Interstate at Blue Five Notebook

I'm proud to have my flash story "Interstate" in the new Blue Five Notebook. It's about a boy and his dad and a talking dog that should have learned to shut-up. There is an airplane too and a mention of what sounds like a fine lunch and a lot of driving. If you have a minute--that's all it'll take--go over and give it a read.

Not Counting Closets

My house has nine doors and four doorknobs. Doorknobs have been a challenge since we moved in eleven years ago. The house is almost a hundred-years-old and was built the year my mother was born. She, of course, has been gone a long time. The house is still standing, but it's difficult to move from room to room. I've fixed the doorknobs, to the best of my ability, over and over, and they always fall off the next day. A carpenter told me last week the problem isn't the doorknobs. It's the doors. I have to face the facts, the carpenter said. I need new doors. Can you help me find some, I asked. Century old doors can't be easy to locate. He said he'd keep his eyes open. No promises. I could tell he didn't mean it. So it's up to me to find doors, something I've never done. I should have looked this weekend. Instead, I read How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer by Sarah Bakewell. It's won several awards and I highly recommend it. It's probably best to read Montaigne's essays first. I read several of them in college. Now I want to read them all.

YB: An Online Journal of Poetry

I'm thrilled to have been asked by founder Rose Hunter to join her and the multi-talented Sherry O'Keefe as a guest editor of the upcoming issue of YB: An Online Journal of Poetry. The theme of the issue is "Windows" and the deadline for submissions is May 20, 2011. (I'm so proud of myself for not saying the window for submissions closes on May 20, 2011.) We're waiting for you to pull out your best work and send it our way.

Without Anger, What's Left?

There are few things I'm confident about in life. Confidence suggests a measure of control over events and only a fool believes in measures. But one thing I'm confident about, because experience has taught me to be, is that the right book will appear in my life when I need it. Today I am, as I was yesterday, and will no doubt be tomorrow, sick to the bone of my hard-earned capacity for understanding and for rational and thoughtful behavior and opinions. I'm pining for the days when my reason was so underdeveloped my anger stormed through it like a runaway truck through a school playground. I have been near tears while I wonder when was it I left the ignorant shadowed wilderness that had tended me for so long, only to trap myself in the village square of reason.

So what book do I pick up from the mountain of books that shadow my every step? Old Masters by Thomas Bernhard is a single 156-page spit-filled paragraph of invective delivered by a suicidal musicologist as he sits before Tintoretto's White-Beared Man in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. The ranter, Reger, says things such as Bruckner only produced musical garbage and Heidegger looked and acted like a bloated staff officer and was a charlatan who never wrote a line that wasn't repulsive. And that is when he's getting started. There seems to be no limit to his anger and disregard for humans, and as it becomes clear he's using his bile to save his life it made me reconsider even more darkly my life-long struggle to be reasonable. Maybe what I thought was a victory, what I had told myself I wanted so long, was actually the foolish extinguishing of the angry heart that drove me. Bernhard is forcing me to ask: Without the anger what am I left with? Today, it doesn't seem like much.

Sherry O'Keefe at Terrain.org

If you stumbled into my blog I suggest going here to hear Sherry O'Keefe read two wonderful poems. By all means come back, if you're so inclined.

I Still Live in the Same City

September 9, 2010

I dropped my Volvo off for servicing
and instead of waiting
for the mechanics to finish
decided to walk back to my office.
Students rushed to class. The son
of an old friend I seldom see
nodded as he hurried past.
My daughter was in one of the buildings
learning about human development
or discussing “Sinners in the Hands
of an Angry God.”
I helped her interpret the sermon last night .
I went to this college decades ago.

On the other side of the campus
I stopped and took Blackberry photos
of the old Newman Machine Company.
It went bankrupt last year
(“business ground to a halt”
is what I'll say
when this becomes a poem)
and now it's being torn down.

My first job was there,
minding a milling machine.
I wrote a poem about what it was like
to punch in everyday
and how I felt trapped
and how one day pigeons
flew in through
a hole in the roof.
I didn't write that I imagined
the pigeons were doves.
The building had green windows
that swung up when the janitor
unhooked them. I once said
out-loud that they looked
like an old-time accountant's eyeshade
and none of the old guys
in their blue work uniforms
talked to me the rest of the day.
I was still learning how to be a man.
Downtown a long train crossed South Elm Street.
The warning honks were too loud.
I put my hands over my ears.
It used to make my mother sad
that her children would never hear a train whistle.

She said it was a sound
that took the lust out of romance,
I guess the way a coke oven
cooks the impurities out of iron.
I could have walked one block over
and looped under the trestle
instead of waiting for the train.

But what was the hurry?
My office was only a block
farther down the street
and I liked being outside.
Now I'm inside my office typing this
when I should be editing
a book about M. Gandhi.
I got a little sweaty on my walk
and the air conditioning,
always too cold
this time of year,
is giving me the shivers.

New Poem and Story

New poem, "My Grandmother Becomes a Young Widow," at Sliver of Stone, a great new journal, and a story, "Smoke," at Conteonline.

Tesla and Love

"Yes, I loved that pigeon, I loved her as a man loves a woman, and she loved me. When she was ill I knew, and understood; she came to my room and I stayed beside her for days. I nursed her back to health. That pigeon was the joy of my life. If she needed me, nothing else mattered. As long as I had her, there was a purpose in my life." Nikola Tesla

It's a familiar story, of how Tesla loved a pigeon who settled outside his window. When I first read that quote while researching a book I laughed and shook my head. But that was a few years ago. Then, for a few years after, it made me sad. Now it makes me smile and admire him a little more. Do you think such a capacity for love was connected in some way to his genius? I can't decide.

(The image is said to be the very pigeon he loved.)

New Flash and Two Poems

I've got a new flash piece up at "The Dead Mule Journal of Southern Literature" and two poems at The Meadowland Review

Bliss is Possible

I've been trying to get on a plane for a short flight to D.C. since 5:30 this morning. Now it's 8:30 p.m. and I'm at my dining room table writing this and checking in occasionally to watch my next scheduled flight be postponed, and postponed again. It's probably dead but doesn't know it yet and I'll have to start over again tomorrow.

)ver the last fourteen hours I've gone through frustration, anger, regret, anxiety, at least two loooong transits through self-pity, more anger--but now I'm floating over the room. I'm lighter than a baby's hand. I can barely reach the keyboard and when I do my fingers blur on impact. I am no longer a corporeal being! My senses are deranged and I'm full of bliss.

Thank you, United Airlines, thank you!