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Day In Jersey, Night in Saint Paul

Jersey was on message: grey, accented, freeway strangled. Friendly. Our driver had taken Paris Hilton around town several weeks before. He had the text message saved. 

But great to be back home after leaving the apartment at 5:30 in the morning. The cab ride home was cinematic: the tunnel of grass and rock as you exit the airport toward Saint Paul, the bridge across the river, and on West Seventh the bar that bills itself as the "Steelers Headquarters, the Pearson's Nut Roll factory, and Mickeys Diner. I love cab rides because you can really look at the scenery--there's no need to keep a conversation going--and because, on the way from the airport, the ride has the sheen of a homecoming.

On Being A Saint Paulite

I think that one of the tests of being a true Saint Paulite--as opposed to someone who just happens to live in Saint Paul--is this:  you know the byways.  And you specifically know how to avoid State Fair traffic. You know to take Pierce Butler under Snelling; to follow Raymond up to Roseville. And if you are entering the city by way of Hastings, you know to take Warner Road along the river, south of downtown, thus avoiding 94 and enjoying the one truly beautiful view of the skyline. I am a Saint Paulite. I triangulated between Cathedral Hill,  the U of M, and Roseville and back without once intersecting Snelling.

Notes on Notes as Prose

The thirty-plus page section I'm working on now is taking forever to revise because I never really wrote it in the first place. Instead, I disguised notes as prose.

Here's what I'm finding:   

1. Puffy prose: all sorts of maybes, useless prepositional phrases, inefficiencies. Kind of fun to revise, because it feels like popping those packing bubbles.

2. Sentences that should be scenes. Rewarding, if exhausting, beacuse you have to build something as opposed to fixing something.

3. Fuzzy chronology. A part of this revision process is asking myself, I could not have experienced this at this time because you can't join scouts until you are eleven? The pleasures of detective work.   

4. Insight ambush. You spend this much time with your past, you harvest realizations--often at odd times, such as while trying to open a building door while navigating Al around a stranger. You mess up your dog's fur as a mnemonic device.

Dylan Chronicles II

Still reading the Dylan. When he was recording the Oh Mercy album in the late 1980s, he was listening to Ice-T, Public Enemy, and N.W.A.   This lead him to conclude that  "the kind of music that Danny [Lanois] and I were making was archaic. I didn't tell him that, but that's how I honestly felt."

Dylan worked with Lanois because Bono of U2 recommended him. 

Has anyone out there heard "Oh Mercy'? It's supposedly pretty good.

My Warehouse Eyes, My Arabian Drums

Reading Dylan's Chronicles I, I am impressed. He is a deeply unconventional man who loves tradition. He tries to be as precise as possible, even if it makes him sound a little nuts.  When he sang, "the ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face" in Visions of Johanna he wasn't trying to be obscure; he was trying to say what he felt was real. He sometimes finds the real just the other side of the rational.

The book is only unrewarding in the few places where he tries to write about the zeitgeist in a CBS Evening News style.  When he is trying to describe why a recording session worked or didn't, when he is trying to locate the birth of a style, when he is telling the story of an encounter with an eccentric shopkeeper in Louisiana, the book is fascinating.

Kick off

Ideally, I would not care aboiut fantasy football but I would be very good at it. In reality, I care a great deal and I'm quite bad at it. The problem is I care but not quite enough to do the necessary work. I'm in a league which my nephew set up and I had my draft today. We will see how the Pigs' Eye Pariahs do this year.

A Week In The Life of My Mail: Day 6

Bank statement, office furniture catalog, ywca "get fit this fall" postcard. Yes, pilates would make me a better person, but I barely have time to be a bad person. 

And the Beloit Poetry Journal. Once again, mail that provokes nostalgia and admiration. The Beloit Poetry Journal is put out by my old professors at Beloit College, but it is not put out by the college. And it is the very model of the small literary magazine. It broke ties with the college in the 1950s, to preserve its freedom. So the magazine's only criteria is the editors' vigorous taste. It is humbly but beautifully produced, so that the editors can afford to keep it going without bowing, however subtly, to benefactors.

A Week In The Life of My Mail: Day 5

Joyful reunion with junk mail. Sports Illustrated still cares: A final notice which I just might act on. Someone is summoning me to review some very important documents: "Notice to recipient--that's me!--Important material enclosed for immediate review. Do not discard. Do not fold." Perhaps I am the executor of a will. I open it! Sadly, it is an undistinguished credit solicitation. I had so hoped this time would be different. Brooks Brothers promises me that I might "save 15%." You had me at free shipping.

And an oddly, non-ironically sad note. A solicitation from the ALS Foundation. Some months ago, I made a small donation in memory of my high school mentor and debate coach Burnell Manley, who died of a heart attack but who suffered from ALS. Throughout high school, he was as close a father as I had.  But we lost touch and I learned of his death when I googled him last fall.

Orwell As Ur-Blogger

"Running between 800 and 1000 words and generally divided into three or four discrete sections, [the As I Please columns] offered a flexible medium for whatever he had in his head at the time of writing. . . . Over the next few months he discussed his interest in artificial languages,  reflected on the ugliness and vulgarity of political leaders,  and wrote an elegaic essay about  the white rambler roses that decorated the Wallington cottage. From the outset Orwell's tenure of As I Please brought a series of lively correspondences (the essay about the roses brought a steely exchange about 'bourgeois nostalgia'). One of the most engaging features of the column, read sequentially is the sense of dialogue, points taken up, conceded or refuted, continuity rather than a trail of pronouncements . . . ." 

Orwell: The Life, D.J. Taylor

Workshops Need Expiration Dates

Last week, I was talking with some people who've recently completed MFA programs. We were all feeling quite over workshops--submitting short pieces of work to people who aren't all that familiar with what you're doing. Our friend James made a useful distinction: saying you are over workshops is different from saying workshops are bad.

Like those fuel cells that fall away from ascending rockets, workshops perform a specific function early in your writing career: they expose you to a lot of amateur work, so you hone your diagnostic skills. At some point, this stops being helpful and you show longer works to fewer people.