Two Dollar Radio & Film Moves

One of my favorite small presses, Two Dollar Radio, is preparing to make some films. Two years ago I read The Orange Eats Creeps by Grace Krilanovich and it helped change the way I think about literature. Not right away. My first read of it, though charged with some enjoyment, felt like work, and at the time I wasn't in the frame of mind where I necessarily appreciated hard work in my reading life. That changed after I finished the book, a few months passed where it somehow was still digesting and decompressing in my subconscious. The desire turned up to revisit it. And looking at myself as a writer at the time I felt like a fraud. For a long time I was focused on telling clever stories. Whereas there isn't anything wrong with a fun yarn and a clever twist, I wasn't exploring and challenging myself with the fresh palette of the page. I was bound by old expectations of what I thought good novels should be. I wasn't handling language as a fine craft. Reading the book again moved me to reinvent myself as a writer, to explore personal landscapes and handle language with a finer point of respect and reverence and reshaping. So I credit this book as an important one in my development as a reader and a writer.

Then this past summer I read Crapalachia by Scott McClanahan and I had to do a double take because I didn't know sentences could be so lean and efficient yet saturated with personality. 

I have some other Two Dollar Radio books on my shelf queued up and am already counting potential Christmas money I haven't received yet to load up on some of their newer titles that have intrigued me, like Jeff Jackson's debut novel Mira Corpora. 

As the books of theirs I've read have been like the introduction of strange delicacies I never knew existed, I'm excited to see what they do with the medium of film. They already have an enviable handle on narrative and voice. In the age where Syd Field formulas have rusted many movies, and people's expectations of how a movie should be paced, I welcome and anticipate what they may be projecting in the realm of digital cinema, and how it may change us as movie viewers.

For anyone that stumbles on my little blog here in the next couple of days, consider tipping them in advance at their indiegogo campaign so they can make the first round. 

Read-Head

I spent much of last year reading, and plan to spend much of the coming year doing even more of it, so I've laid down some reflections.

I wasn't much of a reader when I was a kid. I avoided it when I was younger so I could play baseball, other sports, make believe in the woods, etc. I didn't have the attention for it, I suppose I was restless. When I was 10 I got into the idea of making movies, and messed around with my parent's camcorder. At this time I learned that a film director was a profession, and I decided that was what I wanted to be when I grew up. I shot a bunch of little movies, some comedy, some sci-fi, creating space ship sets in my basement, some clay-mation. Mostly these were made up as we went a long, though in early high school I started to experiment with writing a variety of short screenplays, some shot, though many remained as exercises in writing the form. When I was 16 I acted in my friend James N. Kienitz Wilkins' movie Fight A Force of Friendly Fire. I had heard some actor interviews talk about "method acting" and I was curious, I investigated this "technique" some and decided I would try some method acting out on this film. I feel with some surges of intensity I alienated some friends, though it was a rush, I was addicted to it, I decided I had more fun acting, being on screen, on the stage, so I decided more so than a film director, I wanted to be an actor. 

These days I focus more on myself as a writer, though I do some acting from time to time, mostly in our Wood Sugars projects. But my time exploring film and acting was an important period to put me on a path to explore myself as a writer. Some of my writing experiments began as a way to develop new material to act in or shoot on film, such as my early collaborations with Daniel Mac Rae. It was a great experience to act in new material he was writing, and see his pieces progress through various drafts along side the rehearsal process. I learned a lot about writing from him. 

The relationship between reading and writing is a tight one. Most accomplished authors when imparting advice to writers mention they should read, a lot. To be a serious writer, is to be serious reader (as paraphrased from many different authors). The reason may be obvious. Writers create using language, and reading is important in building up a command on language, in exercising the imagination. Some times painters have to stock up on paint. I also think it's important to actively engage in the form you enjoy creating in. If you don't enjoy reading, then how do you expect anyone else to enjoy reading what you're writing.

