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Welcome back to DC’s Writers Workshop. This is the eleventh in a series of days on the blog where writers who are part of the blog’s community will present work-in-progress in search of the opinions, responses, advice, and critiques of both readers who don’t normally post comments here and local inhabitants of this place. I ask everyone to please read these works with the same attention you give the normal brand of posts here and respond in some way in the comments section below. Obviously, the closer your attention and the more you’re able and willing to say to the writer the better. But any kind of related comment is welcome, even a simple sentence or two indicating you read the piece of writing and felt something or other about it would be helpful. The only guideline I’m going to give out regarding comments is that any response, whether lengthy or brief, praise filled or critical or anywhere inbetween, should be presented in a spirit of helping the writer in question. I’ll be responding to the work too in the Comments section towards the end of the weekend. So, I guess all of that is probably clear. Giving support to the artists of different kinds who read and post on the blog has always been a very important aspect of this project, but this workshop series represents one of the first times that aspect has been made formal. This weekend’s workshop features Thomas Kendall — writer and one of this blog’s longtime distinguished locals. He asks for any thoughts, support, or criticism you can give him. I thank her greatly for entrusting his work-in-progress to us, and I thank you all in advance for your kind participation. — D.C.

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These are two chapters from the first draft of my novel. In the novel they’re separated by maybe three to four chapters that take place along different but interconnected time lines one of which is completely fabricated. Since they’re separated like that I thought it might be important for the opening of the second to mirror the first tonally and stylistically so that they work to inscribe their remembrance on the reader. I want the timelines to ring. Firstly I don’t know if I’ve managed to do that and secondly I’m wondering if a commitment to this is essentially wrong thinking, that maybe I can remind the reader of past events in a clearer or more subtle way.

The first chapter opens after David, having turned up to a birthday party uninvited, has hurt himself and been taken to hospital where he is having to stay overnight….it’s unclear whether the injury was caused intentionally or if Henry’s younger brother had something to do with it. David is a mute. — Thomas Kendall

(1993)

David is asleep on his back in a narrow hospital bed situated among five other in-patients’ beds who are likewise either asleep or worse and whose prone forms are similarly cubed in little isolative tents. The curtains which divide each patient from the other are topped with bull rings attaching them to an overhead rail that imperiously maps the room. It is four thirty am. A ceiling fan with several of its blades missing copters like a Sycamore seed above him. David stirs faintly, his eye opening and blinking in slow recurrence upon the ceiling fan, the mash of his eyelids and milky suck of eye gumming the image as if ruminatively drawing upon a teat.
—David’s dream, about an ocean that had stopped and before which his father and mother and the dead twin who had followed him stillborn into this world were all telepathically ‘talking’ about their favourite flavour of pizza, retreats now to a small windowing glint. The dream folded and passed like a secret note between brain functions before inserting its absurdities into some trace memory eject of the last twenty four hours rendering said memory’s hidden affect revisionist and counterfeit.

The last swelling remnant of his dream being of his, in the dream, identical twin brother asking him with a smile that David had felt, even within his dream, would be impossible to recreate on his own face, whether he, David, had ever tasted death. This moment being the exact point at which the dream’s flex had over extended breaking the surface of sleep.
—David’s brain glitches and ravines, his consciousness shooting up from under a quickly draining pool of sleep so that his sudden wakefulness emerges as if thrust into a wholly foreign and terrifyingly present, thus context free, world.
—The ceiling fan which blooms and lulls him back into the accented darkness.
—There is a dissonance held between the hectic speed and hum of the turning fan and the serene elegance of its rotation in his dream filled eye. This partially due to the remaining blades being evenly spaced apart in pleasingly mathematical relationships so that the fan’s form seems unbroken and less synaptically harried than that of a fully equipped or less evenly remaindered fan. A grace hypnotically at work in the constancy of distances whatever speed the fan may reach.
– – My mother doesn’t like anchovies….my mother is a fish…
—David thinks ‘why did i…’ before drifting out and further forgetting amid the flat low wattage hum of the room’s ventilation system.
—The ceiling fan’s blades continuing to glide around their unchanged axis above him though they, the blades, seemingly accrue and lose speed at various points during their revolutions as the fan tilts horribly in his perception.

David closes his eyes as the world and his history continues to erect itself behind them. He opens them up, confirms where he is. David closing his eyes and sighing and wondering with his first fully articulated thoughts how far he could get from his current prostrate position before being forcibly escorted back to said position. David opening his eyes and lifting his head in the direction of the light’s dispatch from the door, the soft cuboid of which he can just make out through his curtain and which reflects lengthways between the three to four similarly curtained beds in front of him. To the right and left of his bed David can see precisely nothing.
—David cycles his legs out of the quick of the cover and sits up on his plank like bed. His bruised body sort of sloughed painfully around his fencing bones, his occipital spine bent in the shape of an old fashioned walking cane. Tentatively David lets the oval of his big toe spread a cloud of heat across the marbled floor.

Henry walks around more stunned than numb, in general, he thinks. It’s 4:45 am but the distinction is important. It’s roughly the same type of qualitative difference that one might be tempted to state lies between that of seeing and watching. At least it would be, a temptation to state that, for those types of people who spend a great deal of time and effort attempting to make these little semantic differentiations to themselves in order to get closer to some internal, highly personal, lexicography that they secretly hope might outlay some kind of key to both themselves and the world (though the two tend to get confused in this types head) which is something Henry definitely does.
—In this case stunned doesn’t imply the same enervating, dead anti-sensation that numb might though at it’s surface a ‘stunned’ person’s demeanour might very well resemble a numb person’s face’s total evacuation of feeling.
—However, Henry thinks, whereas numbness might stand in relation between the act of remembrance (itself qualitatively different to memory which is far more involved and emotive) and the plain lumpen fact of emotional sensation’s replacement with an inert spiritual death by degrees, to be stunned is more like being jammed at a procedural level. There’s too many frequencies and they’re all equally loud and internally generated to pay any attention to understanding one.
—The contradiction at numbness’ heart lying in the fact that the real pain and torture lies not in the encroaching numbness but, rather, in the phantom sensations of feeling within that numbness as in the famous cases of lost limbs.
—Numbness of course only detectable to something feeling, to the feeling thing that is pushed up against it, so that the real open ended wound of the numb persons ‘pain’ is their residual memory of the pain that may have been instrumental to their incipient numbness, however buried and impossible to face this real pain is, coupled with an increasing fear of further having to live with losing what little feeling of residual pain (the awareness of being numb or unfeeling) is left and then ultimately having to live only with the degrade of that memory to remembrance. Henry unhappy with this memory/remembrance divide though it’s correct at its core he thinks.
—Henry gets up to check Jude. He’s lain out in bed in his favourite metal t-shirt. He’d been all but fugue like since they left David at the hospital but he’s snoring away, tearing through sheets of mucous in sleep.

