YA for Obama

I just heard, through Boing Boing, about YA for Obama, a very interesting social networking site featuring several notable YA authors, such as Judy Blume and Holly Black. It's still in an early stage, but check it out!

RIP David Foster Wallace

By way of Tayari Jones' blog, I learned yesterday that David Foster Wallace, author of "Infinite Jest" and "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men" died on Friday. It's a terrible thing, and he was an excellent writer. I remember reading "Infinite Jest" and just being amazed by the audacity of it. I think people forget, due to all of the stylistic tricks and footnotes, that it's just a great story and a really interesting read. I read somewhere that he had bipolar disorder, which is just a terrible ordeal for a person and for their family, and I hope that they are able to get through this tragedy.

Against the Frost

It's been a very busy end of summer. Between the dog and the new place and the full-time job, I feel like I haven't had a chance to sit down since early August. There's something to be said for being insanely busy, though. Today I took the afternoon to work on short stories, and this one I've been working on makes me feel really exposed. I think it's a good thing. I've heard so much about taking chances with stories, and this one--tentatively titled "Against the Frost" is certainly taking a chance. Here's the opening:

One Sunday afternoon in mid-October, Beulah McCarroll decided that the deer were getting complacent and fetched her late husband’s rifle from the basement gun-safe. Her hand hovered over the shotgun and its ample supply of buckshot—including rock-salt stuffed shells Pete had carefully filled at their kitchen table, explaining that these were “strictly for pests and neighbor kids”—but she decided she wanted the impact to be clean, without the scattered pellets dotting the oak leaves in the woods behind the house.
It was the manner in which the young doe had crossed the street behind her car that revealed to Beulah the true measure of their comfort: she waited. Who had ever heard of a doe looking both ways, waiting for a car to pass before running onto the road? This was not how deer were intended to act; Beulah remembered from her youth the brakes locking on her father’s truck as the animals would trample out of the brush, headlong and singular, drawn forward by the promise of nearby water or by plain stupidity. Now, they knew better.
Beulah had been developing concern over the animals’ complacency all summer: each night, the deer ate the heads from her tulips and morning-glories, never appearing in daylight. It was as though they knew when she would be asleep and wouldn’t shoo them away.
“The damned things,” she mumbled to herself as she loaded the rifle. She had only learned how to do this a year ago, and hadn’t truly paid attention then: how was she to know she would need to shoot for herself so soon? She finished loading the gun and placed it next to her back door. She lit a small fire in the wood-stove and waited.
It was Tuesday night when a doe stopped by—it couldn’t have been the same one, but to Beulah they all looked the same without antlers—and Beulah shot her in the throat.
For decades, Beulah had assumed that when something was shot with a gun, it died, right there, like in the movies. Pete came home with stories of the kill and a buck in the bed of his truck, but he never mentioned this flailing around on the ground, the slow bleeding onto the grass. Beulah put the gun down and wished it would rust over, hoped the earth would reclaim it, anything so that she would not have to pick it up again. Night fell early, and the doe had not moved on.

The rest of the story is about this old woman trying to get this doe killed and buried before the ground frosts and is undiggable. It ends with a confrontation with a coyote. It's a different direction for me, and I'm really happy with how it's going.

In related news, I'm re-starting the application process for graduate school. After the debacle last year, I've decided I'm having everything sent to me early so that I can make sure everything is sent that needs to be sent. That way, if I don't get in anywhere, I'll know that it's all on me.

Tramps Like Us (And We Like Tramps)

Oh, is it Shark Week already? I hadn't noticed, since I've been, as you might know, living every week like it's Shark Week.

So: I went to see Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band at Giants Stadium on Sunday night. And what a show it was. I've never been to a concert of that magnitude, with a crowd so large. It was pretty wild. As far as the music, I have to say I was just blown away. You hear about a lot of older acts going on tour, playing hour-long sets and charging exorbitant ticket prices for a sub-par experience, but with these guys, it was not the case. In a three-hour set, there was only about ten minutes of dead time, mostly before the encore. It wasn't even really dead time, since Max Weinberg played for that space. Three hours! Without pause! It's incredible to see a group of people who play so well together performing just for the love of performing.