As mentioned, I didn't read a lot as a kid. I had spurts though where I enjoyed it. In 5th grade I enjoyed Goosebumps and Michael Crichton. In 8th grade I wiggled my way into an Honors English class, as most of my friends were smart kids and I wanted to fit in. My teacher, Mr. Berry, however changed the way I thought. Mr. Berry seemed to have a bohemian past, on his wall was a banner "No Matter What We Study, Everything is Connected." I remember many engaging philosophical class discussions. Each week we had to write "lit logs." They were a sort of informal book report, where we'd write a letter to a classmate, they would respond, all in conversation about the books we were reading outside of assigned class reading. The vibe of class discourse, for perhaps the first time in my life, got me thinking, or attempting, to think deep, to really examine human nature, the meaning of life. I was also going through puberty, so maybe my brain was also going through complimentary changes. Through writing these lit logs, though on a weekly basis I didn't have the time or reading speed to finish every book, I found myself genuinely curious about books, and had a blast talking about them. 

In high school, well, I spread myself thin with sports and extra curricular activities, and making some movies, that I barely read what was assigned for class, though I did make every effort to. Many evenings I'd fall asleep with a book open. 

I started to take reading seriously again in college. Many of the great actors seemed to be voracious readers. Dustin Hoffman, Richard Burton, Al Pacino, Tom Hanks, Johnny Depp, Sean Penn, all seemed to mention literature throughout various interviews. Tom Hanks I believe kept an active book list on his MySpace page. I felt that, to further myself as an actor, I should probably deepen my "sensitivity to language." Naturally, in theatre school we read a lot of plays. I read some novels and poetry on the side, trying to correspond reading choice material to parallel an acting role, to perhaps expand my understanding of a character perspective or time period. For my role in Magnets: Hyena Daniel Mac Rae recommended Cormac McCarthy's Child of God and Outer Dark, as well as Irvine Welsh's Marabou Stork Nightmares. Such books buttressed a visceral thought process and inspiration toward bringing the character Jerry Thompson to life. This, over the years, led to my interest in authors as artists, just as for a long time I was quite interested in various actors, or film directors before that. And this of course led to my urge to throw down more writing of my own, and not just as material to shoot. I found a thrill in language sometimes being its own means to experience a story. I began to see literature as a mind expanding drug. Words, stimulating imagination, put the author inside my head, while at the same instant, I was put inside their's. 

I have a lot of writing goals for 2013. Though as active as I want to be as a writer, I want to be even more active as a reader, pushing myself further, eating up more pages than I ever have. One, because I quite enjoy it. Two, because I'd like to keep growing as a writer, and as a person (reading has been linked in brain studies to increased empathy). I also find; the more actively I read the more fluid word choices feel as I write.

I will be writing some more about my reading. Much in the vein of those lit logs, some posts here may be, not as a book review or a book report, an exploration, a further dialogue about literature. I remember watching Martin Scorsese's documentary A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies where he showed clips and talked about the movies that inspired and influenced him. I'd be interested to do something similar here with novels and short stories and essays as I continue my own journey through the creation of literature.

I've Got Some Nerve

Some news.

The novel manuscript I've been tinkering with for 3 years now has come to completion. Votary Nerves is coming around the corner.

In 2009, while I was revising Turban Tan and prepping it for publication, I decided to do the NanoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) that November. So I set a little chunk of time each night to pound away at something a tad stream of conscious. I started to pre-plot and outline an idea but threw it out in favor of surprising myself.  And I feel I successfully surprised myself. The only notion I had in mind to explore was "high school" for better or worse. I had at the time realized I never wrote a story revolving around a high school aged character. Even while I was in high school, I was writing about adult characters, because I thought them more interesting. At the time I had just watched Freaks and Geeks on DVD and re-watched Twin Peaks. There was a sort of fresh recklessness I found myself drawn towards through watching high school characters get themselves into trouble. In remembering my high school days, despite the lack of actual stakes in the grand scheme of things, at that time in my life, everyday was fucking vivid. And so my interest was piqued in that sort of naivety, and a perspective infused with curiosity and a tendency towards hysteria. 

So I started writing, and soon a story emerged involving the death of the narrator's father. I myself lost my dad to cancer the summer after I graduated high school. I didn't necessarily set out to write about that, but things spewed, and a different exploration dug itself into my story. A fantasy evolved. After my dad passed away, I experienced little waves of inexplicable anxiety. But I felt I handled that period of my life with some semblance of grace and even temperament. So I thought while writing, what if I handled that anxiety with extreme resignation to my quaking nerves? Out of all of my fiction so far, this one is the most personal. It's certainly fiction, but there are autobiographical nuggets peppered in throughout, and that makes it actually pretty scary, for me, to release. But I decided it was time. The proverbial "they" say to do thing that scare you. Well, here we go.

