrought untold horrors, people have decided to dump the horrible system that's created such devastation (wars, plagues, ecological disaster, you name it) and cobble together a new one with which, unfettered by the one percent's destructive drive for profits, they can begin to rebuild and renew life on Earth. So yeah, that's my modest proposal: to write an alternative narrative that dares to imagine what apparently is unimaginable to most writers, locked in to bourgeois consciousness as they all seem to be. A future in which, after the horrors have ensued--because the horrors have ensued--humanity joins together to fashion a new world. I won't mention the working title of my novel, but I will say that its subtitle is: "A Dys/Utopia." Because while my version won't skip the death and destruction, it will depict the new day that follows. Yes, this will be a novel of hope.

So I read with interest Jill Lepore's recent New Yorker piece about dystopian fiction. Naturally I disagree with her basic political thrust, equating left and right, and lamenting the new dystopians' giving up on the "the liberal state." As if bourgeois democracy in this age of late-stage capitalism in decline, bourgeois democracy with all its intrinsically undemocratic features, its very basis in structural racism, its reliance on imperialist war and occupation, as if the capitalist state which exists to facilitate the theft of surplus value and to repress the working class and oppressed nations--as if the very structures created by and upholding the stinking murderous racist capitalist system--as if all this somehow constitutes a shining beacon of hope and light. Which, apparently, futurist fiction ought to be building up rather than abandoning. I'd counter that all these imagination-impaired (on this we agree) dystopians in fact do accept the status quo, completely, unquestioningly. In fact, they portray it as going on and on. They're certainly right that things will get worse and worse if it does. But because their fiction is imbued with bourgeois ideology they can't imagine a different turn in the future. A whole new way of structuring society, humanity taking on the revolutionary socialist project of reconstruction and renewal, is beyond their creative capacity. They can only see things getting worse, because they can't imagine that humanity is capable of something better.

Lepore does make some good points about dystopian novels, especially toward the end of her piece:

Dystopia used to be a fiction of resistance; it’s become a fiction of submission, the fiction of an untrusting, lonely, and sullen twenty-first century, the fiction of fake news and infowars, the fiction of helplessness and hopelessness. It cannot imagine a better future, and it doesn’t ask anyone to bother to make one. [my bold] It nurses grievances and indulges resentments; it doesn’t call for courage; it finds that cowardice suffices. Its only admonition is: Despair more.

In my view, the alternative to despair is indeed imagining a better future. We'll make one by tearing down this system that's driven the planet, and 99% of its people, to the brink of destruction. My book will be fiction. I can only do my best to imagine how it all will happen, and no doubt most of what I imagine won't turn out to even resemble how it actually goes down. But go down it will. I aspire to contribute my modest bit to a literature of hope as we head forward.

A stunning new review of Vera's Will

File this one under shameless self-promotion, but sometimes a girl's got to do what a girl's got to do.

One and a half years after publication, long after I stopped expecting any new reviews of my 2015 novel Vera's Will, there is one. And it's a beauty.

Writing for The Lesbrary, a wonderful lesbian book review site from which, honestly, I'd long since given up on hoping for a review, a North Carolina librarian named Tierney offers a deeply thoughtful and gratifyingly positive take on the book. I'm so grateful, not only that Tierney liked the book--though of course that too--but also that she really got it. Really appreciated it for exactly what I'd wish it to be appreciated for. Her one criticism is on target, too, I've got to say.

I'll just tease here with a few choice phrases from the review: "heart-wrenching and heartwarming"..."an entrancing read"..."beautifully bittersweet, both melancholy and heartening"..."filled a void in queer fiction..."

Now please go read the full review! Thank you, Tierney, thank you Lesbrary!

QUEENS BOOK FESTIVAL! & OUTWRITE!

As a little known writer of an obscure novel published by a small press, it's always a delightful surprise when somebody wants to hear anything from me. So I'm still a little shocked to say that I'll get a chance to say a few words about books, writing, and my take on it all at two separate important literary events on the weekend of August 6-7.

First, I'll be in D.C. for the annual OutWrite LGBT Book Festival. It's a weekend-long extravaganza of books, writers, readings, talks, panels, that is as far as I know the most inclusive, interesting, multifaceted gathering of LGBTQ writers and readers that ever takes place in this country. I'll be reading from my novel Vera's Will, and also taking part in panels on historical fiction and literary activism, all on Saturday August 6.

I'll rush back home to Queens, NY, on the train that same night, because the next day I get to be a part of the first Queens Book Festival. This is truly exciting--both the daylong event, and the fact that I get to be part of the inaugural edition of what promises to be an excellent annual literary gathering. The New York City borough of Queens, my home for 22 years now, is the most multinational locale on earth, and naturally as home to people from all over the globe it's also the site of a burgeoning literary and arts scene that gives voice especially to working-class and oppressed poets, writers and artists who have for so long been shut out from access to the bourgeois-corporate literary-artistic marketplace (for want of a better word, well actually it's a perfect word). I'll be part of a 4 p.m. panel on LGBTQ Representation in the Literary World. But I plan to be at the festival most of the day, because there's a stunning lineup of writers whose voices I want to hear.