The door clicks open, Fiasco’s home from working/drinking at the crows.
– – Was he there? Shouts Henry.
– – Yeah, he was there.
—Henry doesn’t ask anything else about his father.

David has robed the curtain around his forearm and is currently surveying the ward, the long draping medical green of the other similarly tented beds/’boudoirs’ cultish looking in the darkness.
—There is a TV playing married with children or some other gaudy sitcom at a low, indistinct volume in one of the other cubes. In the flickering editions of light from the TV’s rapid camera cuts David can make out a man sat up in bed with one starred hand lying static and darkly fisted in his crotch. The light from the TV grows brighter or lingers in an unbroken shot so that the man’s outline emerges as an after image, more burnt onto the darkness than actually there. The man is wearing his own dressing gown as opposed to the thin blue, pigmented by a thousand collated night-sweats hospital issue that David is currently sporting.
—The arm that isn’t ending blackly around his, the man’s, crotch slides in degrees from its position on his thigh. A TV remote clatters against the floor. The man’s shoulders and neck follow the weight of the hanging arm. The hand in the crotch pulling a hard left as if steering suddenly away from something fast and oncoming.
—David holds his breath. No one comes. He walks to the door avoiding the light and then turns back to the curtain with the man. A sustained burst of canned laughter from behind the curtain increases in intensity as David’s hand reaches towards it. His hand feels at the curtain then releases it, sending a fluttering pulse towards the ceiling.

David stares down a corridor that is empty and fascinatingly rowed on either side with windows full of a night dumped with stars, stars heaped and combed through like spilt sugar while the corridor with it’s graphics of space and air rendered blocky by artificial light, dims out onto endless repetitions of itself. He steps outside the ward door.
—So far, so good.

Henry’s watching Fiasco’s jaw move in and out along the roll of his molars like a possessed chest of drawers between each chaotically slammed word/staccato ran on sentence as Fiasco explains to him that a man in the pub paid him in speed, made him
– – meaning me, Fiasco,
take a large quantity of speed from the end of the mans knife while loudly declaring
– – the man that is
That he was fucking animal
– – A fucking animal, that’s what he said. A fucking animal. Voice like Bob Hoskins.
– – You got any left?

David is outside the hospital. Whether this qualifies as an escape he’s unsure of. It hasn’t answered his question either. He looks across the town. There’s no reason either way so he starts walking. David walks downhill reciting the lyrics to ‘down town’ in a deadpan monotone in his head.
—He walks without thinking to the playground near Henry’s house. The soft tarmac of the playground dimples under the press of his feet. His feet are bare and dirty, a hardened whip of chewing gum spiralling out from between his two smallest toes. David is tired. His head hurts. He considers the swing, the slide, the merry go round. He walks across the swing, the saddle of which is unevenly hitched up on one side with chain foreshortened around the horizontal bar, and on past the slide letting his hand feel the slide’s warbled, paint flecked surface. David stopping and pressing the flat of his hand onto the slide but there’s no stored warmth left there. David leans against it and looks at the merry go round for precisely the amount of time it takes for it to resemble a U.F.O. Two to three seconds.
—David steps over the thinned trunk of the slide. He colours the small percentage of his self into one of the triangular portions of the merry go round. The merry go round divided into eight of these open ended quadrilateral triangles. The merry go round is a pie chart representing the social and metaphysical functions of merry go rounds in the mid 90s through an illustrative lay of beer cans, fag butts, emptiness and young disturbed men.
—David’s feet lilt around the ground, the merry go round renumerating its surface on the abacus of his ribs. The dark dwindles, a steadily inclining spread of morning sunlight rising over his torso, tucking him in
– – Everything is backwards.

(1993)

Henry’s house is situated at the smoothly bowled dolly westernized crotch of two intersecting hills connecting one council estate to another. A deliberately pointless social u bend the uppermost left incline of which the cloud banked sunlight touches with visible, multi-planed, beams of light whose angles of deployment alter and shift every five to six minutes or so depending on cloud mass or wind variance. The clouds acting like a kind of child’s viewfinder for the light, their overlaid mazily tiered arrangement around spaces lagging between them creating these synonymous strangely diamonded absences that rotate through occlusion and convergence so that the narrowing juts or wide spotlight of the beams trickle or burst in a roughly circular, mindlessly searching pattern.
—Henry is sat under the roof of his porch. The porch roof is a visor of shadow made by an over hanging gutter and slanted roof. The porch consisting of that and a foot high step/concrete block that needs to be climbed to knock with any semblance of authority against the front door but which one has to step back from in order not to appear overly threatening or aggressive were anyone to actually answer the door. Henry appreciates this feature, has reason to believe that there was some underlying ‘socio- psychological’ reasoning behind it.
– – Infantilism of the visitor as trope in council states, political meaning thereof…
—He’s made a casual study of all the houses steps in the surrounding area and they all share this feature.
– – Home advantage through physical elevation, an important consideration in low cost areas? An essay…
—The block/step also capable of comfortably seating two to three people, he notices, with maybe an added fourth casually leaning the small of their back against it, perhaps extending their arms across their friends’ laps one hand, why not two?, clasping the top of a neatly frosted bottle of beer.
—Henry has never had four people he’d regard as friends gathered at his house and he’s never bought bottled beer.