The first draft was raw and all over the place. It took some time to reshape and fine-tune into something readable. It morphed into some other variations. I played with a section of it to perhaps try as a solo performance piece, and even played with a screenplay version. Both were helpful in developing the voice and action of the piece, but ultimately I brought it back to prose form, because I felt it was the more appropriate medium for experiencing the story from the narrator's head, especially with some of the cerebral, hallucinatory aspects I wanted to keep.

I recently wrapped edits, artwork, and formatting for this bad boy. The release is imminent. 

Notes on the release. There will be a soft launch and an official launch. The soft launch will be very, very soon. Soft meaning, you can order it in paperback and Kindle editions via the internet. The official launch will be in early 2013 and will involve distribution to independent bookshops and a big launch party followed by a little book tour here in Chicago. If that goes well, maybe I'll run around with it in different corners of America.

Stay tuned for my baby, Votary Nerves.

Little Pleasures

Id. Gratification. The pleasure principle. 


No matter one's beliefs on the purpose of life, pleasure is at least a pretty damn important additive. It's important to give into temptation every now and then.


I took a walk in the bitter cold then came inside and took a hot shower. The expansion of my circulation melted my interior with glee.


Mexican music playing from the next door neighbors. Made me think of summer, of family. 


Last night I got a good beer buzz going and watched an assundry of music videos on YouTube. This was after another solid Wood Sugars writer meeting. We're getting on those more regularly now so can keep developing new live sketches and new short films. 


Today I did more edits on my novel manuscript. I spent a good while on it and my brain felt a bit sapped after so I played Sonic Colors on Wii and then decided to walk to Walgreens to get cookie dough. Again, giving into temptation. I hope scientists develop a cure for diabetes. My sweet tooth is a good salesman. 


I sat here for a good few minutes trying to think up a good poignant post but this is the best splattering of wisdom I could come up with for now. I have been writing a shit ton though. That's where my brain has been spilling its juice. 


In a little over a week, Monday Jan 23rd I will be reading at the Hungry Brain in Chicago in the 8x8 show. You should come. We can drink IPAs together. 

Cake Frosting Tear Drops

I've been watching a lot of space documentaries lately. The Universe is in my Blockbuster queue. It's made me thing about how creative and destructive space is at the same time; black holes engulfing, stars ejecting fused elements, clouds condensing to become stars, meteors smashing bits of dust off of a m0on, which later becomes another planet's moon, etc. Indeed it has inspired me to incorporate a bit of destruction in my own writing process. In fact, the process of revising my novel is very destructive, stuff being chopped, sentences being bashed and rearranged. 


I started writing a new novel this week. I had been wanting to since the summer, an idea brewing since then. But I waited because the summer was busy, and then I moved. And then I thought I should wait until I have my current novel finalized. But really I need to spew down this new prose. My current novel is at a point where its feeling like a destructive process, as mentioned above. In a good way, maybe. But I felt the need to get this new idea in pen. I'm writing it all free hand, in a notebook. This excites me because computers are starting to remind me of business, and I start thinking of e-mails to follow up on, etc. I like the unplugged feeling of writing by hand. I like getting to a feverish point where my hand hurts. I also like the feeling of exploration that comes to me when jotting shit down with pen and paper. Which is what I feel like a first draft of a novel should be; an exploration, not a final product. When I did more acting, it used to frustrate me when directors treated rehearsal performances like it should be the final show. It's not. It's rehearsal. It should be about exploration. 


I feel like my revision process is a black hole right now. And my new writing project is the white hole.


I could go on and on about space. I almost had a mini panic attack in the bathroom at work this morning when I tried to think about what existed before the big bang. Certainly something other than a super dense primordial atom. Can something really be created from nothing? Which leads me to think that the big bang may be the off shooting matter from some other universe. No beginning? The ancient gets more ancient. The thought makes me dizzy. I had dreams last night that hinted at some absence of matter. Black space, small specks of things happening. My brain had no framework to compare it to reality other than a planetarium with a dim bulb. 


