3/14/2024 0 Comments "The Anemones" in Drunken Boat #25The renowned and venerable Drunken Boat wobbles again with issue #25, and I'm so honored to be included on its screens, alongside such luminaries as Vinita Agrawal, Sudeep Sen, Arundhati Subramaniam, and so many others. Many thanks to founder and editor Ravi Shankar, and to the new (and improved!) DB team. "The Anemones" is a creative nonfiction excerpted from Listening to Fish: meditations from the wet world (Nirala Publishing), the book I'll launch this May at the New York Writers Workshop in Kathmandu / Himalayan Literature Festival. (Photo: Purple-tipped anemone and pale clownfish, from a dive I took off Ligpo Island, Philippines.)
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2/19/2024 0 Comments ॐ मणि पद्मे हूँA delightful meeting with Nepalese Consul General, Hon. Bishnu Prasad Gautam, with NYWW colleague Ravi Shankar as we continue planning for what promises to be an amazing fortnight in Kathmandu, the New York Writers Workshop in Kathmandu/Himalayan Literature Festival, May 22 - June 2, 2024. Check the website for details, register now for the Early Bird discount (through March 15). Stellar guests, regional and international, numerous panels, readings, and workshops, two of which will take place in temples. ॐ मणि पद्मे हूँ!
2/18/2024 1 Comment Plus ça change vs NYCThe old French expression, plus ça change, plus lâ meme chose (the more things change, the more they stay the same) is often true. But it's just as true, and maybe more often, that the more things change, the more they never come back. Above is an image from Paul Mazursky's beautiful 1976 film, Next Stop, Greenwich Village. The actors Antonio Fargas (l) and Christopher Walken (r) hustle their friend, Dory Brenner, across 7th Avenue at Sheridan Square. Behind them, the iconic Village Cigars. The film story takes place in the 1950s. I saw it when it opened, and its images of Village Cigars--my first--became part of my mental map of NYC. How exciting it was, in 1977, to emerge from the Broadway 1 at Christopher Street and stand under the Village Cigars thoroughly old school, Hopperesque awning. It was as if I’d wandered onto the film set of my imagination. The shop opened in 1922, it closed five score and two years later, and it won't be coming back. I'm not a smoker, so it's not the tobacco (or the vapes or the bongs) that I'll miss. I'll miss my New York, which was the New York of e.e. cummings and Marcel Duchamp and Patti Smith and Thelonious Monk--and you, until, that is, Feb 7, 2024. In 1980, if I stood on the sidewalk outside Village Cigars and sailed a paper plane over its roof, it would have landed on the steps of the home a former girlfriend grew up in, a home replete with a monkey, a parrot, alcoholic parents, and a cat named Sphincter. I spent many formative years there soaking up the kind of New York I'd dreamed of as a young suburban delinquent. (For the record, I don't miss the old girlfriend. Very much.) These days, walking through New York City, I think of the old haiku of Bashō, which says something like even in Kyoto … I long for Kyoto. But I've come to understand that missing New York City while in New York City is very New York City, which is here and gone at the same time.
2/11/2024 1 Comment "Two to Choose"In Celine Song’s Past Lives, you fall in love with the actress, google her, and feel hurt when you learn she has a husband. Greta Lee does that to you. It’s hard to know exactly how. At two moments in the film, she gives the men attracted to her the very clear cue to act. One does, the other doesn’t. It comes down to: sometimes you have to kiss the girl. Before you make a choice, you have a thousand possibilities. When you make a choice, you lose 999 things. The rest of life is, you learn how to live with all those losses weighed against the one gain. In “Two to Choose” Charlie Feathers says, “I’ve got two to choose from today / One I’ll keep, one I’ll throw away / If I’m wrong somehow I’ll pay / There will be three instead of one heart I’ll break.” Past Lives presents us with one who chooses, three who lose. (“Two to Choose” is not used in the film. John Cale’s “You Know More Than I Know” is, and it’s sublime.)