To tell the truth I'm more than a little stunned at the cohort alongside whom I'll be presenting at the panels and readings I'm taking part in at both the D.C. OutWrite conference and the Queens Book Festival. These are names I've known, artists I've admired, for a long time. It'll be an honor to share some time, some space, some thoughts with them. A surprising honor.

VERA'S WILL by .... me!

I'm thrilled to announce that my novel Vera's Will is set for publication by Hamilton Stone Editions in late 2014/early 2015.

It's been a long hard slog. I started writing this book 15 years ago. I started trying to get it published almost 10 years ago. I got a lot of positive reactions from agents and publishers, but all of it was along the lines of "this is great, I'm sure someone will grab it up, but it's not for us, we wouldn't know how to market it." I held on to the "this is great" bits, told myself the "we can't market it" bits were anti-gay and anti-political-fiction, nursed oceans of resentment and hostility (as one does LOL) toward anyone who did manage to get a book published. Went on to start a second novel, worked on it in fits and starts, grew ever more enervated and discouraged as I approached age 60 and wrestled with encroaching health problems, all the while trundling to work and back endlessly with no prospect of affordable retirement ever in sight.

Now, though, tra-la! My novel will see the light of day, and I couldn't be happier. Of course this entails lots more labor. These recent weeks I've been toiling at some revisions requested by HSE, which terrified me at first but by which I've now become energized. The big thing, gulp, is that I'm writing a new ending. I think it might work! This is a huge relief.
 
The other hard part of the final revisions is dealing with the song lyrics that pop up in many scenes throughout the novel. U.S. law makes it impossible to include any snatch of a song lyric, no matter how brief, and not even a song title either, without the permission of the copyright holder. The way the copyright holder (rarely the actual songwriter, usually one of the big music corporations like BMI) grants permission is basically by selling it. You have to pay for the right to include the bit of lyric. The cost ranges from hundreds to thousands of dollars. Well, guess what, I haven't got hundreds or thousands of dollars and neither does my small-press publisher. And so, with great snarling sadness, I'm having to go through page by page, find each song lyric, and excise it, sometimes altogether, sometimes change it to a sort of reference that is not an actual direct quote of the lyric. I hate hate hate this! It's hard to do without diluting, damaging any given scene. I've been surprised to find out how many lyrics appear throughout the manuscript, though I guess I shouldn't be as it makes sense for my two protagonists that popular music is a part of their lives; I feel like I should apologize to them for yanking it away.

And lyrics from songs performed by what legendary artist show up in my novel more than any other? Why, Aretha Franklin, of course. Ouch! Oy! Last night at her wonderful Radio City concert (see post below), I was surprised, delighted, and, well, thrown into a sob-o-rama, when she sang one of my most beloved of her songs, "Gotta Find Me An Angel," written by her late sister Carolyn Franklin. This song is key to a climactic scene in my novel. It's killing me that I've got to delete the (brief but important) lines from it. But delete them I must. Ah the life of the tortured artist.

OK, yeah, I know, pity me not. My novel's getting published! I'll be back with details as the date approaches.

Good news, mostly

I don't know whether the new year will see an uptick in my postings here. It just may be. We shall see. The silence lately hasn't been because I haven't been reading, or suddenly have stopped having opinions, or think there's any less need for left literary rants. What I've started having, I'm sorry to report, is some health problems. Mechanic and organic. Nothing life-threatening but real enough that I've just been dealing with them, getting by day to day getting to work and back and not much else.

However. I have high hopes that there will soon be an improvement on the health front, and with that renewed energy for Read Red. Meanwhile there are a couple bright spots in my own literary life to report.

One is that I have a story, "The Ellen Burstyn Equation," in the new issue of Newtown Literary. I admire what the Newtown folks are doing to promote writers from my NYC borough, Queens, and am delighted that my work is included in this latest offering. It's issue #3, and you can order it here.

I haven't taken part in a literary event for a long time, but the second bit of good news is that I will be doing so very soon. It's the upcoming New York incarnation of Stories & Queer, a national reading series highlighting LGBTQ poets and writers.

I'm pleased and honored that Ruben Quesada and Brian Kornell, the brains behind S&Q, asked me to take part. I'll be reading an excerpt from the novel I'm currently working on. So if you're in NYC and don't maintain an inside-on-winter-nights policy -- or even if, like me, you do, you can, like me, suspend the policy for this one night and -- come on down to the Bureau of General Services-Queer Division to join us for some good queer fun.

I'll be back here at Read Red soon with my annual list of the best books I read this year.

The Paterson Silk Strike pageant

Today is the 100th anniversary of a great event in the history of political art in this country: the magnificent Paterson Silk Strike Pageant, organized by the workers and their supporters including, among others, John Reed.