—- – —-It’s a false economy.

It is six am. Beer tastes awful now, especially from a can. The light continues to trend in the well covered dip of his garden. Henry’s bombed two hits of body hollowing speed. This a half hour before Fiasco declared that he needed to go to bed hence the consideration of the step. He’s meant to wake him up in a little bit maybe even accompany him into work for some formal introductions if he’s at all fit to.
—Fiasco’s managed to wrangle Henry a trial shift at the Crow’s next week. Henry’s debating it. He has a hypothetical beer with his dad. He can’t see it happening.
—Henry lights a cigarette and pulls the smoke as far into his lungs as he can. He holds it there. The sense of warmth Henry feels inside, a glowing interior trim posing as the edge of it’s its own mass, is the excision of some interior dermal layer. Henry imagines two small mushroom clouds rising in a mirrored plume under the squinting eye of his heart’s sun.
– – That’s not how biology works.
—The lungs he sees as one of those pendants.
—I got no quality control
—He exhales/inhales. He pulls the door behind him, stands.
—Fiasco’s inside desperately trying to lock his eyes shut, he’s got a grand total of four hours before he needs to be back at work for a split shift totalling eleven working hours. He’ll be in the pub ten till four, seven till midnight. He lives an hour’s walk from the pub so….
—Walk an hour, sleep an hour or….ugh
—His saliva is all matted, if you can call it saliva. It’s like the percentage of whatever saliva is minus the h2o or something, something closer to the fibrous texture of rolled around snot than he’s willing to realise.
– – That’s a good line. I’ll forget it. I just did. What was I thinking? Really what. What time is it?
—His eyes flick to the VCR’s display.
—Fuck, fuck, fuck Fiasco’s body moans on the hangnail of the sofa, cushions shredded by the thrash of his trainers under the wrinkled material of the spare never washed duvet which he has taken as his right. The undeniable shittiness of which, like everything else, is made into a badge/medal to accompany the heart staining his sleeve. All of his thinned skin being the sleeve btw. Fiasco’s body worms on the hook of a dawning and damaged sobriety, his organs pushing through the shit of his body.

The end of the cigarette pricks Henry’s knuckles with an itchy heat. The light in the garden moves from ambience to bravura. Strange remembrances of his father now, probably error strewn or else tonally filled in with his grandfather’s presence.
—Henry remembers his father with a yellow plank length spirit level in hand (Father’s knuckles baggy and swollen, rowed like the faces of alcoholics frowning at something just beyond the bar). Grey grains of metal, flaking paint, the inset bubble slipping around the chamber. Spirit level. His father’s other tools looking like toys in as much as Henry had imagined being able utilize them as weapons but it is the spirit level, entrancingly named but boringly configured, that he sees now with that uncanny, split frame, quickness of a memory less recalled than extracted like a rod from some internal reactor. He feels the absence of its extraction, the pull of it into vision, the hole in his self its quietness had plugged flooding with space.
—His father’s hands there, no face, definitely his father’s hands though (those faces along his hand gurning out at him) showing him the bubble sliding around. His knuckles grained like the metal. Under the yellow paint there was iron, under the skin, dirt. Questions of constancy, of dirt and metal. Spirit level, a bubble trapped in the dead centre of two extremes. Used to measure horizontal or vertical planes. A reality linear unto itself but interconnecting with the other planes of an object (some stairs, a cabinet) that Henry couldn’t visualise until his father slotted them together and even then Henry couldn’t see how it was made. His father sighing, taking the object apart, letting Henry try to figure it out. Henry making a mess of it, awkwardly getting one joint stuck in another, bending a screw so that when his father tried to take it apart the wood cracked as if in censorship at the soft curses his father’s lips kept absently forming.

Henry flicks the butt of the cigarette into the neighbour’s garden and joylessly lights another. A ragged scaffolding of light turns the rest of Henry’s garden into a dark skip as the clouds lurch soundlessly above. Each object the beams catch upon suggests a secret hidden in the contouring, coded fields of light suspended around them though these abstracted horizons are merely rebuffed concentrations of the light’s monotonous nature rendered in visible but suspect dimensions across other reflective/refractive surfaces and these objects in truth emanate nothing but their own inviolability. Henry sees it that way and doesn’t. The garden looks amazing or dull, special or, he doesn’t know, ‘average’ or something. Every appreciation is interrogative. He smiles, sort of, his lips shaped into an equal sign balancing another disconnection, another rift. He knows every time he thinks he ruins something. It’s as if his way of thinking supernaturally ages any sensation his body approaches. These sensations degrading rapidly: judge, jury, executioner; a face being eaten by a sentence of time, a kitsch horror at play in the mundane, words finally. Words like broken toys assembled into brief novelties resembling play, a linguistic cube functioning within its messily stickered logic. Hands will wring themselves over these items, why won’t they work as play? Finally you grow bored of toys but they continue to manifest in the empty associations they leave behind. Banana skins and skates at the top of the stairs, brake pads cut, rails suspiciously removed from stair banisters. The words become possessed toys trundling towards you like toddlers (but flying occasionally and demonically across the room at you) and stuffing your mouth with suppositories as you begin to talk more and more shit. These toys ‘in production’ as we speak. Toys manufactured on a line, arms attached to heads. Toys whose stumps are impossible to cauterize. Cauterize being a word, words being stumps, stumps being stakes.
—Henry’s thoughts are a physical presence in his body and they believe this body the way a mental patient believes in their strait jacket I.E in fits and starts.
—The world’s a hard sell and the word’s a soft cell
—He’s not amusing himself. Always this urge to dominate the experience, the fear of it turning into a horizon even as it disappears beneath a hand one cannot chance to peek under. A repeated loss of faith diminishing whatever might have been captured so that one does not even bother to look after your own disbelief. Henry displaying a real midas touch in which value or beauty becomes entirely attendant to a utility approaching zero, the useless sameness of everything he might light upon. Each supposed depth merely another surface initialling the total.
—For instance the light in the garden now, an anointment of light, under which heather and tomato vines make a palsied sign of the cross over the soil in a just started breeze; the truth of haloes in the soft matrixes of the garden and Henry feels only the laborious overturning from an uncomfortable yet mentally associative chill to a quiet bodily pleasure felt in alien light. A sensation separating, shipping away from his thought into a caging trace of distance. The day getting away from him.
—I can’t stop, I must stop.
—Again the allusion isn’t funny just reflexive. He flannels his face with a forearm. His hair is stuck up and concentrically sweated through. The sweat like the pulse of a radar with nothing on its sonar.
—Henry extends a hand opening and closing it in the light. He exhales unconsciously. The gesture isn’t meant to mean. The light coats the hand in a thin glove of heat and the world for a moment has a quality of indifference less dialectically aggressive than usual. Henry makes himself feel unopposed and meek. He knows its lame. He looks back towards the house.
– – Don’t think about anything.
—Henry is walking to the playground at the top of the right hand hill. He might sit on the swing, smoke on top of the slide’s ladder. It’s an extension of the hand’s unknowing. There are degrees of pointlessness. He has to go farther, farther into the forms of nothingness, far enough, he thinks, that it might at last exceed the reach of his searching.
—-

