The icing on the cake

Aloha! Here's one final post from Cincinnati, featuring me and uber-fan Susie who drove all the way down from Dayton just to hear me and say hi. Her friend also took this picture, which I have snitched from her blog.

Susie is herself an interesting person with a blog worth checking out, especially if you're interested not only in her perspective on, ahem, me, but in other aspects of modern life:

http://susiehereonly.blogspot.com/

Networking is important to establish those professional relationships that will benefit your career later in life

Cin City IV

...So the last thing I did in Cincinnati was have a workshop with a half-dozen writing students who had sent me some stories ahead of time. I found this a lot of fun (their mileage probably varied) especially as I haven't really spent any time with student-age writers since, well, since I was a student. These six people (five women one guy) were a trmendously talented bunch, with all of the stories being intersting and compelling in their own varied ways. A couple had obvious shortcomings (too long, or whatever) but many were just a step or two from being done and publishible in my opinion. But what do I know--I haven't managed to get a short story into a magazine in years. (I used to do it but seem to have lost the knack, for whatever reason.)

Anyway, thanks to the students for letting me see their stuff and talk about it. I'll keep their names confidential for privacy reasons but suspect they'll be making a name for themselves sooner or later. Nice work, guys.

And that was about it, except for the party Jay threw in my honor on Thursday night. Attended by faculty and grad students, it involved copious amounts of liquid refreshment and many funny stories excganged on all manner of topics. Binx the Doberman pinscher made an appearance, then left, then I think reappeared several more times. Then everyone went hojme and I went to bed and got up at 6a.m. and Jay drove me to the airport and I flew back to Hawaii where it has been pouring rain and gloomy with cloud and continues to be so. Hooray for the tropics. Sort of.

Moral of the story: Cincinnati is tres tres cool, even if the Bengals are kind of lame.

Greetings, Earthlings!

Here's a photo taken from reading on Tuesday night. As you can see, I had reverted to my natural space alien form for this special event. I thought it was clever the way I removed my eyes and other facial features, and replaced my outer coating of dermis (the humans call it "skin") with a foamy material that blended with the atmosphere in the room. Also I was able to stow my tentacles in the boxy "podium" structure immediately in front of me so as not to upset the weak-stomached human organisms in the audience.



This photo was taken by the freakishly good-natured human organism Jay Twomey with his cellular phone device. Apparently there were significant atmospheric disturbances at the time. Thanks, Jay!

Cin City, v.3

Okay this is slightly late, sorry. On Wednesday, following my Tuesday night Lecture, I met with a groupd of frighteningly well-motivated students who had all read The Preservationist, so I fastened my seat belt, drank a tankard of coffee and proceeded to answer a bunch of questions I had never thought much about. It was, all kidding aside, really nice to spend three hours with people who cared so much about something I had written, even if much of the time, their thinking about it had about as much in common with mine as, say, a student of advanced biochemistry.

So one of the first questioners pointed out that all the women characters in the book had absent mothers. (Memo to self: Duh...) She asked what I was trying to say with that, or soemthing to thate effect. So after I franticalkly scrolled through the women characters, searching for a mom figure and finding none, I mumbled something about, you know, not wanting to spend all that much time focusing on the family histories of each of the eight main characters in the book... um... how's that? People nodded as if I had said something of substance, but let's face it, these were grad students and I don't think anyone was fooled.

Then another woman asked which character (if any) I had as an"advocate" for the reader, you know, which one was the sort of reliable one for the reader to use as a kind of touchstone. This was a new idea to me, so I said, "Um, none of them, I mean, I think they're all important, they all have their own, like, story to tell." She looked profoundly unconvinced but maybe that was just me feeling paranoid. I found out later that this whole "advocate for the reader" idea is one that some other teacher talks about, and I think it's kind of bogus but what do I know. There's a tendency in workshops to say "Whose story is this, anyway?" as if there can only be one center to any given story, which I think is pretty much wrong, and which my first two books (and maybe Monster) demonstrate as being pretty much wrong.

Then some people said some nice things and this one woman said she liked the consistentcy if characterization in the book, which was nice to hear because I had to work pretty hard for that, and this other guy sort of but not really but sort of so I'll take it compared the book to As I Lay Dying, which is a compliment I'll accept any day of the week (even if it wasn't actually directly offered as such).

