April 2009 Archives

One day, while riding on his mule, Jia Dao suddenly came up with the verse: "The bird spends the night in the tree by the pool, / the monk knocks at the gate under the moonlight." At first he wanted to use the word "shove;" then he wanted to use the word "knock." Not having settled on the best usage, he rode along on his mule, first drawing the character "shove" with his hand, then drawing the character "knock." Without realizing it, he passed through half a city ward in this fashion. Those who observed him were astonished, but Jia Dao seemed not to see them. At the time Han Yu was serving as provisional Metropolian governor of the capital. Han had a stern and punctilious disposition, and his awesome presence at that moment made itself felt on the great avenue. Passing the third avenue, the criers were clearing the way, but Jia Dao just went on writing characters with his hand. Only when he was suddenly pushed down from his mule and dragged before the Metropolitan Governor did Jia Dao realize the situation. The advisers wanted to have him reprimanded, but Jia Dao responded, "I just happened now to come up with a couplet, but I haven't been able to get a particular word right. My spirit was wandering in the realm of poetry, and this is what led me to run into Your Excellency. I do not dare call your wrath down upon me, but I hope you might be kind enough to give this some consideration." Han Yu halted his horse, thought about it for awhile, and said to Jia Dao, "'Knock' is finer."

-Zhou Xunxhu

I've mentioned this here before, but I'm mentioning it again. Partly because it just bears repeating, but also because I seem to have gained a slew of new readers over the past few weeks, and if you don't already know about it, you should: Duotrope's Digest.

Duotrope is a searchable database of about 2,400 fiction and poetry markets. Not quite as many as the 4,000 contained in the Writer's Market annual¹, but it's certainly more convenient to use, and it's updated more frequently. They send out a weekly email that tells you when new markets have been added and old markets have been updated. It also includes upcoming themed publication deadlines and other tidbits.

The site's submissions tracker is the best part. I used to do the same thing by hand in Excel (if that can be considered "by hand"), but the tracker is much better. Now I can easily see my submissions output and berate myself for not doing more. Even handier is the ability to compare the number of days your submission has been with a market versus that market's average response time, which lets you know when it's time to start pestering. You can also keep track of a given piece's submission history, which lets you know when it's time to put a bullet in its head.

So if you're one of those peculiar people who's convinced that other people really ought to be reading what you write, have a look. Duotrope lives on donations, so if you like what you see, consider tossing a few bucks into the PayPal bucket. The whole show is "run by a very small admin team comprised of a few published writers and former editors and is not affiliated with any outside businesses or organization." I have no idea who they are, but they do a smashing job and provide a valuable resource.

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¹Reader Doug points me to the online version of Writer's Market. The main difference between the two is that Duotrope focuses entirely on fiction, while Writer's Market contains a large number of non-fiction markets. Also, it costs $39.99 a year. It's really about what fits your needs best. I like free, and I'm writing fiction, so Duotrope works for me. If you're looking for a way to research places for your how-to book or your travel writing, then Writer's Market is probably the better way to go. I'm happy to see that they're finally online. The book was useful, and the articles were very helpful, especially the ones covering the basics of manuscript mechanics and submission etiquette. But I always found it a bit cumbersome to use for market research.

Ian Wood has managed to get his head stuck in a 3,600-year old Sumerian pot that was manufactured in Larsa during the reign of Rim-Sin I. This is much worse than it sounds, because the pot is priceless and therefore he must extract his head without breaking it. He is pleased that he can touch type.

That was a Facebook status update I posted on April 14 at 9:08pm.

There seemed to be more to it, so I turned that snippet into a 750-word short and sent it off to Chris Monks at McSweeney's. 

Short story shorter: he took it, and it will be on the site in a few weeks. He didn't even tell me to stop bothering him! My plan, she worked. I'll post a link when it's up.

Now I must see if I can do the same thing to Lee Klein...

...that's like a coked-up gorilla that swings through the transept of your mind, kicks out your retinas with its foot-fists, and escapes hooting from your skull, thundering into the world and dragging your blind and insensate carcass behind it like a duffel bag full of dead cats?

Because that doesn't sound like a very nice sort of day to have, and if you've had such a day, you can put my sympathies on the shelf next to it.