I'd hoped to have time to write a substantive post here about this event, such a stirring and important moment, such a shining example of solidarity, such a beacon to artists who want to serve the class struggle. No surprise, nope don't have the time. So, in hopes this doesn't slip into solipsism, I'll just say that as such a person myself--a writer who aspires to create literature of and for the struggle of the workers and oppressed--I'm using the occasion of this anniversary as a wake-up call, a reminder, a renewal. To set aside the tasks and to-do lists, the applications and submissions that take up too much time and divert my mind from its imaginings, and dive back into the work of creation. That's my summer resolution. To write, and write well. Through a series of twists and turns--waitlisted at one, accepted at one but only for a longer period than I have vacation days available, accepted at another but not for free--it turns out that the idyllic writing residency at an arts colony I'd thought was on the horizon is not to be. So it's all up to me. To sit down at my desk, flip open my laptop, shut out the dirty stinky NYC summertime waft, and get this novel done.

And my muse? Let it be them, the women and men of the Paterson Silk Strike who took to the stage at Madison Square Garden 100 years ago today to tell the world the story of their struggle. That's the spirit to imbue in people's art.

What's fiction for? Art of suffering, art of struggle

We've got a brand new conversation freshly posted over at Politerature, the site focused on political fiction that I maintain with author Meredith Sue Willis. This one starts with our mutual praise for the novel The Invisible Mountain by Carolina De Robertis and ranges outward from there, eventually toward questions about what art is for and what literature should be about. Plus, we've even included links to two pieces of writing, mine and MSW's, as examples of fiction that brings the reader right into the heart of political action.

Check it out.

Introducing POLITERATURE!

I'm involved in a new project that's just gone live: Politerature. I think it'll be of interest to anyone who follows Read Red, and I urge you to take a look.

The website, www.politerature.com, is dedicated to politically progressive literature. The idea is to seek out, share, promote and discuss fiction that embodies and expresses political ideas, fiction that takes sides with the workers and oppressed, that raises consciousness about racism or colonialism or women’s and LGBTQ oppression, about war and intervention, about destroying the Earth for corporate profit, about class and unions. To honor and develop a kind of literature that runs counter to the conventional wisdom that true art cannot be political.

We'll be posting book reviews, notes, news and commentary. And we'll be carrying on a conversation that ranges over our thoughts and ideas about politics and literature and where they meet. That conversation has now begun. In the first installment, we ponder plotlines--and whether we've had enough of family dysfunction stories.

Politerature is based on the belief that political fiction can open minds, inform, give insight, inspire, strengthen, and arm those fighting for a better world.
 

If that sounds familiar, similar to my slant here at Read Red, well yes, but what we'll be trying to do at Politerature is different. For one thing, Politerature is a collaboration, initially between one other person and me, and perhaps with more folks getting involved eventually. My partner at Politerature, author and teacher Meredith Sue Willis, is a leftist but not a revolutionist; we do come at this from different angles, which we're hoping will make for an interesting exchange of views. Politerature is in various other ways too something of a more formal endeavor than Read Red will ever be.

I will continue blogging here, and I hope you'll keep checking in at Read Red where I'll post my own individual unmediated rants, reviews and responses to literary news.
 
I hope you will also regularly check out Politerature. And spread the word! Like us on Facebook where there's now a Politerature page. Let your reader, writer, and activist friends know about POLITERATURE.com. If you want to read more political fiction, stick with us, follow this project as it develops, and let's see if we can't have some impact on building the literary left wing.

What hole have I been hiding in?

OK, yes, I've been dealing with some minor but pesky health issues and yes, menopause has destroyed my sleep which in turn makes it a huge effort to do, well, almost anything beyond dragging myself to work every day, and yes, I've been trying to get some writing done...the result of all of which is that I haven't been following literary news very closely, or pushing myself to get to literary events, which is mostly fine but not entirely. Nothing excuses how out of touch I've become with developments in LGBT fiction. Never fear: I'm on it! I'm going to do my best to get to the May 12 reading at Bluestockings bookstore by some of this year's Lambda Literary Award finalists. (Here's a list of all the readings in various cities.)

And I'm all over this. The Lambda Literary Foundation just awarded its Mid-Career Novelist Prize to Susan Stinson and Alex Sanchez. Neither of whose work--oh the shame, the shame--I have read. An omission I am correcting as we speak. I've actually already had some of Sanchez's books on my to-read list, especially since last autumn's spate of LGBT youth suicides drew my attention to Young Adult books for our precious queer kids. I read some, but not yet his, and this award reminds me to get to that soon.

And Susan Stinson--what fucking hole have I been hiding in not to have known of or read her work? Sure, you never know whether you're going to like a book, and absolutely, I have been misled many times by glowing blurbs and even awards. But I've just spent some time on her website and I gotta tell you (and don't tell Teresa), I think I'm in love. Based on her own characterizations of her work and what she explores in it, and the lauds of some pretty impressive others. And based on the short piece, "Drink," featured on her homepage. Hot damn! It's dazzling! Her latest novel, Venus of Chalk, just took a top spot on my to-read list.