There was a lot of other stuff too but you get the idea. Someone asked me a question and I don't much remember what it was but when I answered she said she didn't believe me, which was pretty funny. But I had told the truth, so, what can I say. It was something to do with the function of the characters in the story and did I plan for them to represent different aspects of relationships to religion or something like this. I forget exactly. So anyway, the answer was, no. I don't plan that kind of stuff, I'm too busy trying to keep the characters straight in my head and make sure the story's moving along nicely and I'm not using the word "plenipotenitary" too many times on one page or whatever. She was thinking in terms of thematic stuff and I was stressing that my primary concern was with storytelling. She looked faintly amused and then she didn't believe me and we all had a good chuckle.

Then we all went home. It was great! Thanks to everybody in the class for reading the book. I appreciate your interest.

Cin City, volume 2

Thanks to everybody who came out last night to listen to me talk/read/meander. There were about 50 or 60 people in the audience, which is easily the largest group I've ever addressed, so thanks. It made me feel like a real writer or something (a disorienting sensation, but that's another story).

Thanks also to the unnervingly cheerful Jay Twomey, the guy who's organized this whole shebang. And a massive shout out to my uber-fan Susie, who is not affiliated with the U of Cin in any way but who drove all the way down from Dayton (Dayton!) just to hear me. That's like an hour's drive each way... there's some dedication in a big way, kids, let's all try to learn something from that. Susie's pal took a picture of the two of us which, hopefully, will find its way to my inbox and I will post.

So, what did I talk about? I started with the sometimes humorously negative responses to my stories from some critical quarters, which led me to some ideas of what people are looking for when they read, specifically, Biblical reinterpretations, and then a little but about how I went about writing the stories, and then I read some excerpts, and then I talked a little more and read more excerpts and then people asked questions and then some of us went and drank beer. It was all, generally speaking, great. Maybe at some future date I'll post the actual "lecture," or at least extracts from it, if people are interested.

Favorite question/answer from the evening:

Q: "I heard you like graphic novels, Dave... would you consider doing one as a Biblical story?"

A: "Yeah, definitely. But I can't draw to save my life."

Which is, sadly, true. I think Jonah has promise as a comic book aka graphic novel aka story wid pitchers. But I really can't draw a lick, so, I need a collaborator. Send samples to dmloveletters.

By the way, the next time you find yourself in Cincinnati, please consider staying at a great B&B called Clifton House. It's run by yet another cheerful Cincinnatian named Nancy, who keeps a terrific house and serves a breakfast that makes you fall to your knees and moan, "Yes! Yes!" So... I recommend it.

Later today, I go talk to a bunch of grad students who've read The Preservationist. Here's hoping I get a bunch of questions along the lines of, "Is your writing autobiographical?" I love being asked that and I always say, "Entirely."

P.S. I forgot

Freakishly good-natured U of Cin professor Jay Twomey told me yesterday that, based on my photo at the top of this blog page, everybody here expected me to be "a great big bear of a man." Disappointment ensued when it was discovered that, in fact, I am not. Discuss.

Cin City, vol. 1

So, flew 7 1/4 hours from Honolulu to Chicago, hung a couple hours in the airport, then a short hop to Cin "Sin City" cinnati, where I was met by the lively and freakishly good-natured Jay Twomey, the U of Cin professor who'd invited me to the school's reading/lecture series. Jay plied me with coffee and brought me to his house, where I met Binks, his freakishly good-natured Doberman, who slinked away when I first showed up but later made great overtures of friendliness (resting his head on my arm as I sat a the kitchen table being one of his more heartwarming habits).

After a few hours of semi-consciousness I was bundled off to the U of Cin library where I read from Samson to a group of 30-35 people. This happened at 4p.m., which was earlier than expected but probably just as well since I was pretty bleary and jet-lagged. I think the reading went okay--what I remember of it, ha ha--and people were very nice about saying that I didn't suck too horribly. Then I was bundled off to some bar with a bunch of Jay's dissolute professorial colleagues where we had beer and sandwiches and I generall got the idea that the faculty at this institution are pretty nice and interested in other people and so forth.

Now it's the morning after, I maneged about 12 hours of sleep and I'm feeling much better. Tonight is my "official" lecture and reading and I apparently will be fully conscious for that one, which kind o makes me nostalgic for yesterday when I was half sleeping through it all. But hopefully it will go well, especially if the crowd is half as friendly as yesterday's.

Favorite question from yesterday: "So, did you do a lot of research and, like, Biblical scholarship, when you were writing these books?"

Answer: "No."

Full report tomorrow...

Cincinnati, here I come (part 2)

This afternoon I leave for scenic and lovely Cincinnati, Ohio, which a few years ago was voted the nicest city to live in by some magazine. I have never been there myself, despite going to school in Oberlin, which is not too many miles north and east. So I'm curious.