You don't keep your days on a shelf? What do you do with them, then? You're not one of those people who just piles them up on the couch or something, are you? Honestly, you really ought to take better care of them. You only get so many, you know, and their resale value goes way down if they're all scuffed up and bent.

Incidentally, and in furtherance of the papal thematic thing I've got going on this week for no apparent reason, there was once an antipope who was more into fox hunting than the whole Jesus trip, which didn't sit very well with his cardinals. He hadn't celebrated mass for awhile, and when they insisted that he do so instead of running off with the hounds on the Sabbath, he rode his horse into church, belted out a cursory Mass from the saddle, and trampled a few parishioners on the gallop back to the hunt. I think things might have gotten stabby shortly after that.

I can't for the life of me remember this fellow's name. So if you know the name of the pew-busting fox-hunting antipope, be a dear and leave it in the comments, would you? It's been bugging me all day, like a tweaking lemur in a synagogue.

OK, I shall stop now. Clearly I need to be smacked around a bit.

I've got a small stack of zines here. Do you remember zines? Back before the IntraTubes, would-be publishers used photocopiers to make multiple paper copies of whatever they wanted to print, and sent them to people via the U.S. Postal Service (which is still around, by the way, and some people still use it to mail letters to each other). They came in all shapes and sizes: saddle-stapled 8 1/2" x 5 1/2", or 8 1/2" x 11" if you had a budget or access to the office photocopier; sheets of paper stapled in one corner; 11" x 17" single sheets folded into a square; or sometimes just loose assortments of odd-sized, hand-cut paper stuffed into an envelope.

I've got Impetus here, a couple of issues of Bouillabaisse, and Cokefish. The first issue of Rant. Three issues of Struggle: A Magazine of Proletarian Revolutionary Literature (I'm in one of those, actually, which is not surprising, because I'd spewed off an anti-First Iraq War screed and Revolutionaries like that sort of thing), and th'advenchurzza scab boy. There's Mandrake Makes Madonna in Marmelade, and r.l. nichols & faggot friends & poesy pals preferrin' cock (or love 666). Shattered Wig #11. And, of course, Holy Titclamps, which is still around. Lyn Lifshin is in about half of these things. She's still around too, and remains insanely prolific. You can also buy stuff from the Christies, who run Alpha Beat Press and published Bouillabaisse and Cokefish.¹

It's a weird little pile of stained and yellowing papers and booklets that always stands out among the more ordered spines of the other books on my shelves. I shuffled through it this evening looking for Feh!, which published my four line epic, "Ode to Rubber." I didn't find it, but I found some ephemera that's probably been moving with me from place to place for well over a decade, hidden among the chaps and zines. A couple of poems that I'd forgotten I wrote, which is just as well. A copy of the 1995-1996 course catalogue for Union Theological Seminary. A reference manual for the tsubos of the twelve traditional meridians (excluding CV and GV). Some reviews of my first and only chapbook.

This little stack of random stuff illustrates the danger of our digital age. We've got papyri and clay tablets that are over 5,000 years old. But if the sun has a bad day and wings a monstrous coronal mass ejection our way, many of our modern online zines are going to vanish in a blaze of scrambled magnetic particles on sparking drive platters.

So, today's public service announcement: back up your data. Not that it will help if the sun unleashes an electromagnetic storm big enough to fry your laptop. But it might make you feel better.

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¹The last time I saw Dave and Ana Christy, I was at their place in New Hope hanging out with eliott, joe r., Bobby Starr, and my pal Lauren, none of whom you know or have ever heard of. Bobby Starr's photocopied zines and broadsides were dotted with anuses that he'd cut from porn mags. When I left that evening, he was on the floor with his head in an overturned kitchen trashcan, as a ward against incipient vomit. True story.

I sit here staring at the pixels which form the modern equivalent of a blank page. This slab of Asian components has so many ways into and out of it: jacks and ports and drives. Nothing that'll plug into the back of my skull. So I've got to make due with qwertyuiop.

Some nights I'm tempted to dig into old archives and post bits from them, to fool those of you unacquainted with my ex-site into thinking that something new has happened here. I never do. Everything in those archives has been posted already, and once I've re-read them there's never anything that strikes me as worthy of being posted again. Plus, that would be tricksy and false, wouldn't it? A salve to sooth an ego wounded by a quiescent period of inactivity or, more accurately, a period of less activity than I would like.