I was one of the fellows at the first annual Lambda LGBT Writers' Retreat in Los Angeles four summers ago, and I tried for a while to stay in the loop. Obviously, my efforts lagged. With limited time and energy, it's usually write or hang with writers and writing has to take priority. Still, as I've been thinking about lately since this spring's round of rejections dashed my hopes for an arts colony residency in July, while writing is a solitary business it's not good to be too isolated. There's a certain stimulation, a certain quickening of the blood and loosening up of new ideas, that happens, or can, in the company of writers, at least interesting, exciting, progressive writers. LGBT writers exploring some of the same terrain I'm trying to. So, to Alex Sanchez and Susan Stinson: congratulations, looking forward to reading your work, and thanks for spurring me to get back out into the world a bit.

Reading red in 2011

I've been threatening (promising?) for some time to slow down on blog postings and, as anyone who checks in here regularly will have noticed by now, it is coming to pass. This partly has to do with a more constrictive schedule that results in using my lunch hour for running around rather than blogging, but mostly it has to do with other variables. Like how much I look at other blogs (less than I used to), how much I read book reviews and other literary commentary from the standard bourgeois sources (much less than I used to), how much I follow literary/cultural news (much much less), and above all how much time I spend writing--much more, which is a very good thing, but as a result of which something's got to give and that something is Read Red.

This is not the end, I don't think. It's a turn, I think, and an acknowledgment as I lean into it. Gone are the days of several posts a week. I think. Who knows, as soon as I say it I might turn around and give the lie to it, but I don't think so, because my dear desire is to tune out a fair amount of what's been distracting me. I wrote most days during my winter work break. I regained a certain momentum. I don't want to lose it. So I'll be seeing you less than before.

The up side, blog-wise, I hope, is that when I do blog it will be because I have something substantive to say. Over the last few days I collected a handful of links, thinking, well at least I'll throw them up just to keep the blog alive, but that's pointless, is it not? Just passing along the same little news items, factoids, rants and outrages that everyone else is already passing along? Nah, I don't think I'll go that route for now. If there's a link or news to be shared it'll be because I've got something to say about it. Something red, which after all is the purpose of this blog. Otherwise it'll be commentary on books and other cultural and/or political matters and thoughts about same. Stick with me and together we'll see how it goes.

It was 30 years ago today

So far it's been a crappy New York morning. Not one but two nasty screaming people on the trains. Not one but three trains not running or delayed or otherwise screwed up. Angry impatient crowds crowding each other. Me all the while uptight about running late because there's a new regime at work clocking my arrival to the minute. Just what I need, on top of all my ongoing complaints. I'm tired. I'm not eating right or exercising and as a consequence my body's in awful shape. I'm not getting much writing work done, I'm not doing my part in the struggle very well.

And John is dead.

No, it's not new news. Yes, he's been dead for 30 years today. Yet even after three decades, on this anniversary of the murder of John Lennon, I can still call up the feelings from that night, the awful knowledge that Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play nevermore. Two years ago on this same anniversary I wrote about how I heard that night, when I got home from work after the late shift as a city bus driver in Ann Arbor. In that post I also mentioned my story "John and Yoko and Rowena and Me," published in Cream City Review. I wish it were online to link to, because I'm fond of it and would like to share it. While it's of course fictional, it does call up some of the feel of those days. Maybe I'll figure out a way to make it available, says I, as if someone other than me is clamoring for it.

John was no saint. He was at his death rich as Croesus; it's nice to think that if he'd lived he would have shared the wealth, but who knows. He was guilty, by his own admission, of violence against women. His politics were an odd amalgam of anarchism/pacifism/socialism/yippie/performance art. They're easy to dismiss as unserious. On the other hand, he was really committed to his anti-war principles--and did pay a price for that, having to wage a years-long battle against the U.S. government's efforts to deport him. He was working hard at raising his feminist consciousness. He and Yoko brought Bobby Seale onto the Mike Douglas Show, and sang their great song "Attica State" in solidarity with the prisoners who'd risen up and been slaughtered at NY Gov. Nelson Rockefeller's orders. There's fair cause, then, I think, for this wistful pit-of-the-stomach sadness that lingers 30 years on. It's all the what might have beens. He was a great artist. His music is magnificent, and he did contribute in his way to the struggle for peace and justice. What more might he have done?

If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend the movie The U.S. vs. John Lennon for a pretty decent introduction to all this. Plus, I like to think that you can hear my 17-year-old voice shouting during the footage from the December 10, 1971 Free John Sinclair concert.

This week

• I worked too damned hard and
• I slept too damned little and
• I started and stopped too many disappointing books and
• I wrote not one sentence and
• I contributed not one whit to the class struggle

all of which have something to do with not blogging. I'm not in a fugue state or anything, but it's just been one of those weeks when getting to work and back is pretty much all I could manage. I've been collecting stuff for this blog, though, wisps of this and wonders of that, so I should be back soon with some substantive words.