This is a pleasant surprise. Pank had "Excuse Me" for a couple of years, accepted it, then had it a couple more -- things had gotten a little fractured over there. I'd forgotten all about it until someone mentioned it in a note, and here it is. I've never seen as many typos as there are in this piece. I guess things remain fractured. I'll post a clean version here soon, but nice to see it up, and the patient reader (which isn't me) can plow past the glitches easily enough.
Honored to have a new story -- "Frank Sinatra on the 4th of July" -- in the venerable Men Matters Online Journal, edited by two of literature's finest, Malachi Edwin Vethamani and Danton Remoto. Thank you, gentlemen. And honored to be included in Issue #7 along with the brilliant poets Anita Dev Pillai, Jhilam Chattaraj, and so many others. To quote Sinatra, ring-a-ding-ding!
10/26/2023 2 Comments "Lost," a new story in Live EncountersHonored to have my story, "Lost," included in this anniversary issue of Live Encounters, and to share screens with such vaunted eminences as Indran Amirthanayagam and Thaddeus Rutkowski. A deep namaste to editor/publisher Mark Ulyseas, who continues to produce these exquisite volumes. And special shout out to issue editor, the poet Carolyne Wright, whose essay about studying with Elizabeth Bishop will have you all swimming for Brazil (behind me). As for the content: alas, young men love, and lose, then seek--as Phil Ochs teaches--the pleasures of the harbor.
7/10/2023 0 Comments A great NYC bookAlexander Stille’s The Sullivanians is a compulsive read. For several years, I intersected (peripherally) with the Sullivanians, always wondering but never quite knowing who they were and what they were about. Their base of operations extended from Columbia University down to the Lower East Side, with primary activities on the Upper West Side. They began as what might be called a noble experiment, a necessary, pioneering challenge to 1950s socio-sexual norms; they became, inarguably, a cult that was undone “by the thing [they] had set out to destroy: the family.” I highlighted many passages; here are a few that give a sense of the tensions around which Stille structures the book:
There is some redemption; there’s more heartbreak. The impact lingers. I want to thank C.D. Johnson, editor, and the excellent team at Rogue Scholars Press, for the long hard work of putting together this excellent anthology. The poems are two ways of remembering New Orleans. "Afternoon Rain" grew out of a translation workshop I took with the remarkable Sholeh Wolpe; it springs from a passage by Forugh Farrokhzad, the "Rebel Poet of Iran." I'm honored to be included alongside friends and luminaries such as Patricia Carragon, Wayne Kral, Thaddeus Rutkowski, Sarah Sarai, and so many others.
5/24/2023 0 Comments "Nes. Yo."In the blizzard of obits, testimonials, and encomia following the terribly premature passing of Martin Amis, a lot of very good writing has pointed to a lot of other very good writing. I’ve been wasting away the better part of a day enjoying some of the connections. In the online publication UnHerd (thank you, Robert Anasi), Terry Eagleton takes Amis (& Co.) down a peg for failing to develop anything resembling a viable alternative to the political perspectives he parodied, critiqued, or denounced (The liberal complacency of Martin Amis). In that piece, Eagleton references a hilariously mordant takedown of the JFK legacy by Amis’s dear friend and partner in slime Christopher Hitchens (If JFK had lived much longer – available in The Free Library). The occasion of the Hitchens piece is the publication of historian Robert Dallek's bio, An Unfinished Life. The tone is pitch perfect:
A widely shared opinion on Amis is the excellence of his nonfiction, the memoir, essays, and reviews. This sends me back to his collection, The War Against Cliché, wherein we find abundant evidence of the old Saul Bellow observation that writers are readers moved to emulation. Amis analyzes dispassionately, but admiration, even envy, percolates subtextually. We learn, for instance, from Amis’s brief survey of the William S. Burroughs catalogue, that halfway through The Wild Boys, “there’s forty solid pages of rectal mucus …” Rectal mucus. Can you imagine the paroxysms of shoulder-shaking Beavis-and-Butthead snickers that phrase produced in Amis? And we learn in the title essay that the new (1986) edition of Joyce’s Ulysses corrects this seemingly minor error in the Circe section:
which reverts to the author’s original intention, the sublime
“Nes. Yo.” is my favorite line of the day. Discussing the release of his first-ever album in The Guardian today, filmmaker Jim Jarmusch says, “Lately, I have an aversion to blues-based rock’n’roll guitar solos.” Jarmusch would have had a hard time at last night’s appearance of Lucinda Williams at City Winery, where a pair of gunslingers, one from Alaska, the other from Ventura, CA, shredded the necks of a half-dozen Guild and Fender guitars. It was a complicated, exciting, nostalgic, but perhaps irrelevant evening, during which I kept thinking, there’s a part of America that doesn’t exist anymore, or at least doesn’t matter, and it’s called America—that vast expanse between the east and west coasts, and especially the region south of DC—and that’s where Lucinda Williams and her band come from. Lake Charles and Baton Rouge, Nagodoches and Nashville, all these towns and cities Williams name-checks and criss-crosses in her songs, they’re all in some gravel road dream of the past that her songs evoke with fondness but expose as nightmare. So many meaningless deaths at the ends of meaningless lives. So much promise cut short by pills and pathologies. The men, especially the Scorpios, assholes, put on pedestals by the women who worship them.