I also had a dream that I was at my high school reunion. I stepped in some cake frosting that had fallen to the floor and everyone pointed out that it looked like crusty cum had smeared on my shoe. It was humiliating. Cake frosting tear drops. I woke up depressed. Are such embarrassing events really that depressing in comparison with planets out there getting ripped apart by magnetars? It gives me hope that getting made fun is really actually a chill time. 

Turban Tan's 2 Year Anniversary Thoughts

Today marks the 2^nd anniversary of the release of my novella Turban Tan. Books deserve birthdays. Below is the main character, The Drippy Man celebrating.

Two Years Later, Some Thoughts.

Turban Tan began as a piece of spontaneous prose, thrown up here on this blog in fact. I developed it some more for one of the Seeding Meat releases, written almost as a play, with dueling philosophies on the parts of The Drippy Man and The Dry Advisor. As the economy continued to hover in a recession throughout 2009, I became quite interested in economics, the complicated facets of it, of derivatives, CDOs, mergers. I wanted to play around with an economic “drama” of sorts and The Drippy Man character continued to surface in my mind.

I became interested in dystopian literature as a sort of economic ghost story.

I liked the idea of starting not from his race to escape a fucked up world, but of exploring his tendency to go back to it after being offered a sanctuary. In a lot of ways I think people are masochistic. We make things harder on ourselves than need be.

Below is a video of me being really excited about this book. 

This is 2 years ago. I look pretty much the same. In fact I am still quite excited about this piece. I’ll be the first to admit that it isn’t a perfect piece of literature. But I hold fast to the fact that it is a wild, unique crack at dystopia, at a fucked up spy novella, at a novella in general. Though flawed, I am confident in its fascinating trek from Maine to Dubai. The writing came together fairly quickly when I set out to expand it into a novella. I had a lot of shit floating around my head from reading the news more actively than I ever had before. Turban Tan is a bit raw, simple, ambiguous, and I appreciate aspects of that. The novel manuscript I’m currently working on, I’ve been working for two years now. I’m in a bit of perfectionist mode, chopping, refining each sentence structure. I’m less reckless as a writer now since Turban Tan, for good or ill. I suppose every writer goes through phases of development, after all, I’m working on strengthening my craft. Yet something I learned from my high school athletic days, sometimes you get worse before you get better, while the muscles rip and grow and ache.

Enough of my thoughts. Turban Tan is swell. It has an orange cover and a strange story told from a strange, coded point of view. You should buy a copy! I really think you should! For your back pocket and for your Occupier’s stockings. You should also eat cake today and read a book for at least a little bit.

I’ll be getting drunk tonight. I hope you do as well and offer a little toast to The Drippy Man.

Buy a copy and read it too!

Preposterous

I feel the urge to write a sci-fi-esque novel, just going nuts and writing bullshit and going by a new logic, a new law of physics. Just going nuts and allowing myself the freedom to be preposterous and see what can be sculpted from it. I like space and space blows my mind and I want to fuck my mind up a little bit by writing about myself in space and sucking the cartoon-ish fascination out of it and scare the shit out of myself.

Bringing Home Small Pumpkins

Went apple picking today in Indiana but didn't find too many apples in the orchard, all picked over and some scattered on the ground, got to stump on a few and at least enjoy the pseudo outdoors and the sunshine. I ate 3 pumpkin donuts too many in a short amount of time and had a sugar crash. The Hen House Prowlers were playing bluegrass for the family folk, I know these guys, I know them as Sexfist, their other name from some Chicago shows. They were nice enough to let us record some live tracks awhile back for our Wood Sugars Inside the Barrel podcast.

We bought a tiny pumpkin for our cat Gus. I get a kick out of cutesy things like that.

Wicked tired today from a late night of chicken wings and sour beer, then hoppy beer with a good friend last night.