Speaking of words and what I haven't done, I believe something else happened this week. I can't quite be sure, for who knows, I may yet flare back into rage and resistance, but I think I entered the last stage of the mourning process over not getting my novel published. Acceptance, or something like it. Something finally clicked, it seems, and I recognized this is one dream, the dearest dream I've ever dared, at least on the puny level of my own little life, that's dead. I'm nearly ready to make my peace with this, it seems. I'll never know why I failed, I'll never know if it's all about the market and the industry and all the changes and so on and I would have succeeded had this book been written 10 years ago, or if it's simply not good enough for any bookshelf. No way to know. So frustrating. In my long, initially enthused and energetic and ultimately sporadic, pessimistic and doomed effort to find a route to publication for this novel into which I poured so much of my heart and soul, I mostly found firmly closed doors--but I also had enough responses of the "it's not for me but it's great and I'm sure it'll find a home" variety that I kept slogging onward, kept holding onto hope, probably much longer than I should have. If the hope, better recognized as delusion, has at last slipped out of my grip it's a good thing, I think, a relief, to finally put the sucker away and shut that drawer. Who knows, maybe I'll open it again some day after I finish the second novel I'm now writing.

That kind of week, right? And to top it off, the travesty of all travesties came last night on Project Runway when the awful, hypocritical, pinched, smug, myopic, uncreative, anti-innovation, bourgeois judges snatched victory away from the miraculous Mondo Guerra, who'd clearly earned it. This is the second season in a row that the obviously superior designer was passed over for the PR prize and the obviously superior designer was Latino. Last year it was Emilio Sosa. Nor can we forget how Korto Momolu was robbed a few seasons back. In fact, only once has a person of color won PR. In the thousands of tweets, blog entries, columns and commentaries that you can find today on the PR finale, 99 percent of them horrified laments at the outcome, quite a few characterize this and past decisions as racist. It's hard to argue with that interpretation.

Next week: next week!

Checking in

I'm just swinging by to say hi, I haven't forgotten you, my millions of blog fans ...

Several matters have converged that account for the recent paucity of posts. One is simply that I'm trying to stick to my guns about, as announced here a couple weeks ago, only posting when I feel I have something actual to add to the conversation on any given issue, and, more particularly, when I have something to add that relates to literary matters since that's the ostensible focus of this blog. The main reason I haven't had a chance to craft any substantive posts is that I'm sticking to a writing schedule with way more discipline than is usual for me. The result is little to no time and even less brain power left for blogging. There's this or that other reason too. I do have several potential posts brewing, though, so do keep checking in.

Here's a throwaway for now. A few days ago I read Philip Pullman's new novel The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. My rating: bleh. I don't know what I was expecting but it was more than what I got. I hugely loved the His Dark Materials trilogy--golly, what a rip-roaring story that was, what godawmighty fun to read--so I was eager for Pullman's next book. I knew it was to be his take, again, but in a different way, on religion, but jeez I guess I assumed it would be a great gripping twisty tale like Lyra's. Not at all. It is instead, as best I can make out, his all too earnest effort at knocking some sense into the head of any Christians whose heads might be susceptible. And maybe also his offering to those ex-Christians like himself who've sought a sadder but wiser take on the Jesus legend. In other words you'd have to be, I think, rather invested in the whole project of Christianity in one way or another, love it, hate it, be all twisted up over it, you'd have to be churchy or formerly churchy in order for this book to speak to you. Or so I'm guessing. All I really know is that it left me cold. A disappointment.

As ever, onward.

LGBT writers, let's boycott Arizona!

It's now been a little over two weeks since Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer signed the odious anti-immigrant state SB 1070. The law criminalizes undocumented immigrants, along with anyone who associates with or aids them in any way, from giving an undocumented child a ride to school to offering prenatal medical services to an undocumented woman. Most alarmingly, SB 1070 requires police and all government employees to detain people based on "reasonable suspicion" that they are undocumented immigrants.

This latter clause has become widely known as "breathing while Brown."

If you are or appear to be Latino/Latina, you are subject to arrest. Your very existence is a crime. Unless you carry on your person legal documents proving citizenship, actually even if you do, you can expect to be rounded up at any time, held for hours in jail before being released at best and at worst subjected to the horrors of this country's system of immigration detention, a network of nightmarish prisons currently holding tens of thousands of adults and children whose only crime is being alive on the wrong side of a border that was created when the United States stole more than one-half of the nation of Mexico some 150 years ago.

A righteous outcry has arisen in response to the Arizona law. It is being compared to the Jim Crow South and before that the Fugitive Slave Act, to apartheid South Africa's pass laws, to Nazi Germany's Nuremberg Laws. It ought to also remind us of what we have faced as LGBT people--violence at the hands of bigots and police, harassment, discrimination, our very selves banned by law in most states until the Supreme Court's Lawrence vs. Texas decision just seven years ago, our relationships not legally recognized to this day, all of it compounded by racism against LGBT people of color.