On some of those nights the pixels remain a pure and unmarked WYSIWYG white. It's not that I'm frightened of the empty page. I just don't have the energy to jump into it. These fallow periods have always been offset by later bursts of manic production, but that never feels like a pattern I can rely on.

So, I end up stuck in that moment, while my characters lounge in static scenes with nothing to do, smoking cigarettes too quickly and looking up at the ceiling, wondering when the hell they can get on with their lives.

Then I come here, and tell you about it.

Nothing further, really. Have a nice weekend, or, failing that, become the Pope.¹

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¹Speaking of which, I seem to be shedding skin from the insides of my cheeks at an alarming rate. On CSI they're always swabbing cheeks for DNA, but at this rate I could give Marge Helgenberger a pillowcase full of cheek cells without much bother. Not that I'd give Marge Helgenberger a pillowcase full of cheek cells. Not right away.

Because I deserve those things.

The grrrrriiiind is in full swing here, oh yes. And why is Movable Type telling me that "a saved version of this entry was auto-saved 13 hours ago?" I just started it, right this minute. Hang on a sec, be right back.

No. I have not gone back in time, only forwards like the rest of you lot. Therefore I will attribute it to some software glitch, unlikely as that sounds.

The grind is not pleasant, nor is it productive. Ray Bradbury famously advised us to stay drunk on writing, so that reality could not destroy us, but dealing with the long-term legacy of staying drunk on other things does seem to get in the way of that. Or! Perhaps not. In any event, no dwelling on that here. Let us intone words in a sacred way, with fantastic haircuts:

Yea, though the bottom has fallen out of my neurochemical soup tureen, I will indulge no whine: for dignity of some sort art with me; its rod and staff beat me about the head. It preparest a bowl of really smashing curry in the presence of pulchritudinous tatterdemalions, which is awesome because who even uses those words anymore: it annointest my head with Belgian ale, which is sticky and has too many calories. Surely fabulous tales and increasingly lucrative contracts shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in an excellent villa on Naxos forever. A-fucking-men.

Self doubt, my loves, self doubt. Sylvia Plath called it the worst enemy of creativity, and she would know, what with that whole oven thing and all.¹

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¹And by the by, did you know that her son Nicholas Hughes also killed himself, just a few weeks ago? I mean, dig the horror, here: his poet father left his poet mother for another woman, and his mother gassed herself. Then the woman for whom his father left his mother, herself the wife of yet another poet, gasses herself and their daughter. Some four decades after that, Nicholas leaves an academic career as a marine biologist to set up a pottery workshop, but hangs himself instead. Thank god or something of a similarly elevated sensibility that I've no pretensions to poetry. Or pottery.

I felt dissatisfied late in the day,
I galloped my coach to the ancient plain.
The evening sun was limitlessly fine,
it was just that it was drawing toward dusk.

Li Shangyin,
Yueyou Plain
Translation: Stephen Owen

From around 1220, virtually all of the more architecturally active German cathedral authorities were tacitly acknowledging the failure of their native tradition by employing French architects to extend, complete, and embellish works begun by Germans.

Want something poetical to peruse?

The Tang period (618-907) is considered the golden age of Chinese poetry. Tang Shi San Bai Shou is an 18th-century compilation of the period's poetry, and was used to cultivate the characters of elementary school students while teaching them to read and write.

Commonly referred to as "300 Tang Poems," there are actually 320 poems in it. You can find all of them on this nifty Tang Shi site, maintained by L'Association Française des Professeurs de Chinois and arranged by style of verse and by poet.

If you're inclined to visit, I'd suggest starting with Li Bai, one of the Eight Immortals of the Wine Cup¹ and generally regarded as one of the two greatest Chinese poets.² His Drinking Alone with the Moon is a favorite of mine.

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¹Which is one of the reasons I love this stuff. Eight Immortals of the Wine Cup! In the West we get dry descriptive sobriquets like "The Algonquin Round Table" or, if people are feeling whimsical, "The Inklings." But the Chinese called their scholars drunken gods!  

²The other being Du Fu.