I saw Williams at the Palladium in 1988. The self-titled lp that restored her career had just come out. She opened for Pylon (who seemed hopelessly, joylessly self-important) with two accompanists: fiddle and guitar. Saying nothing, she stared at the ceiling for forty anxious minutes and vanished. Last night, still clearly in recovery from a stroke, she stayed on for one hour and forty-five minutes. And she spoke. A lot. The band standing around looking at the stage floor. Nervously, I thought of the onstage ungluing of Barbara Jean in Robert Altman’s Nashville. But this was healthy banter, comfortable conversation, warm and almost fuzzy. She talked about some of the men in her life, especially the Scorpios, the ones she used to call beautiful losers but who’ve been upgraded to beautiful misfits ("Hard to lose, but harder to live with," was how she put it). She talked about her father. She talked about the stroke. She talked about where songs come from. Lucinda Williams is 70. Her audience is her age. A lot of big bellies, wide hips. A lot of men in baseball caps, several in cowboy hats. Gray hair, dyed hair, no hair, white hair. Her guitar player has white hair. She has white hair. And they all come from America, where they celebrate getting left behind together. A couple of other things: from as far back as I can remember, Jim Jarmusch had white hair. I still love blues-based guitar solos. I prefer sturdy, enduring songs. The Velvet Underground’s “Pale Blue Eyes” is one, and that was Williams’s first encore. Honored to have a new story up on the screens of Live Encounters. Many thanks, Mark Ulyseas!
A lovely way to close out the year: "Swim Lesson" in the esteemed Men Matters Online Journal (Issue #5, Dec 2022). Many thanks to editors Malachi Edwin Vethamani and Danton Remoto. And congratulations to fellow contributors.
Honored to have new work appear in the esteemed Beltway Poetry Quarterly. Many thanks to editors Indran Amirthanayagam and Sara Cahill and the BPQ team. "The Wall Meditations #3, 4, & 5" are part of a recurring sequence in Listening to Fish: meditations from the wet world (soon to be a collection). Earlier "Wall Meditations" appear in Lighthouse Weekly, and Live Encounters. To help save our friends the fish, and their homes, the coral reefs, you can do no better than to donate to the REEF Foundation.
11/11/2022 1 Comment Death, Sex, & Transition on the Coral Reef: new material in Live Encounters, Dec 2022Honored to have new work appear in Live Encounters, Dec 2022. Many thanks, Mark Ulyseas, for including me in another killer issue. "Death, Sex, & Transition on the Coral Reef" is an excerpt from Listening to Fish: meditations from the wet world, a current project-in-progress involving processes of and perils facing the world's reefs as experienced through the lens of a diver, i.e. me.