The day the governor signed SB 1070 a national boycott began. No travel to, no business with, no support of any kind for any Arizona enterprise until the law is overturned. The boycott has broad backing. Along with the National Council of La Raza and virtually every other Latino/a organization, key supporters include the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights--a coalition whose members include the AFL-CIO, NAACP, National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, National Organization for Women, American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, Asian American Justice Center, and scores of religious groups. Alpha Phi Alpha, the biggest African American college fraternity, has moved its upcoming national convention from Phoenix to Las Vegas. Many professional athletes support the boycott.

On the literary front, two writers have taken the lead. Award-winning novelist Tayari Jones published an open letter canceling her scheduled appearance at an Arizona writers' conference this summer. And poet/novelist/memoirist Rigoberto Gonzalez, one of the leading lights of LGBT literature, issued an impassioned call for everyone who cares about equality to join the boycott.

I've been an activist for many years, and one thing I know is that wherever there is a mobilization for social justice, LGBT people are always there in the thick of it. Now it's time once again to take a stand. Let's heed the call sounded by Tayari Jones and Rigoberto Gonzalez.

Sisters--brothers--others: LGBT writers, poets, journalists, let's boycott Arizona!

What does this mean in practice? Don't go to Arizona. Don't do readings there, or book signings. Don't attend writers' conferences or other literary events. If you're scheduled to participate in or speak at one, cancel. Try to get your publisher to pull your books from the shelves of Arizona bookstores.

It's not all don'ts. There are do's too. Join marches and rallies against SB 1070. For those of the butch persuasion, by which I mean those who follow sports, and really everyone else, walk the picket line at your city's baseball stadium if the Arizona team comes to play.

On top of this, we as writers can contribute something special. We can write! Stories. Poems. Essays. Opinion columns. Organize readings supporting the boycott at bookstores, community centers, campuses. Let's do what we do best, use words, to express solidarity against racism and build the boycott.

From the Montgomery bus boycott initiated by Rosa Parks to the first boycott of Arizona when that state refused to observe the national Martin Luther King Day holiday, there is a long, honorable history to this tactic as a means to apply pressure against oppressive institutions. Now it is in play once again, this time in service to the effort to overturn the abhorrent, unconstitutional, racist Arizona SB 1070. The LGBT community must be partners in this fight. Especially we writers.

Spread the word: no human being is illegal! Let's offer up our voices to this urgent cause.

Writers for Mumia

The struggle to save the life of and free political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, the revolutionary writer imprisoned on death row in Pennsylvania for nearly 30 years now, is at a critical juncture. Since the most recent court ruling against him, the state could move to set an execution date at any time. The last time they tried that, back in the 1990s, his supporters thronged to Philadelphia for a mass demonstration whose anger and energy convinced the racist cops and prosecutors to back off.

The next step in the struggle at this point is to go to Washington, D.C., this coming Monday, April 26. At a news conference and rally, Mumia's supporters will demand that the Justice Department open a civil rights investigation into the case.

Two days before the D.C. actions, this Saturday, April 24, is Mumia's birthday. Here in New York City, there will be a gathering of writers, poets, musicians and activists to wish him long life and share our words, our art, our energy and our organizing ideas for continuing this long fight that will not end until our brother is free. I'm happy to say that I'll be taking part. I'll read a poem or two. Possibly, if it's not too long, the middle one of these three that were published six years ago in the Mississippi Review, because it has to do with Mumia. I'll bring along a couple of others in case there's time. Which there probably won't be. Look at the lineup! The event is sponsored by the National Writers Union along with the New York Coalition to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal, and it takes place at St. Mary's Church in Harlem, site of many peace-and-justice events and home church of Rev. Luis Barrios, a great friend to all who fight for a better world. I'm really looking forward to it.

If you're not familiar with Mumia's case, or you are but want to learn more, you might want to head over to leftbooks.com to order some of his books.

The Book of Grace

Boy, do I got cul-chah or what? Two theater outings in two weeks, after a long drought away from the boards. This is more like it!

Last night, having nabbed last-minute cheap tickets just a few days before its run closes, Teresa and I saw The Book of Grace at the Public Theater. This is Suzan-Lori Parks' latest play. It is intense.

The writing is marvelous, and comprises several dimensions. There are at various points clever wordplay, ideas and ideologies playing off each other, deep drama, startling humor. Three terrific actors, one of whom, recent Julliard graduate Amari Cheatom, I guarantee we will be hearing more from.

The play is on its most obvious level a family tragedy, but the personal links with the political in sometimes obvious and sometimes less clearcut ways. The setting is a Texas border town. One of the characters is a Border Patrol cop. Parks takes us where we need to go.