Was wicked tired last Sunday too, I failed to mention here about our Wood Sugars 4 shows in 24 hours last weekend. We of course had our Jokesmith Juggernauts on Fri Sept. 30th which was a good turn out but the comedy didn't seem to hit. It's okay, it happens. I hope the people were at least entertained and enjoyed their Friday night out. Saturday, Oct 1st we performed at the Ravenswood Art Walk at two different times, different places. At 11:45am we performed for 15min at their Main Stage. We had to substitute out the cuss words and ultimately performed for the beer booth guys, the sound guys, and a mom with two toddlers bopping around. I rehearsed my bits all the way there without the usual cussing. I was intensely nervous I'd let some f bombs slip like usual, but I was proud in the end to be a controlled performer. Then at 2pm we were under the impression we'd be performing in a theatre space but it was actually a wood shop. Wood Sugars in a wood shop, very fitting I do believe. It was actually the most fun I've had performing in a long time. We got about 5 or 6 random viewers, and were supposed to fill an hour. We're used to 15 min time slots, so we threw in some old sketches and did some improv to stretch it out. We popped some genuine chuckles out of our crowd.

Then we were asked to perform at a friend's house party, which we agreed to tentatively but an e-mail blast went out from the hostess that we'd be performing and we didn't want to be the dicks who backed out, even though Donny was hurting from what he thought was a cracked rib after a bike accident. It was actually pretty rad performing along with some other comedy folk in an apartment. It was cozy, almost salon style. I heard about a ghostly encounter from earlier that day in that very apartment. I dig hearing such things. Some people shotgunned their beers. I cheered them on and just drank my beer really fast, not chugging, not sipping. I got drunk and stayed out late. I don't do that enough anymore, but was reminded why it's not a usual thing for me when my wee hour AM bus route through Wrigleyville delayed me from catching the Belmont bus, within only a few seconds. And it was a 30 min wait for the next one. So I just walked, which I usually don't mind but I've been doing that a lot lately and my feet were tired. I thought about the novel I've been revising.  About to dive into another pass at it, and I'm feeling a slight nervousness. The piece I feel is getting close to being something swell, yet I feel like a blacksmith about to work on a bunch of small metals. A slight cabin fever type thing echoes around in me like the sensation of trying to put thread through the eye of a needle. Sometimes I get a kick out of digging into such tight focus on a task, yet sometimes I just want to work sloppily and spill my guts all over the place and not have to reshape it all into neat little piles.

I'm a slob with OCD.

The Diarrhea of Writing

I came across this clip of Chuck Palahniuk talking about writer's constipation which enjoyed listening to and identified with. I do love those moments of writing when you burst down to your laptop or a pad of paper and do just have to fucking write.

One of the first vivid experiences I had with that involved this old piece of spontaneous prose (http://theigloooven.blogspot.com/2008/02/lagoon-of-serious-dementia.html). I was suddenly compelled to get off the bus early, because I had language popping up in my head that I just just had to write down. So I found the only free piece of paper I had in my bag, a Chinese take out menu, and started scribbling on it against a newspaper box. This language was coming out of nowhere, as though my subconscious possessed me, came pouring out like diarrhea. That's when I knew I wanted to explore this writer thing more.

Spray

I just sneezed all of a sudden and sprayed snot all over my laptop. I think I got it all cleaned up but I still feel dirty now typing away here. Sometimes I hate sneezing. I know they say that to feel a sneeze is to feel 1/10th of an orgasm, or 1/100th of an orgasm, some stat like that. (I'm curious how this is measured. Do they set people up neuro-sensors and record their brain waves while having sex as a control experiment? Then wave pepper up their noses to compare?) I feel more irritation than anything when I sneeze. Particularly, after eating a granola or cereal bar. I think I'm allergic to something in them. I sneeze harshly after the first couple of bites. Yet I keep eating them because they are a convenient form of breakfast in a go-go-go society. Store brands make me sneeze most viciously and it's painful when I get granola chunks flung up my nasal passage. So I steer away from generic granola bars. I'm a granola bar snob. Or granola bar snot, if I may work in a pun.

I'm thinking on the correlation maybe, of this sudden sneeze spasm. I am sitting here drinking cold water and hot coffee simultaneously. Work day appropriate double fisting. Perhaps the alternating temperatures are doing weird things to my interior systems. After all, alternating from cold air conditioning and hot muggy outdoors does odd things to my body, like summer colds. But I like drinking a lot of coffee. And I like drinking a lot of water. I drink too much of each. I am a liquid fiend. I'm also curious on the psychology of this. Like a fixation. I always like to be drinking something. I get this way with beer too, I like to keep going. Not necessarily in an alcoholic way. I'm less interested in the buzz or the inebriation then I am in the taste and flow. What would Freud say about me?