*

p.s. Hey. So, yes, as I basically said in the intro up above, please give some time this weekend to reading and then giving your thoughts on Tomkendall’s new fiction. Even a few words from you would be very helpful. I really appreciate your participation, and I’ll be giving my thoughts about the work towards the end of the weekend. ** Allesfliesst, Hey. Oh, drat, it’s a virtual certainty, barring international calamity, that I’ll be in LA visiting and doing Halloween spooky house research with Gisele and Stephen when you’re here in Paris. That sucks. What’s the official reason for your Paris trip, if there is one? I was at an art opening last night too. Jean Luc-Verna at Air de Paris, crowded but not so much so that I couldn’t get in, but, oh boy, the mugginess. It might as well have been raining. Very cool about your impending performance. Do you have to memorize a script or just access your theoretician side and free associate? I hope it gets vidded then uploaded, obviously. And I hope you were able to check off your ‘duties’ of yesterday one by one. Especially the door. Doors are important except when that word is the name of a rock band. ** Tomkendall, Hey, it’s the man himself and of the hour! ‘TMS’ comes out on November 1st, so the wait isn’t too long. I don’t think there’ll be any excerpts before that. It’s not very excerptible. I’m still trying to figure out how the hell I’m going to read from it at events. Anyway, happy and proud to have your work here this weekend, man. I hope it goes greatly and as helpfully as possible. You’re the best. ** Empty Frame, Hi. Well, do you mean starting now or do you mean I could only have ever seen the filmic output from one country? I’m thinking it’s the latter. If so, with no hesitation, yes, France. If I’d never seen Bresson’s films, I don’t know what would have become of me. In second place would be … I think the USA. Third place, hm, Japan, I think. Fourth … Germany, I guess. I’ll stop there. My allergy effects go like this: First, I start feeling a tingling that turns into numbness in the body part(s) that are touching the non-organic clothing. Then I get a weakness in my legs and arms. If I don’t remove the clothing at that point, I flush red and get a really bad headache, and the glands in my throat swell up painfully. I don’t think I’ve ever not removed the offending clothing at that point, so I don’t know what happens next. It depends on the color too. Dark colors are the very worst. With white, it’s the mildest. For instance, whenever I sleep in a hotel bed, I get mild allergies, and if the sheets are even mildly colored, I spend the next day with a headache and feeling kind of weird. Also, it depends on the body part. My legs are the least effected, which is why I get to wear non-organic jeans, although I have to wear them very loose, and even so they give me mild allergies until they’ve been washed a bunch of times. The most quickly effected body parts are my neck, arms, hands, groin, and feet. That’s probably a lot more information that you were asking for, sorry. Hope the married Greek did you up good. ** Pilgarlic, Man, that Tybee life sounds nice. Oh, ‘peeps’. Is that the same ‘peeps’ as in the marshmallow ‘peeps’? I got kind of mixed up on the DBT thing. It’s not a box set, it’s a ‘deluxe’ limited edition version of ‘The Big To-Do’. I just tried to find a pic of it, but I couldn’t. The cicadas might even learn something from Coil. Never underestimate whatever it is that makes their teensy brains — if they have brains in our understanding of that term — work, I guess. Nice, beachy weekend to you. ** David Ehrenstein, Lovely Belmondo rhapsody, sir. A total pleasure. Oh, that makes complete sense about the rerelease being timed with the Almodovar, of course. I’m very curious to see ‘Contagion’. Great reviews over here from its Venice Film Festival showing. ** James, Hey. Thanks for the good words. It’s okay ‘cos it made me realize I need to thicken my skin re: the novel’s reviews, and hopefully I can do that, ha ha. Oh, cool, a spirit lifting blog entry from you. I’ll go luxuriate in it once the p.s. is history, thanks! I should share the good vibes. Everyone, writer/.d.l. James has a new entry on his blog that you might want to check out. In his words, ‘It’s about working at Circle K when you’re 22, fresh out of college, floundering. It’s about huffing Reddi-Wip when no one’s looking. It’s about parking lot ghosts, and Ben Nighthorse’s sweet chopper. It’s about jerking off while considering the Ice Boys. It’s about loving your mom … ‘. Sounds pretty tasty, right? Go here. ** Tosh, Hey, T. I’m really glad to hear that your uncle is getting a lot better. Yeah, thicker skin is my aim. I think I’ve managed to thicken it a little. Anyway, thank you, kind sir, for the commis. ** L@rstonovich, Hi, bud. Glad you liked the Belmondo, and heck yeah about the co-star stuff. So, you’re unplugged now, right? So, if you see these words, it’ll be on the other side of your creative windfall. What happened? What did you do? Are you okay, ha ha? Never have read that Eno book. It’s one of those perpetual ‘intend to’ things. Sounds awesome. I’ll check Shakespeare & Co. first. All right, give us the good word when the internet feels safe again. ** 5strings, In Pavement’s case, I always thought it was rocks with their asses out. But you know me. Dino Jr. is awesome, of course. You listening to the old or new stuff? Besmirching the godlike Melvins?! Say it ain’t so. May a bar of soap end up in your mouth, ha ha. Hard Rock Cafe makes a reasonably mean veggie burger. Props from me to it for that. I always seem to end up sitting under Lita Ford’s undershirt. The French Eric Roberts … that was ‘mouthful of coffee spewing’ funny, man. Wtf?! Before Eric Roberts’ horrible car accident requiring extreme facial reconstruction in the 80s, he was just about the cutest guy ever. Impossible to believe, I know. Bob Mould wrote lying bullshit about me in his recent memoir, so I’m avoiding things to do with him at the moment. Maybe his balls’ shrinkage explains the lying bullshit, ha ha. ** Chilly Jay Chill, Hey. Yeah, you’re right. That’s so weird. The first time I read through the comments, I saw yours, but when I went through them the second time to do the p.s., I somehow scrolled around weirdly and it got lost between the cracks. Sorry about that. I fear that happens sometimes. Anyway, as I meant to