Not necessarily always as far as I'd have liked, politically speaking. There are points in the play, especially in a monologue by Cheatom's character Buddy/Snake, where some strong statements are made that bring out the broader context for the family drama, but then this veers off away from the larger platform of social-cultural analysis and back onto the smaller personal-psychological stage. This leeched a bit of the impact out of it for me, but the character study remained powerful enough to make this overall a provocative, stirring evening of theater. In fact, I must dissent from the reviews in which bourgeois drama critics have taken Parks to task for what they see as her jamming her characters into boxes as archetypes rather than creating fully fleshed out real human beings. I can't believe these guys saw the same play I did. The characters are fully wrought, beautifully so. Whereas I wish Parks had taken the politics a little further, these critics can't bear that there are politics in the play at all, and concoct a specious criticism with which to scold her for the crime of acknowledging the world. Don't listen to them, Ms. Parks!

An unexpected added treat: after the play, there was a "talkback" with the playwright. We stayed for this and I'm especially glad we did because I found her comments on the background and process of writing this play really interesting. Particularly because I've been thinking lately about trying my hand at drama. It has always seemed a mysterious if not impossible form to assay, but something has been shifting, clicking, inside my artsy-fartsy little head and I'm starting to wonder whether I shouldn't try to get up the nerve to make an attempt.

Rejection season

It's that time of year again. Yesterday's mail brought a rejection letter from the MacDowell Colony. Today's or tomorrow's will most likely feature another of the same, this one from Yaddo. Then I can look forward to a No from the New York Foundation for the Arts, due to arrive in early April.

These were my three attempts to cadge the means for the optimal writing situation during my vacation days this coming summer. The optimal writing situation being two or three weeks in some quiet, pretty place outside the city. I've been dreaming of a sojourn at one of the arts colonies. Courtesy of rich donors, the colony houses and feeds you and provides everything you need to forget about everything you deal with during your regular workaday life so your mind can just sort of waft off into the ether and the words emerge. There's nature! Birds, trees! A swimming pool, even, at Yaddo!

I've been to three previous residencies and at each I became practically a different writer: enormously, uncharacteristically productive. I wrote a big chunk of my first novel at the first. At the second I completed the final rewrite. And at the third, two summers ago, I began my second novel, writing 65 pages of what I first thought was dreck and have since discovered is a pretty decent start to the story. None of these stays was at a place nearly as fancy-shmancy as Yaddo or MacDowell. I knew I'd have scant chance at the big time, but I decided to try this time around. I knew right, it seems.

As for NYFA, that's simply a piece of cash. I've applied many times before and I know, as with the arts colonies, that there's little likelihood of hitting the jackpot. If I did, though, I'd use some of it to create my own little writer's retreat. A cabin on Lake George is what I fantasize, just Teresa and me. In the morning I write while she reads or cooks or putters about, in the afternoon and evenings we vacate ...

Well. Anyway.

As it happens, I've recently sent out a new batch of submissions to literary journals so there's another bunch of rejection letters I can look forward to. I have mixed feelings about most of them (the journals, not my submissions ... well, okay, my submissions too). They are none of them the journal of my dreams, they are all of them pretty mainstream, they none of them partake of the class struggle, literary division. But they're what there is. They're where my stories might get read, should anyone accept any, and I have a humbly stubborn little feeling that a secretary's stories deserve to be read.

Does that sound pathetic? Nah, it shouldn't. For here I sit in my urban aerie and as I finish eating lunch and turn back to the work of entering data, filing the records, scheduling classes, helping students with their endless registration difficulties, I'm also watching out the window mesmerized by the buds on the tips of the winter-stripped tree branches as they begin to fuzz out into something like spring. It's that season too, or nearly. Rejection I can take, especially while I watch this promise peeking forth.

I just ate blueberries ...

... and my tongue is dyed a deep purple. You're welcome.

Also I'm writing, a new story that came upon me as I woke up this morning as well as revisions on another that's almost done. Also lots of household chores this weekend, laundry, groceries, etc., and oh god the tax returns, so the comandante can be out in the world doing the important work of organizing the fight to fix it. All this is by way of saying don't expect much blog action, possibly for several days.

It'll be like this until it isn't

It's one of those periods: my posts here are infrequent and insubstantial. This will continue until it stops. Be glad for me, partly, since partly it's because I'm buckling down and writing and have no time or brainpower for blogging. Be sad for me, partly, since partly I'm in a funk having just found out that a recommender for my July arts colony applications failed to send the recommendation letters by the deadlines so now I'm out of luck for a writing residency next summer and I'm out $50 in wasted application fees. She'd fairly gushed about how highly she was going to recommend me. I trusted her. Wah wah wah!

For now, then, here's some stuff.

Frederick Douglass on Haiti, via Sukant Chandan's blog Sons of Malcolm.
Venezuela cancels Haiti's oil debt, President Hugo Chavez noting that his country is in fact historically indebted to Haiti in many ways.
Fidel: 'We are sending doctors, not soldiers.'
This Friday, in 24 cities: Stand with Haiti. Here in NYC, we, led by members of the Haitian community, will march across the Brooklyn Bridge to the Federal Building to say the people of Haiti need material human aid, not a U.S. military occupation.