I've heard a lot about how Springsteen live is one of the greatest shows in rock and roll, a trek that every fan must make, lest they get to the end of their life and realize, "I never saw Springsteen in concert." I understand now the pilgrimage-to-Mecca kind of fervor some of the truest fans have: the show was like a religious experience. For a sixty-year-old man, Springsteen on stage is like a tent-revivalist. He walks all around, he lies down on the ground when the music or the emotion leads him to. The crowd plays their part, singing every word and ooh-ing along with him or without him. He even repeats phrases throughout the show, like "Can you feel the spirit in here tonight?" He repeats them over and over, and you hardly notice when he starts singing them, and before long, he's in the middle of the song and you're wondering where you were when it started. It was amazing to behold. When he played "Jungleland" (the necessity of the saxophone I only understand after seeing it performed live) followed immediately by "Born to Run," it was the closest thing I've ever seen to mass religious ecstacy. For the older crowd that grew up with this, and the younger crowd who is just now experiencing the frustration of being young and trapped, it was a moment of cross-generational connection.

When he spun his guitar around his body three (or was it four?) times, the entire feeling of concert-as-religious-gathering was confirmed. Like the sign of the cross at the end of a Catholic Mass, it was a kind of benediction, a sending-forth into the wider world to go with peace.

Works in Progress

Hey, in the interest of keeping this regularly updated, here's what I've been working on lately:

1. Pinball Wizards: a three-act about pinball machines, early film, Edison's rivalry with Tesla, and maybe death rays if I can figure out how to incorporate them. This has been my big project lately, and it's coming along very quickly and interestingly. I've come to realize I can't write just comedy or just drama, and I think this is a good thing. So it's a tragicomedy, or a...comic drama...about these two great men competing to invent machines that will amuse Edison's kids. Excitement!

2. Well-water Girls: This phrase has been in my head for awhile, and I just figured out while I was in the shower today how to incorporate it into a story. Look for a clip on here soon.

3. Charlie: This is my new puppy:


Hope to see you all soon.

Reading Tonight!

Tonight, 7:30pm:

I'm going to be reading some fiction at the Starbucks on Main Street in Stroudsburg, and if you're in the area, you should come by. I mean, reading some of my fiction, out loud, at Starbucks on Main Street. Otherwise, this announcement wouldn't really merit a whole blog post.

I'll put up some pictures later.

Vampire Weekend

If you've been reading Pitchfork, watching Saturday Night Live, or listening to satellite radio, you've probably by now become aware of Vampire Weekend, indie rock's current darling "it" band. The review of their self-titled debut LP on Pitchfork is probably the most fawning piece of journalism I've read in some time, and I will admit that when I first heard "Mansard Roof," the first single, on Sirius, I thought it was fun and pretty enjoyable. And then I got home and found out who these guys were: a bunch of prep-school white boys from Columbia University. For an indie pop band, this is not entirely surprising, but from a musical standpoint, I find their ubiquitousness kind of troubling. Why? Because they're doing Afro-pop. When I first heard them, I thought they were a legitimate pop band from Africa.
Now, there is a long history of American musicians taking influences, instrumentation, and general sound from world music: David Byrne and Paul Simon (in his Graceland days) have both borrowed extensively from music of cultures not their own, each to outstanding effect. But what these two have in common (and Vampire Weekend lack) is a strong sense of self in their music. For all of its imported percussion and whistles, Graceland does not sound like anyone but Paul Simon. Likewise, David Byrne cannot change the fact that he is David Byrne and whether he is performing with the Talking Heads or doing his country songs as a solo act, his voice is unmistakably his. Not so with Vampire Weekend.
I recently read an essay in the New Yorker about Amy Winehouse, in which Sasha Frere-Jones referenced a review that called her music "aural blackface." The essay dismissed this review in part because Winehouse's backing band, the Dap Kings, are a soul band backing a soul singer. There isn't much of a disconnect between the music and the individuals performing it. I would use that term, however, to describe Vampire Weekend. I just think there's something inherently racist about what this band is doing, or something at least condescending toward Afro-pop artists who will probably never explode in America in the same way: they're putting a white face on African music and getting the approval and encouragement of their establishment. If you read interviews with these guys, they come off as the most pretentious, self-satisfied pricks to ever record a record, so I'm forced to believe that they think themselves precious and ironic for presenting the musical equivalent of...well, I don't know. Let's say the musical equivalent of if I got onstage and performed a Richard Pryor routine verbatim.