say yesterday, that’s potentially great news about the NYC run for the theater piece, obviously! Hope the money falls into place. It would be great if you were in NYC when I am. I could actually finally just hand you that weirdly elusive, ever getting lost prize you won here a ways back. ‘Stavisky’ is great, no doubt about it. Personally, I wouldn’t rate it up with ‘Marienbad’ or ‘Providence’ or ‘Muriel’ or ‘Mon Oncle’, but that’s not to say it’s not fantastic and that you should definitely see it. I’ve seen ‘Moderato Cantible’ and the color (his first) Melville. Neither is a masterpiece. I think ‘MC’ is the better of the two. Both are worth seeing if not necessarily worth chasing down with too, too much effort. ** Steevee, Hope the Cronenberg interview comes through. I’ve heard mixed things about his new one, but the positive reviews seemed more trustworthy than the disliking ones. Man, waiting for editors to get back to one sucks, but, yeah, you know how it goes. Hopefully you’ll hear something by the beginning of next week if you haven’t yet. ** Wolf, Hey. Interesting about the Belmondo vs. Delon thing. I can’t remember if there was a similar actor thing in the US when I was growing up. There were big music rivalries. Like it was Grace Slick or Janis Joplin, one or the other. I was a Grace Slick kid 100%, and I still am, even though I have induce amnesia about everything she’s done in the last thirty years to stay loyal. Dude, you’re killing me with that pancakes stuff. My computer is shorting out due to mouth fall out. I’m way into myrtilles. Myrtille muffins, holy shit! I have to make myrtille pancakes now, that’s just all there is to it. I’ll have to borrow a pan from someone. And maybe a campfire too. And I will, as God is my witness. Oh, wait, as Someone is my witness! ** Sublethal, Hey, man. ‘Stacking’, hm, I’ll look that up even though I don’t have an Xbox. I like that not quite closed mouth thing too. Actually, even complicated guys do it, and when they do, it’s just so poignant. What are your writing projects like? You mind saying? New Lynne Tillman, yeah, I love it. A favorite of this year. And Kavan rules, obviously. I really like Red Lemonade. I spend a fair amount of time there. In fact, I spent some time there yesterday because a fine writer who is also a d.l. of this blog posted some of his novel there. Yeah, I think it’s a terrific project. What do you think? ** Bernard Welt, Hey, B! Happy to see you! I’ve missed you! Oh, aren’t you nice. Yes, you are. I’m glad you’re all better and that the Uncanny class plus possibly, hm, astrology caused the upgrade. Gooder than good to see you. I’ll greedily await your unstressful, unbusy moments. ** Kyler, Hey. Yeah, Paris is amazing that way. Six years later, and I’m still all wow. I’m like the characters in ‘Groundhog Day’ who aren’t Bill Murray. I should download the ‘Stavisky’ soundtrack. I have it on vinyl, but my vinyl lives in LA. Okey-doke, you have a fine weekend, my friend. ** Paul Curran, Hi, Paul. It hardly gets better than ‘Pierrot le fou’, that’s for sure. It’s weird that you went to the zoo because for some completely inexplicable reason, I had Simon & Garfunkle’s ‘It’s All Happening at the Zoo’ or whatever it’s called playing relentlessly in my head yesterday, and I don’t even like S&G;, and the Paris zoo is closed for refurbishing. Happy about the good week of writing, man. Very bon weekend. ** _Black_Acrylic, Belmondo is kind of the ultimate cigarette smoker among his many other virtues. Gosh, I hope L’Anarchiste lives up after all that waiting and hoping. ** Bollo, Hi, J. I need to get the new Believer. Thanks for giving me even more reason to. Jan Verwoert, very cool. You’re djing the closer? Do you need to make the people dance? I hope not, but I’m sure that if you do, you’ll make them dance interestingly. Wow, I can see why that is driving you insane. That’s awesome. Everyone, this is driving Bollo insane in a good way, and, having just watched the beginning of his insanity’s source, I think I am now insane in the good way too. You want to take a chance and join us? ** Creative Massacre, Hey. Oh, so it’s kind of like the WWE retirement home show but without the retirement part or something? Hogan is still wrestling? That is scary. If he can still do it, I want Rowdy Roddy Piper to come back. I’ll check for clips. Thanks, pal. How are the plans for your big move going? ** Chris Cochrane, I haven’t cemented my November NYC arrival date yet. I have to coordinate with HP about that. So, afternoon of the 12th means I would need to come to NYC on the 11th, I guess. I think that should be fine. Give me a day to make sure. Uh, there’s someone at the Wire that Gisele has contact with, and I’m seeing her in a few hours, so I’ll ask her who it is. Brandon Stosuy at Pitchfork. Uh, I need to concentrate on possibilities. I haven’t yet. I will pronto. I’ll send you my agent’s address by email. Feel better, and have a rarin’ weekend. ** Sypha, Hey. Well, it seems like I’ll be in NYC from about the 11th or 12th through the 15th. Yeah, I can see the interweaving for sure. I like the idea of them interweaved with a fantasy novel. I can sort of imagine it, but it’s also mysterious in a cool way. ** MANCY, Hey. Good about the Seattle embrace. I guess enjoy the transitioning if you can. Soon enough you’ll be a Seattle old hat, which will no doubt be nice, but crossfade periods always seem to end up being really memorable for some reason. ** Sailor, Hey, Sailor! I’m really glad you came back. Awesome! Hope you have great weekend! ** Misanthrope, He’s only let himself go, career-wise, although, I guess if you’re a certain kind of person, you might think he has become a respectable citizen. Always happy to almost make you almost vomit, man. Well, unless what you were going to vomit was nutritious and would improve your life by having been fully digested. Maybe you can get one of those tennis balls on a tall bendy stick thing for inclimate days like these. Cars are the devil. Mine is actually very kind, though, or so I hear from a great distance. Sucks dude. The money, the car. You deserve better, man. ** Okay, everybody, please peel your eyes and sharpen your senses and spend some of your weekend with the workshop-lodged works of Mr. Tom Kendall, thank you very much! I’ll see you in the comments arena when Sunday starts getting dark, and I’ll see you back here on Monday.