I also tend to write a lot of stories about liquids. Last night at our monthly dystopian reading series I read a short story of mine about indie craft soda pop making scenesters. I had a lot of fun reading/writing this one. Add it to the collection of other liquid oriented tales; Church Decaf, Whiskey Pike, Tea Man, Steep!, Sake Date in a Mustard Field, Nagasaki Lagoon. Etc. Maybe I'll put together a liquid themed story collection. Or just submit them around like random corks riding the ocean waves. [Insert poetic conclusion]

Bottoms up.

I feel sneeze coming o-n-

ITB 6

We put up a new episode of Inside the Barrel last week. We had some fun conversations with Ted Tremper, a comedian, and winner of a Vimeo Award for his webseries "Breakups." We also have a short sketch on there I wrote called "Bikers and Cars" which plays with the seeming rivalry between hipsters who bike about town and the people who drive. Definitely something I see both sides of, and I do applaud anyone who rides their bike, I know I'd like to ride mine more about town, but I've encounter much too many bikers who believe they are above any rules of the road. So this piece was inspired by that. I also wrote and we recorded a sketch called "Furrocious" about a father/son hunting trip, and the son reveals he's a "furry." It felt funny as we recorded it but editing found it didn't work as a comedic piece the way it played out, so I'm back to the writing table with that one.

Stage/Bridge

It has been awhile since I last posted here! My apologies for my posts have been few & far between. I have been busy though. First off, we have a lot going on with our Wood Sugars site between podcasts & columns. So a lot of my writing energies have towards the podcast & my weekly column The EGP: The Economic Gho$t Po$t which is a blend of fiction (ghost stories) with economic analysis. Both the paranormal & economics have fixated me for sometime & I thought it would be fun to combine them into a strange concoction. I am by no means no economic expert, even though I have been reading up on economics quite frequently, the post is more so a means to a conversation regarding it, I might say something stupid but am open to be called out on it., so please read it & comment...maybe we can all learn from it.

I've also been drawn towards playwrighting as of late. For along while I either wrote fiction or screenplays. In February I pounded out a script called Bosto. It's a strange one, takes place on the 3rd floor of a building. Three fisherman live there (two are out of work, one gets work) & below them one floor is a shelter for battered women. And on the bottom floor is a fine seafood restaurant. When screams sound from the floor below them, the fishermen are drawn into a night of intrigue. The play will be work-shopped with XIII Pocket this coming august at the DCA (Department of Cultural affairs) space in downtown Chicago along with two other plays by members of the artistic ensemble. I am psyched to get it on its with the other ensemble members, to see it, hear it, and continue to tweak it.


I have also tweaked the screenplay I've adapted from my book Whiskey Pike to also be a stage play. I must say I've had the most fun with the stage play form. Even though I feel the screenplay is in strong shape, I may focus on mounting the stage play first. Why? Both will be fairly expensive to produce. As it stands they read as period pieces, which are naturally expensive to produce. I do have some strong ideas to gear the film away from being period & make use of modern, guerilla shooting. This would make it more feasible to shoot on a low-low budget. But I feel compelled to stage it...to build an atmosphere to be experienced in the flesh. I feel with the vision I have brewing, I can get away with minimal setting, costuming & still douse it with the feel of an old forgotten world. There's still a lot of props & transitions, so I am continuing to work on fine-tuning it, simplifying it, trimming. But I am excited. It currently stands as a strong two act play, with a lot of potential for eerie environment & highly kinetic movement.
I think what is currently drawing a lot of my interest in writing plays is that it serves to bridge to of my passions: performance & literature. Plays serve as a strong blue-print towards performance, but also great reads. Look at the many who read Beckett, Shakespeare, O'neill, Shaw, among many others, and enjoy the read for it's literary value. I get a kick out writing with the challenge of developing human behavior within space. It's a blast to drive your own production but also interesting to let the script continue to exist & be interpreted by other productions throughout the years. As much as I love film, it tends to stamp one vision to a story & limit its play on one's imagination.