I arrive Monday morning local time and will probably proceed to crash out. however, for those of you living in the area and who are also curious, I'll be giving a reading Monday night--I know not where, exactly, but it's somewhere on campus and I'm sure a quick phone call to the English department will point you in the right direction.

If you can't make it to that, I'm also giving a lecture Tuesday night, and will be reading during that as well. There's a link below for more info.

I am not a huge fan of flying in airplanes, so, any cheery thoughts yo wish to turn in my direction will be appreciated. I'll try to coment on my time in Ohio as I go along, if anything interesting happens (which I'm sure it will...)

Check out Uzee's US publisher

Clockroot Books will be publishing the US edition of The Geometry of God in the fall. Here's a link to their writers page, which featues some other interesting people in addition to, ahem, the lovely and talented Uzma Aslam Khan.

http://www.clockrootbooks.com/writers.html

I love the cover of this edition. It's a great book y'all,and highly recommended.

Forgot to Mention

Remember back in October when I said I was done with the new book? I was sort of lying. Or not lying exactly, because I thought it was true (or hoped it was) even though part of me sort of knew better.

Anyway.

I am now, really, about 2 days away from finishing the new book. At which point I will send it off to my tremendously talented agent and wait.

It's called, right now, An Age of Madness. This could change but I don't think it will.

Feel free to send champagne.

Cincinnati Here I Come

Those fine fine folks at the University of Cincinnati have invited me to come and give a lecture as part of something called The Ropes Lecture Series. (I will keep my snide comments about why they call it "Ropes" to myself.) The link to further information is here:

http://www.artsci.uc.edu/CollegeDepts/english/events/ropes.cfm

As you can see, there are all kinds of really smart people involved, talking about all kinds of really smart stuff, and then there's me. I have, as yet, more or less no clue as to what I'll be talking about. Suggestions are welcomed.

I had to come up with something to put on the calendar, which is why I invented a lecture called "Stairways to Heaven and HIghways to hell: Interpreting Biblical Tales for a Secular Age." Which sounds all cool and sexy and stuff until you reflect for about half a second and realize that the age we live in is about as secular as seventh-century Saudi Arabia. So I don't know where I'm going with that.

I'll be in Cincinnati for most of the week; besides the lecture I'll be doing a reading, and a creative writing workshop, and a seminar class that's read one of my books (I think The Pres). I'm actually looking forward to all this, provided of course that people are nice to me and don't just take the opportunity to vent about how much my books suck and ask me things like, "Hey, how come shitty writers like you get published and good ones like me don't?" Because then I'll have to talk about all the people I've slept with to make it this far.

So if anyone out there is in the area and wants to stop in and say hi, please do. I don't know when the reading will be but when I find out I'll post it here.

And maybe I'll keep a running like blog-thing going about my week in Cincinnati. If I have time. Will I have time? I have no idea. Is there much to keep you busy in Cincinnati? No idea.

As mentioned above: suggestions are welcome. Don't be shy.

One Historical Atrocity Does Not Excuse Another One

Now Israel is using white phosphorus, a chemical weapon, in its attacks against refugee camps. If this sounds familiar, it's because the US did it a couple years ago in Fallujah.

White phosphrus is classified as a chemical weapon and therefore is banned by the UN convention against these weapons. Guess which 2 countries haven't signed on?

Details of the accusations and evidence:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090112/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_israel_white_phosphorus


Score: Israeli casualties from 9 months of Hamas rockets: +/- 12.

Palestinian casualties from Israel's most recent attack: 850+ and rising.

See the links below for sources.

Is it anti-Semitic to say this is fucking insane?

I don't care. I'll say it anyway: this is fucking insane. One historical crime does not excuse another one.

Wow, Things Must Be Pretty Bad If Even The New York Times Acknowledges It

The NYTimes, one of the most rabidly pro-Israeli papers in the States (well, most every paper is the US rabidly pro-Israel) has against all expectations printed something pretty accurate about the recent re-invasion of Gaza. Hard to believe, but true:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/08/opinion/08khalidi.html

Remember: six billion dollars of US tax money goes to fund this every year.

STOP THIS FUCKING LUNACY.

How many more innocents does Israel need to murder before the United States demand that it desist?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090107/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_gaza_a_reporter_s_story

No explanation needed.