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‘One must have a mind of winter to regard the frost and the boughs of the pine-trees crusted with snow; and have been cold a long time to behold the junipers shagged with ice, the spruces rough in the distant glitter of the January sun; and not to think of any misery in the sound of the wind, in the sound of a few leaves, which is the sound of the land full of the same wind that is blowing in the same bare place for the listener, who listens in the snow, and, nothing himself, beholds nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.’ — Wallace Stevens

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Laurel Halo live at Tandem, Brooklyn

‘Laurel Halo’s music is deliberately vague, and intentionally steeped in descriptive context. When asked about her sound in interviews, the Brooklyn by way of Ann Arbor producer/vocalist responds with a gushing string of reference cues, including, but not limited to: “mecha violence,” “the shapes you see when you close your eyes,” “time leaping” and “David Axelrod.” Her productions are a connect-the-dots of concepts, laid out across the infinite space of your imagination, blending krautrock with early techno and electro styles for tracks of textured synth play that spur deep mental wanderings.’ — Mishka Bloglin

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Hey Colossus Pope Long Haul III live in Bristol

‘With a mission of creating “subterranean rumblings of sludgy rock using three guitars” rarely has a band been more appropriately-named than London’s HEY COLOSSUS. HEY COLOSSUS has concocted an utterly crushing sound based on he inspiration of the MELVINS, BLACK FLAG and BLACK SABBATH, and other influences including bands like CAN, BEEFHEART, ISIS and NEUROSIS into what sounds like a truckload of distortion pedals falling down a cliff onto a mountain of anvils, just to see how much noise it’ll make.’ — Shifty Records

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Haswell & Hecker UPIC Diffusion Session #22

‘Russell Haswell and Florian Hecker have been researching UPIC, Iannis Xenakis graphic input computer music composing system since 2003, and now present this as a live multichannel electroacoustic concert, using surround sound and laser lighting to create an immersive multisensory environment. Russell Haswell (UK) is a multidisciplinary artist who has exhibited conceptual and wall-based visual works, video art, public sculpture. Extreme Computer Music is one specialized area of activity. Compositions by the electronic music composer Florian Hecker (DE) tend towards noise music and are often released on the Mego label.’ — Jacques Tournier

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Prurient featuring Kevin Drumm Tractor Replaces the Horse

‘Dominick Fernow basically makes up Prurient with a theme of anti-technology and anti-electricity — with the exception of his microphones and four-track recorder. Backing Fernow’s stance up is his unconventional use of banging objects together to create music; playing with live wire, pennies, frying pans, toolboxes, scrap metal, and used shotgun shells are an example of some of his instruments. Fernow was also the guitarist of bands Football Rabbit, Vegas Martyrs, Taylor Bow, and Ash Pool (in which he also sings). More recently, Fernow has started marketing to the black metal audience with his label and creative works and is currently the primary live synthesizer player for Cold Cave.’ — self titled mag

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Liturgy live @ Silent Barn, NYC

‘Brooklyn’s Liturgy started as the solo project of singer/guitarist Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, who started writing the music with a drum machine on which he created the “burst beat” — a way of taking the blast beat of much grindcore, death metal and black metal and altering the tempo while maintaining an overall rhythmic logic in time with the rest of the instrumentation. Hunt-Hendrix has ruffled some feathers with his intellectually rigorous understanding of the philosophical underpinnings of the music his band is creating. If Liturgy is black metal, you can hear an expansive and adventurous spirit in the music rather than an expression of the anomaly of an existence focused on existential, even cosmic, pain.’ — Westword

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Charlie Martineau (Esperik Glare) live @ Open Mic

‘Esperik Glare is Charlie Martineau. Charlie has been manipulating sounds since the summer of 2004 as a means to keep his sanity living in the abyss called Wyoming. His recent album releases include ‘My Nights are More Beautiful than Your Days’ and ‘Hypothetically Speaking’ His collaborators include Kenji Siratori and Florian Ayala-Fauna, with whom he creates music under the moniker In Serpents and Seas.’ — collaged

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Jim O’Rourke live 2010.06.04 Super Deluxe Roppongi