I've had some new ideas for the developing of a novel I wrote called Televictim. The novel is still in rough form. I wrote it very quickly during the month of November. It's a bit sloppy overall. There's some stuff I am pretty proud of. There's also a lot that needs to be cut & there's a lot that needs to be further explored. I have spent a lot of time combing through it & working up a new outline. And the further I have gone into outlining it, the more I churn up some interesting staging concepts. I have currently put this project on hold until later in the summer as to focus more on writing for the Wood Sugars podcast Inside the Barrel & fine tuning both Bosto & Whiskey Pike but perhaps after letting it stew, I may dig back into the novel instead as a stage play.

Burning Ink

I tried an experiment while camping this past week. I wrote a page of prose, feverishly handwritten, then tossed it to the smoking flames, to see the ink sear, then crumple into the collapsing paper, bronze running to black, and withering away forever into an ash that will run with the mud of upcoming rains. This experiment came to mind as I walked past an image of Adolph Hitler not too long ago. In a long series of thought associations I stumbled onto the concept of book burning, and as I vested more of an interest and passion in writing literature over the several most recent years, the idea of book burning hollowed me with a more personal sting. My curiosity and tendency towards slight masochism itched me to explore the experience of seeing a written work singe and disappear. I could very well toss my book Whiskey Pike, which I recently self published, but that wouldn’t have the same flare (no pun intended) of indignation, as there is a pdf of the original typeset saved on several computers, jump drives, and CDs, not to mention with the publisher. We see here the glory of the digital age in backing up intellectual property so the artist can rise again like a phoenix amidst the destruction of one physical copy. I wanted to see something unique written, never again to be recreated, slip into the orange flicker of destruction. Of course this experiment is a bit watered down as I knew going into it that I was going to destroy whatever it was I was going to write, and perhaps subconsciously I did not release a depth of personal vestige in my work. However upon completion of the writing, I was filled with a touch of pride at the poetic flow of the piece I had written, and pleased with the aesthetic configuration of words communicating the idea of burning literature. I thought for a second how easily the words came to me in the instant I wrote them, but how ethereal they were without the preservation through ink to paper. Never again could I communicate with such precision the same thought, as I would be crippled by the urge to recreate the same poeticism and rhythm of the first attempt. Writing is very much a performance, a very personal performance, the writer performing at the paper, and beautifully the paper preserves it through the whip of ink or tap against type pad. The hollowness I felt post paper burn struck me with some similarity to the feeling I have had after the close of a play, pleased with the piece but realizing it would never again be seen. There is a bittersweet twist of pleasure with the creation itself and emptiness that it will slip away through the cracks of history, as with anything in life, we realize we are of mortal nature, ourselves as well as our work. Enjoyment of the work becomes necessary to continue on knowing all of nature’s destructive forces. The writer may also face the loss of work in the everyday dance with technology, a power outage before saving the document for instance. Art reaches to be shared, and obstacles to its ability to be seen or experienced can be of a devastating vibration. My experiment in a sense was meaningless as I wrote it without the intention of sharing with an audience and wrote the carefree flick of pen knowing I would never get to share it – the result however with the carefree flick was a piece I felt was actually, truly beautiful, and indeed despite an assumption of closed subconscious, a personal splatter of words that had a raw and fresh quality to it. I almost want to approach all of my writings with that same carefree attitude. It in fact may well be my most honest writing to date. I thought that I may perhaps rewrite it and see how close I could pull out the phraseology that may be lingering in my short term memory. But it would have lost that original flow, and would be a prefabricated attempt to duplicate, as if I were a photocopier – I in fact would not be engaged in the act of creating. I will let the aforementioned piece remain a mystery both for the reader and for myself. I can only image how one would feel seeing his body of work purged and what possible ways there are to cope with such a protest against ones art and ideas. I know how I coped on the level of my experience, which was in all essence self induced and petty. Immediately after staring into the destruction and page particles flittering away as smoke, I pierced two hot dogs with a whittled stick and balanced them above a hot coal. I buried the loss with sustenance by cheap beef frank and slid a momentary step back down the ladder of Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs.