story with pictures

a friend of mine used to make these, but with good prints. i'm not a photographer. click on the pictures to read the text.

christmas bowling indie lit interview juked john wang

there is no one in my house right now, except for the dog, and six cats. they are sort of boring me. when i drive down streets right now i put on the saddest and quietest music i can think of (bon iver right now) and watch the other people doing things. i have nowhere to be and nothing to do, therefore heavy traffic is not bothering me. emily is gone to various places in Texas, i hope she doesn't get lost. yesterday i put bookmarks for an author i like (stephen graham jones) in a barnes and noble. today i went back and the bookmarks were gone. nothing i do right now leaves any mark, except for about an hour. i want to leave a thing that will last longer than that, that someone will look at and think, Thanks, or, Yes, or, No, or, Asshole. the appropriate soundtrack for my current mood is the sound of a fan or something like a dripping, leaky sink. the following video represents the appropriate gift for a poet:


christmas bowling indie lit poet from alan rossi on Vimeo.

also: i am reading Breaking and Entering by Joy Williams. i am wishing it was summer.

also: there is an interview with good friend John Wang (Juked) on Matt Bell's website. click on the title of this post to get to it.

authentic

these are three chile rellenos i made. the little ones were spicier. the inside had a queso blanco, and grilled onion with tomatoes and cayenne and cumin. there was a ranchero sauce to put on top. pat and emily and i ate them and then played ping-pong. the next day i ate a bunch of them and had to drive emily to the airport the next day after that. i felt unpleasant during that drive.

life's hard, real hard

we live with a lot of animals (in monotone without emotion) from alan rossi on Vimeo.

yates williams williams gass more please

a friend of mine (http://patrick.hub-bub.com/) talked about wanting fiction to read for his blog. so i want to post what i'm reading because all i read is fiction, except for online poems.

Collected Stories of Richard Yates. I don't even know if it's called this, but it has both Eleven Kinds of Loneliness and Liars in Love, as well as uncollected stories. i like his clear, simple style. his sentences aren't 'adorned' but they are clear and, i don't even know how to talk about this. you just have to read Richard Yates' stories.

Taking Care and Breaking and Entering by Joy Williams. i like the stories in Honored Guest a lot, except maybe two. i liked parts of The Quick and the Dead, but it seemed more prose-y and affected. i've wanted to read Breaking and Entering for a long time, just because the book sounds like something i want to do. these two people live in other people's houses on the beach when the other people are gone. i like being in other people's houses. i like house sitting. i don't like stealing, i just like being in some other place i don't know anything about. it reminds me of that Carver story, whose name i can't remember.

Finding a Form by William Gass. maybe it's Habitations of the Word i want to re-read. one of his. the one with "Representation and the War for Reality" in it. i'll have to look. i think his essays are better than his books, except for In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and Omensetter's Luck. parts of Cartesian Sonata are fun to read. Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife is an interesting object. i'm either not smart enough for The Tunnel or something.

i will then try to read one Diane Williams book and try not to stop writing altogether.

His rock music station

between Johnson City and Spartanburg, i listen to the radio. i'm tired of a lot of my cd's and usually, when it's late when i'm driving, there is jazz on npr, so i'll listen to that, there's also a good reggae-type station, and sometimes there's the BBC news, which i pretty much listen to the for the accents. sometimes i turn my lights on and off through the mountains. one time i saw a dog-like creature, possibly a fox, but bigger. it was dragging a carcass off the highway. then sometimes i listen to a station called His Radio. as in Jesus' Radio or God's Radio. i listen to this, thinking that if i ever see one of the people who do His Radio, i will capture them, then i will slowly torture them by blind-folding them, numbing parts of their body and telling them that i'm cutting off chunks of their flesh. then i will fry those chunks in a delicious tasting olive oil and garlic pan-saute, tossing that with linguine and a bit of white wine and squeeze of lemon, flashing all that in the pan, and serving it with intense laxative and secular music on, so that while they eat their seared flesh, they will say (thinking of God), 'Jesus, you sick bastard. God, no, no, not another bite. No, it tastes so good. Why did he have to make it taste so good, God? This is nothing like His Radio, why? AHHH.' Then later, 'oh my God, I'm pooping my own self out. He put laxative in it. Why? No, it's coming, no, hot, it feels hot.' Then i'll let them go home and tell them it was just chicken or pork.

