Three Writers That Make Me Happy

Today, I'm going to talk about three writers whose work makes me happy whenever I read it. This is a very particular satisfaction for me, vaguely composed of jealousy and wonder. I spend a fair amount of time reading work online, and maybe you don't (but you probably do - why else would you be here?), so it seems like a nice idea to tell you what I like. Maybe you will be able to show me other nice things? Needless to say, this is only three people, and there will be more in future installments.

Mike Meginnis

About a year ago, I first read Mike's unparalleled story/game "Angband, or His 55 Desires." It's the biggest, achiest, hulkiest thing of longing I've ever read and, at least from my personal perspective, encompasses every emotion I ever felt as a very purposeful videogamer when I was a teenager. Every time I return to it, this story gives me chills. You've never seen anything like it.

Mike isn't the only writer giving videogames a place in literary fiction, but he is by far the most affecting. Generally speaking, for me most of the recent spate of videogame-influenced essays/poems/stories lack a real human element or connection - not so here. Mike writes about the people playing the games, and how they become shaped by them. His story "Navigators" (included in the latest edition of Best American Short Stories) explores a father-son relationship through their shared playing of a fictional videogame, Legend of Silence, and it is absolutely devastating in its loss. 

Fittingly, from a critical standpoint Mike writes with unequaled depth about videogames; their structure, intent, and interaction with the players first and foremost, which makes for thrilling, fascinating material. He created a project called Exits Are, which simulated an oldschool text-adventure  game between writers, which remains the most fun I've ever had virtually with a writer. (He recently started a writing-about-games blog, bless him, in which I will drown myself in as much writing as he will provide, and these are games I've never played or heard of.) Mike Meginnis is the type of writer who makes you want to go and really verse yourself in something, or else just shut the fuck up.

Brandi Wells

Brandi Wells has written the book I've loaned out to the most people and read all the way through the most times (besides Harry Potter, the early ones): Please Don't Be Upset, from Tiny Hardcore. I think it's four times now, but whatever. No one makes you feel quite as small and brutalized yet ferociously cared for as Brandi Wells. I think what originally snagged me was the tone, casually intimate, sort of brutally offhand, if that makes any sense. Here's a place to start, but just get the book. It's something you'll want to carry with you.

There's an honesty and rawness to her stories - even if nothing in her stories ever happened in real life, I don't care, it feels like honesty - a specificity to the language and images and happenstances that for some reason feels undeniably real to me. OK.

She is doing bizarre things now, assembling some sort of terrifying novel. She's writing these tiny little pieces about animals and machines and people with bizarre predilections that have the kinds of unpredictable twists and turns you can tell she just loved writing. Five of them were in Knee-Jerk recently. In these, again, it's that goddamn tone again - where horrifying, sinister things happen casually, just around the corner - even though there are suddenly talking animals. It's wonderful.

I cannot say enough, although I've probably said more.

David James Keaton

Take "Swatter" first - I think it's my favorite - and go any direction from there. Generally when you see people praising Dave's work it's variations on "oh wow what a wild ride" or "it'll knock your socks right off your feet - literally!" and while these praises are perfectly true, they do not even scrape the surface of what genius plays are going on in these stories. They are visceral, yes, but there are real human guts inside, and his stories slip against reality in the most marvelous, subtle way. He writes it enough like pulp to fool most people (white knuckles on black-and-blue skin and all that), but really, it's the weirdness and fantasies we don't want to admit where these stories are hitting hardest.

Plus, his stories are absolutely chock-full of arcana, details and factoids that are either meticulously researched or just plain fabricated (does it really matter which? Probably, and I'd lean towards the former because he watches too many movies to take dishonesty to source material well). Just try and say something to him on the internet-space (I've never met him in person), and see if he doesn't retort with some kind of obscure movie trivia reference. He's like a real-life Gilmore Girl (I've said this before). Just. Try.

He has a collection coming out from Comet Press in May - Fish Bites Cop! Stories to Bash Authorities - which I'm slowly wading into now, and not only is it fantastic but it has the best acknowledgements page I've ever seen. Seriously. You think I'm joking, but wait until you read this shit.

Only the good stuff here on this blog. These are the people you want to steal from.

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David Bowie released his new album, The Next Day, this past week. If you've seen my skin or know me at all or read this blog you'll know how much this means to me. I promise to deliver a full report once I've absorbed it all and had time to process. In the meantime, I'll be listening to it over, and over, and over. I've been reading some good books, too - mostly ones I got at AWP, which was amazing and tiring and financially devastating - so I'll have to tell you about those as well.

I had a tiny comic with a normal-sized yak in Hobart this past week.

Also, a very old poem (circa 1070), anthologized.

I've been listening to this Amanda Palmer song an awful lot. An amazing video, too. I just love her. It's pretty amazing that there are celebrities on Twitter, like Amanda Palmer, who will answer if you ask them questions.

I've also been listening to a lot of Bruce Springsteen (again), but this is for another project.

But what do you think about all of this? Do you like these songs and these writers as much as I do? Let's have a discussion!

I like blogging!

DAVID BOWIE'S NEW SINGLE AND WHAT IT MEANS TO ME

I had a minor meltdown on Twitter last night when I learned that David Bowie had - completely without warning - released a new single and accompanying video, "Where Are We Now," his first new music in nearly a decade (Bowie turned 66 today), from the album The Next Day, due to be released in March:

Back in high school, David Bowie was the first musician I listened to in any kind of intentional way, and he's been, by far, my biggest artistic influence in the six or so years since then (before I knew his music, he was Jareth the Goblin King and my aunt's biggest crush). As someone who's kept a fairly close watch on all the nothing that went on on the official David Bowie website until midnight this morning, I was completely stunned last night when I went to the site - just to see if there was anything there re: Bowie's birthday, as the site hadn't been updated in nearly a year (as well as for other reasons that I'll get into later), and found, instead of the pastel-colored blah redesign leftover from his last album, 2004's Reality, a new splash page announcing the new album and its first single. I was floored; I didn't believe it at first.