‘American post-classical composer Jim O’Rourke has been a key component in the increasing overlap of the American and European experimental music avant-garde, working in everything from jazz and rock to ambient and electro-acoustic, and building many a bridge in between. A Chicago native, his work has found equal luck with experimental jazz and noise fanatics, chill room denizens, and bedroom experimentalists, and has had the resultant effect of cross-pollinating many otherwise isolated compositional communities. Dealing most often with prepared guitar in improvisational group settings, O’Rourke has also released a fair bit of material as a soloist, although more often in the electro-acoustic musique concrète vein.’ — allmusic

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Blue Sabbath Black Cheer Bog house show

‘Seattle’s incredibly prolific doom metal outfit Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, consisting primarily of members Stan Reed and wm.Rage, have released a slew of 7-inches, splits, CD-Rs, and cassettes, collaborating and conspiring with peers in their community to generate one of the more viciously enviable catalogues of sound-vomit, death, and hatred to ever be thrown against the monolithic brick wall of noise. Their sound is metal inverted. Like other bands within the doom milieu, BSBC do not make songs, but rather create soundscapes, borderline narrative-based explosions and showcases in control and sound and moment.’ — Tiny Mix Tapes

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Matmos live at Auto Italia

‘For the past four years Matmos have been re-enacting experiments into telepathy that were done in the 1960s. They were basic sensory deprivation set-ups in which the experimental subjects were unable to hear or see. The subjects were asked to recognise different shapes being transmitted to them from a table of graphic sigils. In Matmos’s experiments, they tried to transmit the concept of their new album into the minds of their experimental subjects. For this performance, each collaborator recites different transcriptions of the psychic experiments that are played through their headphones. The performance took place at London’s Auto Italia space 19 May, 2011, organised in collaboration with Upset The Rhythm.’ — The Wire

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Seb Patane Year Of The Corn (2011)

‘Entering an installation by London-based artist Seb Patane (born in Italy in 1970) is agreeing to play an intricate game of references, symbols and signs, which will touch different buttons depending on the viewers’ private contexts. Found images and objects, intervened drawings, sound and performance… Industrial music, Jodorowsky’s work on the Tarot cards, Christiane F and war iconography… Patane works through a wide range of media and references like a hidden alchemist, linking issues that appeared to be unconnected and that, subsequently, cannot be understood the one without the other. He is preoccupied with the physicality of materials, but it is not a concern with textures but, rather, with presence and absence.’ — SelfSelector