Best of 2008: Books

Sharp Teeth by Toby Barlow is a terrific read, a 300-page epic poem about werewolves living in Los Angeles. Against all odds, it's emotionally engaging as well as viscerally thrilling, and deserved much of the hype it received. Every so often, a book comes along that is genuinely daring in regards to form, and this is one such; when the dare pays off, as it does here, something unique can be created. The jarring, staccato lines of verse are a perfect fit for the story of wolf-people who might, after all, be expected to have somewhat limited attention spans.

I also loved Absent by Betool Khadairi, an Iraqi woman writing (in French, I believe) about life in Baghdad in the 1990s, in between the two American invasions. The story is obviously "political" in the sense that you can't write about life in an invaded/sanctioned country without incorporating elements of this into the milieu; but the book isn't out to make political statements in the conventional sense. It's more concerned with the narrator, a teenage girl who is growing up in these difficult situations and is concerned with relationships, with boys and her parents and how she looks and what she's going to do with her life. With the same concerns as the rest of us, in other words, but in an especially poignant setting.

I also loved Delirium by Laura Restropo, a Colombian writer whose ornate, long-winded sentences perfectly matched the subject matter of her book: a young man finds his fiancee in a state of near-catatonia following her return from a visit to her home town. He spends much of the book trying to figure out what has happened to her, and so do we, as Restropo doles out the story, and the history of several key characters, a little at a time. This was the first book I had read by this author, who apparently is much repected throughout Latin America, and I'll be looking for more.

The Egyptologist by Arthur Phillips came out a few years ago and it's a shame I didn't get to it sooner. It's a big, funny, sinister, mysterious, multilayered book about archaeologists digging in Egypt in the early part of the 20th century, and it's fantastic. Phillips pulls off the trick of having several different narrators involved, either speaking directly or through their journals and letters, and it gradually dawns on you that not all of these people are entirely trustworthy. Or maybe none of them are... By the time you figure out what's going really going on, you're in so deep there's no turning back. Did I mention it's funny as hell? Besides, it's about Egypt, which for me--as I think for many people--holds an enormous appeal. Tombs and sarcophogi and heiroglyphics and all that. Great stuff, great book.

Finally, Watch Me Disappear by Jill Dawson was a very powerful evocation of childhood, of the unreliability of memory, and of the difficulty we have facing up to unsavory events in the past. A British scientist living in the US returns to England for a family gathering, only to be confronted by something that happened to her as a child, when one of her friends was apparently abducted and killed. The body was never found. Dawson avoids all the easy expectations in this book as she writes about something that, sadly, has become so common that we barely even spare a thought for the missing children when they show up on milk cartons or wherever. It's a heavy book, and an emotionally intense one; not a lot of laughs here. But she's a great writer, and like her earlier book Wild Boy, this is deserves a far wider readership than it has gotten.

Best of 2008, part one (Tunes)

Here's a fairly random sampling of The Best of 2008, in the form of:

Music. The Black Angels are still my new favorite band, with new album Directions to See a Ghost only marginally inferior to their 2006 effort, Passover. Droning guitars, occasional organs and other keyboards, thudding bass and percussion, gauzy stoner vocals. Love it. Love it. They manage to edge out The Black Keys for Best Discovery of 2008 honors, even though the BK and their guttural, fuzz-heavy, blues-from-the-swamp sound is, more or less, what I tried to invent for myself during 20-odd years of guitar noodling. (Especially true on their earlier records Rubber Factory and Thickfreakness.) Honorable mentions include Bettye LaVette's Scene of the Crime CD--her best yet; Brightblack Morning Light's Motion to Rejoin, which features ultra-stoner, ultra-mellow but layered sonic soundscapes; Crooked Still, a Massachusetts-based country/bluegrass band whose third album, Still Crooked, is pleasantly morbid and grim (imagine The Handsome Family with an ethereal female singer and acoustic instruments); Sasquatch, a power trio that channels Alice in Chains but with better guitar playing; and Funkier Than a Mosquito's Tweeter, a compilation of Ike and Tina Turner from their late-70s rocking heyday. I never knew Ike could play guitar like that, but he could--and Tina could sure holler. This is nothing like the soul music I've always associated with Tina; this is rock & roll, sure as Janis is. Meanwhile, Senegal's Bassekou Kouyate & Ngoni Ba came out with Segu Blue, the best African music I've heard in quite a while, featuring bouncy kora playing, multilayered vocals and propelling basslines. And let's not forget Junior Kimbrough, inspiration for the above-mentioned Black Keys, whose record Most Things Don't Work Out is a standout. But really, any of his collections of swamp-boogie-trance-groove music hit the spot just fine.

Please note: not all these records came out in 2008. Some did; others I just didn;t discover till recently.

