“Make no mistake, he said: a true piece of writing is a dangerous thing. It can change your life.”

Maud Newton has one of my favorite literary websites. Stephen Elliott is one of my favorite writers. So you can imagine how happy and excited I was when Maud invited me to interview Stephen for her site! The interview is up now, and I would love for you all to go check it out…

“So yes, that’s the wonderful thing about writing (because it isn’t the money), that you achieve moments of insight and you realize things that are important, that you might not have known were important to you and who you are.”

http://maudnewton.com/blog/?p=9652

Stephen Elliott wheatpasting posters for his book, The Adderall Diaries...

Fifty-two years ago yesterday, the Soviets sent a living thing into outer space for the very first time. The animal was Laika, a tiny stray dog from the Moscow streets, and she only lived a couple of hours from the time her rocket entered Earth’s orbit. Sputnik 2 was designed and built in just one month, to capitalize on the incredible propaganda coup that the Russians had scored with Sputnik 1. Besides showing off the advances of Soviet science, Khrushchev liked the thought of the imperialist American swine trembling from fear as they heard the faint pinging of Sputnik’s radio as it hurtled over U.S. soil (for that purpose, the radio signal was set to a low frequency that amateur shortwave operators and commercial stations could pick it up). Because of the tight timeline, there was no way to create any adequate temperature control or life support systems, and Laika died from overheating and stress.

Laika is an icon for me for a lot of reasons.

The cell phone/interconnectedness/worldwide-information-superhighway addict in me celebrates her and Sputnik-2 as important steps on the road to where we are today. The Soviet history scholar in me loves her as one more link in the long chain of lives destroyed in the course of the Soviet experiment, a chain that includes so many of my artistic heroes (Mandelstam, Mayakovsky, Eisenstein, Tsvetaeva). The vegetarian in me mourns her as another victim of our hubristic belief that we can kill animals for the sake of advancing human knowledge.

Here’s a lovely poem about her, by Zbigniew Herbert.

First the Dog
to Laika

by Zbigniew Herbert

So first the faithful dog will go
and after it a pig or ass
through the black grass will beat a track
along it will the first man steal
who with iron hand will smother
on his glass brow a drop of fear

so first the dog honest mongrel
which has never abandoned us
dreaming of earthly lamps and bones
will fall asleep in its whirling kennel
its warm blood boiling drying away

but we behind the dog and second
dog which guides us on a leash
we with the astronauts’ white cane
awkwardly we bump into stars
we see nothing we hear nothing
we beat with our fists on the dark ether
on all the wavelengths is a whining

everything we can carry on board
through the cinders of dark worlds
name of man scent of apple
acorn of sound quarter of colour
should all be saved for our return
so we can find the route in an instant
when the blind dog leading us
barks at the earth as at the moon

Tomorrow night I’ll be reading at the Longwood Arts Gallery in the Bronx, to celebrate the release of the second issue of crossBronx, the literary journal of the Bronx Council on the Arts. This issue contains my story “Outside the Pack.” I’m terrifically honored to be included, and to have been selected as one of two winners of the Bronx Writers Center’s 2008 Literary Fellowship and Residency.

WEDNESDAY/ NOVEMBER 4th, 2009/ 6:30 - 8:00 PM

Longwood Art Gallery @ Hostos
450 Grand Concourse at 149th Street
Bronx, NY 10451
718-518-6728

http://bronxarts.org/bwc_events.asp

Hope to see you there! And here’s a picture of my 2009 Halloween costume, as Starbuck from Battlestar Galactica…

Just out on DVD, Disney’s first feature invents a whole new cinematic language. Slow in the dwarf scenes, overall lovely and terrifying and artful.

Today we wanted to roast pumpkin seeds, but then it seemed like a shame to waste the rest of the pumpkin.

So I made a jack-o-lantern - a cylon centurion from the reimagined Battlestar Galactica.

I’m terrible at pumpkin-carving, so I am not presenting this as any great awesome achievement. But it does kinda sorta a little bit look like a cylon…

I take the 5:15 train out of Penn Station because dusk comes around six, and I want to watch the sun set behind the sheer black hills on the western side of the Hudson. When the train comes out of Manhattan the sun is already hovering just an inch above the skyline like a mushroom cloud, like New York City has been nuked and we’re lucky to escape alive. This apocalyptic feel doesn’t go away, as we head north into the gathering dark. The sunset is orange and purple fire burning just past the horizon; we’re observing the end of the world from Amtrak’s overpriced comfort, and look, there’s even an outlet for my laptop. Tugboats push barges upriver almost against their will. We pass through vast silent yards full of trains, utterly alone for having outlived the men who made them. My brain thinks Shakespeare, Kerouac. Part of why we read is to process moments like this, where the beauty of the world is inseparable from its sadness, when our tingly joy at being alive to see things like purple-orange sunsets bumps up against our knowledge of the loneliness and sadness and suffering that is also part of being alive-

which by and by black night doth take away

So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, and all the people dreaming in the immensity of it…

I took all these photos! Through the window glass, with a crappy digital camera.

Above-average scary. Neat pacing. Best with a full house in big cities. Overheard: “this is dumb good,” “we’re gonna have to get the bootleg.”

Scary, weird, intricately detailed world. Great characters, human and otherwise. Kept stopping to scribble notes to myself - “so THIS is how you write a novel.”

Loved it at fifteen. Rereading at thirty: didn’t. Great energy and verve - but little more than drug use, sports prowess, lady-banging success.

The show at its best- Michael stupid and brilliant at once- impending catastrope averted in a fresh unexpected way - moment of happiness… then the catastrophe.

Comes damn close to being brilliant, but the relationships feel rushed and flimsy. Too much time setting up the story, not enough on the resolution.

Energetic, smart, fearless - great cinema, great characters. Really brings to life Anna Wintour and Grace Coddington as brilliant, dedicated, very different artists.

All it has going for it is Valentino, who *is* compelling. No cinematic courage - too entranced by its subject to get critical or explore context.

Halfway-decent story, murdered by lack of living breathing characters. Some scares. Only the bad guys are interesting, and we spend no time with them.