This is a couple of weeks old already, but there's an interesting post over at Contra James Wood about what books published by what corporations get noticed, reviewed, sold.

This too is not new, but, sadly, it doesn't seem to ever get old. There's a lot of righteous outrage about publishers taking books with people of color protagonists and wrapping them in cover art that depicts the characters as white. The suits keep making disgusting, lame and transparently racist excuses, primarily that, well, book buyers just don't buy books with Black people on the cover. It's particularly disturbing that this tactic seems to mostly take place with young adult and children's books. Rather than restate some of the very good, sharp commentary, let me just provide some links, each of which will lead you further on with more links to more words. Here, at her blog Fledgeling, Zetta Elliott has followed the issue in a series of posts. As has Tayari Jones, here. And there's much to chew on at Color Online.

I haven't been bored since 1960

Children get bored. Hugely, complainingly bored. I was no exception. Except that I can't remember being bored very often or to any great extent after I learned to read. Which in my day, young whippersnappers, took place in first grade, when we were 6. From that point, under the unkindly tutelage of my teacher the fearsome finger-pointing, earlobe-grabbing Miss Von Fintel, and of course having already spent much happy time from infancy on being read to on my mother's and grandmother's laps, I was off and running. Books opened a million doors, everyone knows how that happens, many heartwarming essays have been written about the worlds children enter through the world of reading, but also, I think, books closed one big fat door. Boredom was a land I would never enter again.

Now, almost 50 years later, I'm hard pressed to remember the last occasion when I came even close, even glimpsed the territory, for even as much as 10 or 20 minutes. I am never ever bored. I am in fact ever less bored. Some of this has to do with the crazy way time keeps speeding up as I age--yes, everything they say about this is true, the way days are just devoured each one by the next, weeks streak by, months march forward--but time's fleetingness isn't the whole story, I don't think.

And it has nothing to do with technology, with all the screens and speakers, all that stuff flashing at us all the time. Good lord, that stuff flashing at me -- don't get started about how there's now a blaring TV forcing itself on us everywhere we go, in doctors' waiting rooms, banks, coffeehouses, stores -- is a source of brain shut-down, at least for me. And sure, I do my share of web surfing, Youtube watching, and so on. But all this, for me, is deadening, not enlivening. It drags me back down the dreaded road to that long-left-behind place where tedium reigns. And so when I catch that telltale click as my brain starts shutting down, I flee. Back to a book, most likely.

Or simply to silence. To staring out the window, at the wall, into space. In recent years, I seem to have developed more and more the ability to do nothing at all -- and do it damned well. Of course, in reality I am not doing nothing. I am thinking. Most of the time, I am thinking. Deep Thoughts ... well, thoughts anyway. There's so damned much to think about! How can anyone not grab any spare minute that presents itself?

And when I'm not thinking conscious thoughts? When my mind drifts? That of course is where writing begins. For clearing some mental space so that whatever is gurgling around there down below is permitted to rise to the surface is, as every writer knows, crucial to the creative process.

In this coming Sunday's New York Times Book Review there's an end-page essay by Jennifer Schuessler headed "Our Boredom, Ourselves." Some of it touches on the connection between doing nothing and creativity, as here:

But boredom may itself be a highly useful human capacity, at least according to some psychologists and neuroscientists, who have begun examining it not just as an accomplice to depression and addiction but as an important source of creativity, well-being and our very sense of self.

Researchers have discovered that when people are conscious but doing nothing ... the brain is in fact firing away, with greater activity in regions responsible for recalling autobiographical memory, imagining the thoughts and feelings of others, and conjuring hypothetical events: the literary areas of the brain, you might say.

I find it strange, an odd misread of the very research she's reporting on, that she conflates "boredom" with "doing nothing." The whole point is that doing nothing is not the same as boredom. The mind can be, and in my experience pretty much always is, very busy. At base, I find the whole concept of boredom unfathomable. What does that feeling feel like? If you're working at your job, or writing a leaflet or walking a picket line; if you're reading a book or writing a book; if you're cooking or shopping, doing laundry or bathing the babies; if you're listening to music or singing; or walking in the park or sitting at the beach--your mind is always aswirl, is it not? I'm not claiming that mine is an especially interesting mind, but it keeps me occupied.

If it did not, that I'd think would be the foundation of boredom -- which I know because there's really only one circumstance in which it occurs: when I'm reading a boring book. Schuessler touches on this experience too in her NYTBR piece, but I wish she'd taken it further. For is there anything more excruciating? When a book bores me, I get the most gruesome feeling, at once inside my head and along my spine and creeping up and down my arms and legs, a feeling of desperation, of being trapped, of needing to scream. It might come highly recommended, it might even be admirable for artistic or political reasons, but I cannot keep reading a boring book.

Fittingly, Schuessler closes with talk of the upcoming publication of David Foster Wallace's posthumous novel The Pale King, whose subject apparently is, in part at least, boredom. Um. Oh dear.