Always on the lookout for ways to turn my video game hours into something productive, I decided to put together a blog post on my favorite songs to play on the drums on Rock Band 2….

Go Your Own Way, by Fleetwood Mac.
Just a Girl, by No Doubt.
Town Called Malice, by the Jam.
Sunday Morning, by No Doubt.
Teenage Riot, by Sonic Youth.
Alex Chilton, by the Replacements.

That’s me in the picture, or rather the avatar of my alter-ego drug addict rock star recovering-ex-skinhead, Fo!

Come check me out when I strut my stuff this Saturday night in the glorious Lower East Side. Brother, My Lover is a monthly queer reading series hosted by robert smith. This month features me, along with:

gabriel defazio
matthew johnson
jeffrey marx
robert siek
and music by THIN SKIN JONNY

Saturday, March 6, 2010
8:00pm - 10:00pm
envoy enterprises: 131 chrystie street
Between Broome and Delancey
B/D to Grand Street; J/M to Bowery

More details are here, for Facehuggers:
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=348545367497&ref=ts

Go here for the full issue details: http://www.washingtonsquarereview.com/issues.html

On Saturday, February 6th, I read the story at the issue’s launch party. My parents came down from upstate, and a bunch of my friends came out, and the place was packed. And the fabulous editorial people at WSR really made such a wonderful big deal about my story. Fiction editor Sativa January gave me the most incredible intro - which made my sister cry - in which she said my work caused her to experience a “paradigm shift,” and likened it to that moment, on an airplane, just before take-off, where all machine noise and conversation come to an eerie stop. A quote from my story is included in big letters on the inside back cover.

Everyone showered such love on my story, and I walked out of there feeling really secure in my abilities as a writer. But here’s the thing. “Burning Down Wal-Mart” got rejected by 31 literary journals before it landed in the lap of these lovely people. And with every one of those rejections, I felt a slight expansion of that teeny-tiny puddle of hopelessness that every writer carries around inside of them. That fear that we’re no good, that our work will never matter to anyone, that no amount of publication or acclaim will ever make a dent in our own sense of failure. I don’t think I’m the only writer in whom that hopelessness contends with smug confidence, the conviction that our work will rise to Joycean heights of fame and respect and endure forever.

So the challenge is to hold tight to that kernel of euphoria - to remember that any of my stories could end up in the hands of wonderful people who will adore it, in spite of the rejection slips that stack up at such a staggering rate.

Brodsky and Auden are two of my favorite poets - very different artists, but quite fond of one another in real life  - and they both wrote some phenomenal rhapsodies about what the New Year means to the human soul. Or spirit. Or consciousness. Scroll past the pics for something from each of them.

Joseph Brodsky, excerpt from Watermark - his brilliant prose love poem to Venice, published in 1992)
“I always adhered to the idea that God is time, or at least that His spirit is. Perhaps this idea was even of my own manufacture, but now I don’t remember. In any case, I always thought that if the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the water, the water was bound to reflect it. Hence my sentiment for water, for its folds, wrinkles, and ripples, and – as I am a Northerner – for its grayness. I simply think that water is the image of time, and every New Year’s Eve, in somewhat pagan fashion, I try to find myself near water, preferably near a sea or an ocean, to watch the emergence of a new helping, a new cupful of time from it. I am not looking for a naked maiden riding on a shell; I am looking for either a cloud or the crest of a wave hitting the shore at midnight. That, to me, is time coming out of water, and I stare at the lace-like pattern it puts on the shore, not with a gypsy-like knowing, but with tenderness and with gratitude.”

A New Year Greeting
by W.H. Auden

After an article by Mary J. Marples
in Scientific American, January, 1969

On this day tradition allots
to taking stock of our lives,
my greetings to all of you, Yeasts,
Bacteria, Viruses,
Aerobics and Anaerobics:
A Very Happy New Year
to all for whom my ectoderm
is as Middle-Earth to me.

For creatures your size I offer
a free choice of habitat,
so settle yourselves in the zone
that suits you best, in the pools
of my pores or the tropical
forests of arm-pit and crotch,
in the deserts of my fore-arms,
or the cool woods of my scalp.

Build colonies: I will supply
adequate warmth and moisture,
the sebum and lipids you need,
on condition you never
do me annoy with your presence,
but behave as good guests should,
not rioting into acne
or athlete’s-foot or a boil.

Does my inner weather affect
the surfaces where you live?
Do unpredictable changes
record my rocketing plunge
from fairs when the mind is in tift
and relevant thoughts occur
to fouls when nothing will happen
and no one calls and it rains.

I should like to think that I make
a not impossible world,
but an Eden it cannot be:
my games, my purposive acts,
may turn to catastrophes there.
If you were religious folk,
how would your dramas justify
unmerited suffering?

By what myths would your priests account
for the hurricanes that come
twice every twenty-four hours,
each time I dress or undress,
when, clinging to keratin rafts,
whole cities are swept away
to perish in space, or the Flood
that scalds to death when I bathe?

Then, sooner or later, will dawn
a Day of Apocalypse,
when my mantle suddenly turns
too cold, too rancid, for you,
appetising to predators
of a fiercer sort, and I
am stripped of excuse and nimbus,
a Past, subject to Judgement.

1969

Sixteen years old, somehow possessing a driver’s license, I drove up and down these roads every time I wanted to get anywhere. Rural life is unimaginable without a car or truck - how do you get to your crummy fast-food job? How do you get to the supermarket? Buy cigarettes? Visit friends? Back home we drive these roads because we have to. Driving along County Route 23 and 66 and 9H and 9G, I felt truly independent for the first time, and truly alone, and very flimsy. I saw how easy it would be to die out there, and I saw how meaningless my fear was.

This landscape shaped me. Black bare tree branches against a bright twilight sky. Boris Pasternak spoke of “the pure essence of poetry - it is disturbing, like the ominous turning of a dozen windmills at the edge of a bare field in the black year of famine.” Riding these roads I think I know what he was talking about. Great art shows us how our suffering means so little to the universe. How these things we build will outlive us. How hunger and loneliness and loss and aesthetic ecstasy are all symptoms of our own threadbare mortality.

Last month, home for Thanksgiving, Amber drove me and Juancy to Chatham in search of yarn. I took these photographs through the window.