I've been writing poems about him for months (hold on, I'll get to these later), but never, never this. I get the impression that NO ONE - not even the traditional insiders - knew this was coming. There has been, literally, no hint of it.

As far as singles go, to me "Where Are We Now" is damn near perfect, a gently propulsive, atmospheric, piano-and-haze-drive ballad with a marvelous Bowie lilt as a vocal, with lots of German place-names thrown in (the artwork for the new album cover - if you can call it that, really; pastiche? photoshop? - is taken from "Heroes" and reflects on his time in Berlin, mid-70's), and it includes wonderfully oblique, poetic lyrics like "The moment you know, you know you know," "just walking the dead," and "You never knew that, that I could do that."

The whole thing ends with a marvelous descending piano line outro, the kinds of chords that always hit me the hardest and turn an otherwise regular song into a mood-turner. (Honestly, it sounds a lot like some of the b-side material from his late-90's and 2000's albums, which is absolutely fine with me. Tony Visconti can lay his hands on any Bowie he likes as far as I'm concerned.)

The video, too, is really wonderful and stirring. In a cluttered artist's studio (Bowie has a thing for the cluttered artist studio), two dolls - onto whose faces are projected video of Bowie and a silent mystery woman - sit before black-and-white footage of Berlin, presumably from about the time that Bowie lived there. I was particularly captivated by the woman's face projected on the doll - she doesn't sing or anything, and serves as a silent partner, but has such an intimate expression on her face that it just kills me. Bowie, too - like they're both trying to hold something huge in. Then, at the end, we see Bowie standing there, and damn, 66? The man looks GOOD.

It seemed like even his official Facebook page was taken by surprise: two hours before the website was updated (which I think happened at midnight EST, right as his birthday crept about), they posted some random portrait of him asking everyone to join alongside "DBFBHQ" (David Bowie's Facebook Headquarters, presumably) in wishing the man a happy 66th. And then, BOOM.

Today, the internet is reeling.

David Bowie has taken over the iTunes adspace for probably the first time ever. Yet a statement from Bowie's people promises no interviews, no dates, no appearances.

But this is a blog, mostly about myself, and I'm getting to that, so let's expand by way of doing the opposite: I think, for the most part, until last night everyone thought David Bowie was done forever. Finished. Spent. No more. He had every right to be, after 29 studio albums and a 40-year career. So when you're offered something completely unheralded and magnificent like this, what are you supposed to think? I had staked my claim in Bowie being gone forever (read on), so, WHAT COMES NEXT?

See, I've been writing poems lately. Poems, specifically, about David Bowie, but about a David Bowie who has effectively vanished off the face of the Earth as we know it, and gone to hide with his family, collect modern British art - which, until last night, was all that the media knew/reported he was doing - and, in my poems, examine his legacy, fearing every inch of it, every hour of his age. These poems have ridiculous long titles, things like, "David Bowie Approaches Tilda Swinton to Play Him in the Movie of His Life", or "David Bowie Discovers that His Official Website Hasn't Been Updated in Ten Months" - quite simply, things that, all of a sudden, just don't apply anymore. Now, I worry that the poems don't make any sense.

I have about a dozen David Bowie poems, and they all assume this anxious, afflicted persona of him. It's been the most fun I've had writing in a long time, and I think part of the great appeal in writing them was knowing that my version of Bowie and what he was doing with his life was just as possible as anyone else's speculation. No one knew what he was doing - he might as well be building a minotaur or reading 1001 Arabian Nights or worrying about his future. But now, this new music, this sign of activity, this giant fucking blip on the radar.

Is Bowie back? Has he put out this music only to disappear once again? What does this sudden resurgence mean for my poetry? I've come to the conclusion that it either means these poems are now completely irrelevant, or potentially more interesting and relevant than ever, since, thematically speaking, they are very much in line with what we've heard of this new music.

My plan was to make a book of these David Bowie poems, eventually. I think I'll still try. None of them have been published or accepted yet, but, we'll see. Nevertheless, this has put me in a really weird place, generally speaking. The short story collection I've been shopping around (PARTNERS) lost its latest contest last week, and now Bowie returns to silence my poems. I'm beginning to think - albeit halfheartedly - that the cosmos is trying to tell me something.

I'm moving to New York City on Friday. I'll admit, part of the original draw is that Bowie lives there, in Manhattan, and I wholeheartedly believed, in the tiniest part of my brain, impossibly, that I would be able to seek him out, to find and meet him after 10 years of public silence and tell him that I KNEW, that I wrote ALL THE POEMS for him, that he wasn't forgotten for a single second.

But.

Now that there's this song, this album, this sudden attention, though, and my dedication seems a little... unnecessary. Insignificant. Redundant, I guess. Plus, if he's not planning to give any interviews or play any shows, then Bowie will be in super-hiding, and there's absolutely no way that I could find him.

Maybe my poems will?

You can see the delusion here, obviously, and I recognize it, too: clearly I would never have met the man, but now it just seems infinitely more complicated and difficult and unlikely. While, really, I should just be celebrating this new music. It feels like the cosmos again.

So, all in all, I don't know how much this new song changes things, but potentially quite a bit. Maybe you understand? I don't know, but this is a blog and, really, you don't have to.

Where are we now, indeed.

Thanks for reading. Do let me know if you've made it this far, I'd love to hear from you.