Coming soon: 2008's best books, movies and, like, experiences, man.

One last dystopia

...is The Army of the Republic, which came out in September and features the best blurb I have ever written: "Read it now, while it's still fiction." Yes, I can be clever.

Seriously, though, this is a pretty great book by a guy named Stuart Archer Cohen, who lives "up in Alaska, there" and posits a USA maybe 10 or 15 years into the future, when the corporations have taken over everything (more than they already have), a private army named Whitehall works for the government (more than Blackwater already does) and natural resources like water and forests are being carved up for the private sector (more than than they already are). Cohen raises some interesting questions about how far one should go to resist such developments, and what the difference is between a revolutionary and a terrorist, and to what extent violence is justified in acquiring/defending freedom. It's all wrapped up in lively thriller-esque plot, too, which makes it go down mighty easy. He doesn't have the "high lit" cache of Crace or Thomson but I like his book a lot better. It has both the big picture and a lively plot. Imagine!

The Dystopia Tour

Okay, I'll admit it: novels about horrible future societies/lack thereof have always grabbed me. Whether Farenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury) or The Sheep Look Up (John Brunner) or A Boy and His Dog (Harlan Ellison), I've always been a sucker for the "Here's the way the world is going to shit" school of storytelling. All the above-mentioned books are science fiction novels in the traditional sense; but I've also always enjoyed it when "literary" writers try their hand at it, and end up with Brave New World or 1984 or We by Eugene Zamiatin (1929, and arguably the foreunner of them all, though HG Wells's Things to Come predates it by a good 20 years).

Which brings us to these past few years, and this sudden raft of dystopia novels by "respectable" lit-fiction writers. There is of course The Road by Cormac McCarthy, which well and truly rocks, and also Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood, The Pesthouse by Jim Crace, Jamestown by Matthew Sharpe, Divided Kingdom by Rupert Thomson. They're all men except for Atwood (who tried a different riff on the future-disaster idea with The Handmaid's Tale, years ago) and everybody is white; but Crace and Thomson are Brits, and Atwood's Canadian, while MacCarthy and Sharpe are Americans. So the interest continues to cross national lines, at least, even if it continues to apparently mainly interest men, and white men at that. (If you'd like to write your thesis about this, please feel free.)

So anyway. I'm in the middle of reading all these books, and what have I learned?

I've learned that McCarthy leaves everyone else in the dust. At least, everybody I've read. The Road is relentless in its grimness, it laconic linguistic power, and its mood. It's like reading the blueprint of a story, with all the embellishment burned away. (Appropriate image, that, given that the landscape itself is utterly incinerated.) There are two characters, a man and his son, and a few others who come and go. Everything is horrible to being with, and gets worse. It's a great book, in its totality of pessimism. He also writes like the Dickens, which keeps things from getting dull.

On the other hand we have The Pesthouse. Jim Crace wrote a couple great books, Being Dead and Quarantine--which is problematic in itself, but for other reasons--but he really falls down on the job here. For me, one of the joys of dystopian fiction is the way it frees you up to explore the big picture, the oh-shit-I-can't-believe-it's-come-to-this-ness of things. Unfortunately, apart from a few suggestions, Crace really doesn't take you very far. Essentially the story follows--like The Road--a road, as characters walk from west to east, hit the shoreline, and turn around. Then they head back. The story never strays very far from the road, which maybe helps the forward momentum (of which there isn't a great deal) but it also means that the big-picture view is pretty much forgotten. There's an interesting bit with a religious cult, which is for me the most interesting part of the book, but that's about it.

Currently I'm reading Divided Kingdom, a story in which the UK has been broken into four quarters corresponding to the four humours of ancient medicine--sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric and melancholy. The population has been forcibly relocated to live in these quarters. In my world, that's what I call an ass-kicking premise. Then in the course of the story, the main character contrives to visit all these different quarters, and see what's been developing in each of them, which turns out to be... hmm, somewhat underwhelming. I mean it's sort of cool, and it's just the kind of big-picture stuff that Crace's book lacks altogether. But it feels like a lot less than it could be. I mean, given the premise, he really could have taken it to extremes. But apart from a few cases (the melacholics' Museum of Tears, for example), he doesn't do it much.

So anyway, that's where I am now, about 20 pages out from the end. After this I'll read Jamestown, which seems a wackier book than any of these others, and give a full report. Somewhere in the hazy distance lies Oryx and Crake, but I'm not a huge Atwood fan so that may take a while. And after that I guess I'll read some different stuff. But you want to know something, none of these high-profile books can hold a candle to We.