Honored to have a new story in Tin Can Literary Review Vol 2 (reprinted below). There's an accompanying interview here: Haunted Waters Press. Ireland In New York City, a lot can happen in fifteen minutes. But here’s a story about fifteen minutes when what should have happened didn’t. I had this hat, see. A cap, actually. A gray Donegal tweed, kind of a newsboy’s cap I guess you’d call it, made in Ireland, land of the Celtic mystics. Jack Kerouac wore one on the cover of Scattered Poems. Maybe that’s what triggered the dream I had in which I wore one exactly like his. I woke up that morning with a purpose: acquire that hat. But in those years you couldn’t find a decent hat in New York City, you couldn’t find an indecent hat. So I saved up, and borrowed, and borrowed more, and used what I borrowed as collateral to borrow again, until I had enough money to fly to Ireland. I took Aer Lingus to Shannon. The guy seated next to me was Irish. He asked what I planned to do on my visit to his country. I was a bit wary about sharing with anyone that I was visiting their country to get a hat. It seemed at once twee and trivial—twee because the motivation to undertake so costly a journey for something as non-essential as a cap, triggered by a dream, no less, could appear foolishly whimsical, or whimsically foolish, something fucking Donovan might write a song about, and trivial in the sense that the entire sweep of the country’s history, culture, landscape, and people would appear as if it was of little to no interest to me. Joyce, Yeats, Cuchulain, and all I wanted was a cap. But I experienced that want with great urgency. I kept seeing images of Kerouac in his cap—the weathered cheeks, the searching eyes, a supplicant on the byways of spiritual fulfillment, which is how I’d appeared to myself in that dream: a lonesome pilgrim on a soulful mission, but a mission that couldn’t be fulfilled without the proper costume. I had another reason not to share the object of my quest. Given the scarcity of headwear for gentlemen, at least in New York City, I didn’t want to plant an urgent need in anyone else for gray Donegal tweed caps—there might be but a few left, and what if they ran out of my size? So I told my Irish seat-mate that I was visiting his country simply to hitchhike around, have a bit of a look-see, as it were. He said hitchhiking isn’t as easy as you might tink. I said, well, that’s not what I heard. He said, well, begging to differ, but you might, as an alternative, consider the trains. I thanked him for the tip, having neither the intention nor the money to take trains in Ireland or anywhere else for that matter. What else, he wondered, might I have planned? I said I thought I might go up to Belfast. Belfast, he said, why in the world would you visit Belfast? Do you have a side? I said not a side, as such, just an interest, really, a curiosity. He said, well, if I might, let me give you a piece of advice. No one’s interested in being the object of a stranger’s idle curiosity, and if you go up just to gawk at their troubles, they’ll want to know which side you’re on, and they’ll assume you have one because why else even bother entering a war zone, and if you deny having a side they’ll tink you’re a liar or a damn fool, and they’ve already got sufficient numbers of both running around, do you take my meaning? I thought, what am I, on Candid Camera? We hadn’t even reached Nova Scotia and this cocksucker was shooting down my whole trip. I wondered if I could change my seat. I said, take it easy, Paddy. If you want to know the truth, I’m going up to Donegal to get a cap, a gray tweed cap. A cap, he said. That’s about the stupidest ting I’ve ever heard. I said, yeah, I thought so too, but it came to me in a dream, and to me, I told him, dreams have more power than the most perfect equation in quantum physics. So if it’s all the same to you, I said, I’ll go the fuck up to Donegal or any other place I like for whatever goddamn reason. He said, take it easy, sonny, you’re misunderstanding my point. Fuck your point, I told him, and don’t call me sonny. Well, he said, snapping open his Irish Times, and you don’t call me Paddy. We passed Greenland (I think—we flew at night, I was guestimating), and started curving south toward Shannon. We exchanged not another word, landed, took opposite sides on the luggage carousel, and when my bag came, I took it to the exit and went looking for a place to stick out my thumb. Half an hour went by, then another. A total of three cars, each giving me barely a glance. It seemed like the sonofabitch was right. In another half-hour, it started to drizzle. I thought, I’m not spending my visit to Ireland on the shoulder of the road, if you could call what I