Sometimes I listen to His Radio and think: Do people really believe that God likes cheesey rock/pop music? For the sake of argument, if these lyrics are praise:

Ever since the world around you shattered
You've been looking everywhere for something more
Sometimes you feel like you're life doesn't matter
But it does, I tell you it does, oh yeah

Then God is in his early thirties, has a nicely trimmed beard, wears Ambercrombie, tans once a week, thinks David Blaine is pretty cool, likes upscale bars, has more than two fragrance candles in his house for dates, has a torquise Fender Stratcaster, dislikes cats, and doesn't really 'understand' David Lynch.

edit: i realize that somehow capitalization rules have gone wrong in this post. also, i don't really listen to His Radio, no, seriously, i don't, leave me alone.

medium-size city

the best thing (see calming) to do in winter at night is to drive around a medium-sized city listening to either Lee Morgan's Candy or Cannonball Aderely and Miles Davis' Something Else. this sort of jazz is only appropriate for late fall, winter, in a medium-sized city, where the entire city is driveable, including downtown and dirty or wealthy outskirts, in three hours time, so that the album can be got through at least twice. the city should have a bluish hue to it (the lights of the city tinted blue) and there should be patches of snow on sidewalks and medians. this concludes music week.

indie lit for christmas

here are some new or recent indie lit books i would buy if i could:

Nick Antosca's Midnight Picnic

Blake Butler's Ever

Matt Bell's How the Broken Lead the Blind

Sam Pink's Yum Yum I Can't Wait to Die

Kim Chinquee's Oh, Baby

i'll post the links to these things later. i have things to do. i have to prepare for christmas. i have to do this because i have make it match or be better than thanksgiving week, in which i: got a speeding ticket, started a grease fire in the kitchen, bought a ping-pong table, ran over a median at three in the morning, played Fifa '98 for nintendo 64, ate at a twenty-dollar buffett, in which everyone wore suits and my girlfriend and i wore diapers, and my german shepherd, Rexus, developed the ability to communicate with me using his eyebrows. yes, german shepherds have eyebrows.

buy one of these books, supporting indie lit, which supports reading in general (but better, more sophisticated, avante-garde reading), which will (more-so than a mainstream book or a book over two-hundred pages) make you a better, more giving, compassionate, and possibly, spiritual human being. that's what happened to me anyway when i started reading these people.

'highly creative'

i started a blog because i live alone in an apartment in a larger house and don't really talk to anyone, except my students, my office mates for a couple minutes. so, this is my way of talking, i think. i live alone in an apartment because i got a 'real' job teaching college, but the girl i was living with also got a 'real' job in another state and so we decided we'd try to like 'commute' our relationship (a two hour drive) so we could maybe have some money. i regret this decision, in some ways, and in other ways being lonely has made me extremely productive and creative. 'highly creative period' right now.

i'm going to post some beatles music to end music week.

htmlgiant is really fun to read. according to statcounter, i think there are maybe six or seven people who read this blog, you should all go there now. there's a lot of arguing on htmlgiant about literature and different websites and it's all surprisingly petty. i'm really entertained by it. it also makes me not want to ever comment on anyone else's blog or get 'involved' with internet lit too much. meaning i will probably close this blog when my year in tennessee is over.

anyway, if you follow the post titled ‘How to Get Linked on HTML Giant’: A 2 Step Primer, read the comments there, and then follow some of the next posts dealing with similar subjects (deleting authors from web archives, the indie in-crowd, etc) it's entertaining. i'm bad at linking things, so this is linked above in the title of the post and here: http://htmlgiant.com/?paged=2. scroll down a bit for that first post that gets things going. i want to say: i don't know nor have i talked to any of these people ever, maybe because I very rarely submit to online places (not out of malice, i just write longer, possibly more print friendly things, though it's not like i have a load of print pubs) (edit: i have talked to Matt Bell, who's mentioned in some post as having a chapbook, which i'm going to order - he was very cool and recently took a story of mine for Hobart's online thing), but I do read some of these people and I like a lot of their stories. i think it's odd that the apparatus (this weird internet space) causes/allows for stuff like this, which seems petty. that said, htmlgiant also is doing really neat and worthwhile things. so, i still think it is 'dumb and good' at the same time.

the Keys

music week continues. buy now. hilarity ensues. hilarity now. i once saw these guys in a dayton bar in 2001. there were maybe ten people at the bar, maybe a few more came in later, some of the people were playing pool. i was probably one of the people playing pool. i went with a friend, i didn't even know the name of the band. when they started playing, i stopped playing pool. they were so good. they were so good that when i heard them a few years later i remembered them. i like the progression they've made with Attack and Release.

Ukulele

i've wanted a ukulele for a long time, ever since i saw a cartoon-guy playing one in Waking Life. and no, i don't really care if you think Waking Life is cloying or a sophomoric, poor film. if you don't like Richard Linklater, in fact, you're probably cloying and a sophomoric, poor film. Jens Lekman:



i like when he says 'ah.'

MUSIC WEEK

the grandaddy.




also: i have a new story coming out in Hobart's February web issue. link when it gets up.