was standing on a shoulder, and in the goddamn rain to boot. I needed a hostel, or a train. I crossed the road and stuck out my thumb in the other direction, toward Limerick, which was close by. I’d always liked limericks. There was an old man on Aer Lingus, who acted like I was a dingus ... I got that far in under a minute, began working on the interior couplet, when a blue Volkswagen bug from the early 70s geared down and puttered to a stop. It was spooky to see the driver on the same side as me, watching through the sideview mirror. He wore a gray newsboy cap that looked at first glance a lot like the Kerouac cap. Already things were getting mystical. I reached the driver’s door all breathless, the window came down, and it’s the same sonofabitch from my flight. He pointed back behind him and said, “You’re going the wrong way, sonny.” Then he rolled up the window and puttered away. But that’s not the fifteen minutes when something didn’t happen. That came later. First, I made my visit to Donegal, and I got my Donegal cap. I drank a few pints, spent a few nights in a hostel that smelled like dirty feet, forgot about Belfast, and flew home. The fifteen minutes happened when I took the subway downtown to catch a set of Mose Allison at the Bottom Line. I changed for the local at 14th Street, took a seat on a bench and flipped through a Village Voice. A few minutes later the Broadway #1 appeared, I hopped on, and as soon as the doors closed I realized I’d left my Donegal tweed cap on a bench. One stop down on Christopher, I squeezed through the doors, ran up to the street, crossed to the uptown side, and caught the next train north. A fool’s errand, I know. This was New York City. They’d steal the hat right off your head. Leave it on a bench, well, you’re giving it away. Back at 14th Street I didn’t even run. Why bother, what’s gone is gone. But when I arrived on the downtown platform, there it was, on the bench, sitting neatly on top of a folded copy of the Village Voice, which I’d also forgotten. And alongside the cap sat a fetching young woman with a short bob. She wore Thai fisherman pants, Addidas trainers, and a serape. “Anyone forgets a cap like this,” she said, “they come back.” Her name was Terre. She’d recently visited Ireland, too, with her sisters. “What was the purpose of your trip?” I asked her. She said, “The health food.” “The health food?” I said. “And strawberry apricot pie.” I skipped the Mose Allison set. We went for tea in a café with a mezzanine window overlooking Greenwich Avenue. But I didn’t look at Greenwich Avenue, even with all the amazingly cool people passing by. I looked at Terre. We fell in love, or at least I did. I stayed glued to her side for close to two months. She looked so soulful playing guitar with my cap on her head, her fringe pinned to her eyebrows. Then she stopped returning my calls. Typically it took women two weeks to see through me, sometimes three. I credit all extra time to the cap, which I hope she still wears. Getting over Terre wasn’t easy. I spent a lot of time at home behind drawn blinds. If I went out, it was to the Strand where I purchased books I’d add to the stacks of things I’d never read. One day I found a biography of Henry Miller. On the cover he wore a Borsalino fedora. Honored to included on the screens of A River Sings (Indolent Books). Many thanks to editor Michael Broder. This "Underwater Haibun" is from the growing collection, Listening to Fish: meditations from the wet world. (Also from that collection, "Wall Meditations #1.")
Honored to have "The Wall Meditations #1" up on the screens of Lighthouse Weekly. It's from the ms-in-progress, Listening to Fish: meditations from the wet world, an essay-poem-cnf hybrid focused on the perils facing the coral reefs, their populations, and, by extension, everything else. More work from LtF appearing soon. Many thanks to the Lighthosue team, esp editors Caroline and Alice.
On Saturday, Sept 17, New York Writers Workshop launched a new series of readings at the utterly charming Underland Gallery, the vital nerve center of cultural activity in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn (conclusively supplanting Rocky & Nicky's Pizza on Colonial and Bay Ridge Ave.). Featured readers at the inaugural event were Ravi Shankar, Deedle Rodriguez-Tomlinson, and me. It was a night to remember, and to be repeated.
Honored to have this new work, "Blame It On My Youth," appear on the vaunted screens of Jerry Jazz Musician. Many thanks to editor Joe Maita and to the Jerry Jazz team. Thanks to Karrin Allyson for the haunted, deeply inhabited version of the song. And thanks to Oscar Levant/Edward Heyman for writing it.
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