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p.s. Hey. Remember that your bedtime tonight is the deadline for sending in your contributions to the blog’s celebration of and memorial for Antonio. Thanks a lot to those who’ve already sent in your entries, and thanks a lot in advance to those who will. The resulting post will be a two-parter, and it will appear here on this coming Friday and Saturday. ** Schoolboyerrors, Hey, D! Fuck, in my typically scrambled email-related attentiveness, I didn’t see/open your email until Sunday night when, I think, you were already gone. Sucks for me. But I’m glad you were able to make it, and I hope Paris treated you royally. Any highlights? Man, that BM conference does sound incredibly cool. Damn, I really regret my alternative location of that time, which will be a book tour in the US. Everyone, if you’re going to be in or near Dublin in mid-late November, PEST – Black Metal Theory Symposium, in which our own Schoolboyerrors will be one of the stars, should be completely fascinating. That link will take you to all the info you need. Man oh man. ** Tomkendall, Hey, T. I did get the workshop-related email safely, yes, thank you a ton. Once I get the Antonio post(s) set up, which will be a main activity for the next couple of days, I’ll figure out the soonest we can do a workshop here, and I’ll give you a heads up on the date. Yeah, great, exciting, man! ** David, ‘Rose Alley’ really is great. Very highly recommended. ** Memoirs of a Heroinhead, You nailed Joe’s famous cadence and tone to a ‘T’, man. I was a calf in clover. I guess I’ve said this a million times, but I thought RHCP were okay until Kiedis decided he was a singer whereupon they began to battle with, oh, Muse, for example, for the title of my least favorite band in the world. I agree Jane’s Addiction were much better. ** JoeM, Phew, there you are, safe and talkative. I was just about to call whatever the UK equivalent of 911 is. Man down with a bad case of the dreaded RHCP fan-itis. I just read a quote by Nick Cave about RHCP not two days ago that seems relevant: “I’m forever near a stereo saying, ‘What the fuck is this GARBAGE?’ And the answer is always the Red Hot Chili Peppers.” That guy who was running the now defunct Alyson has started a new gay press, but I don’t know much about it yet or even its name. I’ll let you know when I do in case you want to try the place. Yeah, the fact that no UK publishers want ‘The Marbled Swarm’ is painful and strange to me, but I’ve been totally on the outs with UK publishers for ten years now, so it’s just more of the usual, I guess. An HTMLGIANT equivalent for the UK would make a huge difference. If there is one already, I would love to find it. If not, starting a site like that seems like a no brainer. I’ll see if I can figure out exactly when Antonio first arrived here. I know his first appearance was as a lurker making a contribution to a Self-Portrait Day, and then he dove right into the comments arena. Memory tells me his peak involvement here was through most of 2006 and then the first third or so of 2007. Then he left for quite a while and returned for a few months maybe a year and a half ago? ** Sypha, Hey. Oh, thanks. My only problem is that there’s such an incredible onrush of really good newer writers in the US right now that it’s hard to keep up, especially living over here. That’s why I end up reading a handful of books simultaneously, which I’ve never had to do before. Oh, your label has gone active again. Great! I’ll go go get that new Sypha Nadon album pronto. Everyone, excellent news from multi-talented d.l. Sypha aka James Champagne aka Sypha Nadon: ‘After a long period of inactivity I’m trying to get my netlabel active again. Today I released a new Sypha Nadon album, “4NIC8,” a proper follow-up to 2009’s “Our Lady of the Flowers of the Red Night.” It’s kind of a porno album. It can be downloaded here. I used mostly samples from straight porn because women tend to be more, um, vocal when they’re orgasming, but there are two songs on there using samples from gay porn (“Piano Piece for Cocksucking” and “Room Service,” which “stars” Brent Corrigan).’ ** Jdb aka, I’m pretty sure, Chris Cochrane, Hi, man. Sounds awfully nice out there. I forget: are you in the Pines or Cherry Grove or elsewhere if there is an elsewhere? I could feel the mellow in your language. The good kind of mellow. Soak it in, man. ** Alan, Hey. ‘Rose Alley’ is really, really good. Agents in the UK? No, I don’t. Everyone, (1) Does anyone reading this know of any literary agents in the UK? If so, speak up, as it would help d.l. Alan. Thanks. (2) Chris Dankland, if you’re reading this: Re: your question about contemporary poets who use rhyme, Alan recommends Frederick Seidel, James Merrill, and Philip Larkin.. Thanks a lot, Alan! ** David Ehrenstein, Yes, RIP: Jerry Lieber. And also Nick Ashford. Bad day for fine songwriting yesterday. Interview with Doris Day? That’s a rare thing, is it not? I’ll go read it. Everyone, should you need a break from the avant-garde-o-rama up top today, David Ehrenstein alerts us to a brand new interview with the one and only Doris Day. You can find it here. ** Chris Goode, Hey, Chris! My pleasure, sir! Such an inspiring book! I’m really glad to hear stuff is going like wild fire in Edinburgh. May you leave the place scorched. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. ** Thomas Moronic, Safe flight or, if you’re already over there, I hope US customs let you breeze through, and I can’t wait to hear what you’re seeing and doing. ** David, Your tumblr has changed? I’m out of the loop. Hunh. I’ll go see what the newness involves post-p.s. ** Kyler, Hey. Oh, gosh, don’t let my blog wreck your sleep patterns. I’ll feel so guilty. (Just hearing the word jetlag gives me jetlag). Oh, ha ha, the psychic character. Please forgive any cartooniness. She’s there basically to represent something for the narrator. I was really addicted to that John Edwards show on the SciFi channel at the time. Do you know who I’m talking about? Whatever happened to him anyway? Take care, man. ** Steevee, Hey. You can read the Lynne Tillman book in its entirety for free online on the Red Lemonade site. Hold on. Here. ‘Talismano’ is pretty amazing, yeah. ** Katalyze, Hi, Kat! In my total ignorance, I didn’t know of Jack Layton until I read that he had died, but I was really impressed by what I read about him yesterday. Great that you’re painting again! That’s exciting news! Can you pass along the address of your tumblr site so I can hang out there and pass the link along to everybody? Kiddiepunk has done a typically gorgeous job with ‘French Hole’, yeah. I’m excited to see it finished too. ** Chris (British), Hey. Good for you for tweaking the laid back. Laying back has its virtues — I am a dyed in the wool Los Angeleno after all — but only to a point. I guess my must-share thoughts get taken care of by the blog. Yeah, I think the blog serves whatever thoughts-to-fingertips-style bursts I have. Yeah, that explains it, I guess, now that I think about it. ** 5strings, Hi, buddy. I haven’t even read Artforum since they got that new editor. Yikes. I’d better go get a copy. There’s this tiny controversy going on in the UK because Doc Martens did these ads that showed photoshopped dead ‘punk rock’ stars in heaven wearing Doc Martens including Joey Ramone and Kurt Cobain who always wore Converse sneakers and Doc Martens’ defense has been that they have proof that those two bought Doc Martens at a store but it turns out they bought the Doc Martens as gifts for friends of theirs. There’s some cafe here in Paris in Montmartre that serves Australian coffee, and I’m going to go drink some, and I’ll let you know. Ha ha ha, yeah, you could have told me that image you linked to was a photo of the Marais at 2 am on a Saturday night, and I would have believed you. Mine? Mine: Blake Butler’s ‘Nothing’, Michel Butor’s ‘Mobile’, Jeff Jackson’s ‘Title TK’, the last 20 pages of Kate Zambreno ‘Green Girl’. ** Bill, Hey. Cool, let’s mumble. Don’t know that David Nickle book. Thanks for the link; I’ll go check the work out. Why a Berg concerto for the more Italian moments in ‘Wolfburg … ‘? Good question. Maybe David E. will read this and explain that. I’m glad you’re leaning towards doing the show. What do I know, but I think I would do the same thing. Great about the successful animating. Demo link, please, when the time is right? ** Creative Massacre, Wouldn’t it? He has probably has interview requests from every which way at the moment. Yeah, freedom must be so trippy. I was reading something about how totally tripped out he was when someone showed him an iPhone. ** Inthemostpeculiarway, Hey! Welcome back! Let’s see … No, uh, I waited too long on the ‘Enter the Void’ DVD and someone else bought the only copy. I’m an idiot. My back still hurts, but that’s my fault for having been sitting in this chair mostly for the last couple of days. The interview was nice. She was really cool. I might hang out with her sometime. That would be nice. Okay, that wedding sounds really crazed and very, I don’t know, Southern or Texan for some reason, I don’t know why. Maybe the horse flies? I guess it could have happened in all sorts of places. Never mind. It is so weird to be here in France and see all this non-stop stuff online about the Kardashian wedding. It absolutely does not translate. I’ve never even seen her move her lips or move her fingers or anything, so I don’t know what’s going on, but the giant interest in her is a humongous mystery to me. I think my favorite part of the wedding — excluding the wonderfulness of your report and its wacky, intriguing characters — was those rolls. ‘Braxton Hicks’, nice. I have a friend with the name Hicks. Sander Hicks. I wonder if they’re related. I love that ‘ … he’s one of the best men.’ Anyway, that wedding was very, very colorful. Man! It’s nice you got to decompress sweetly with Eyebrows afterwards. Anyway, great report. My days haven’t been so interesting. I’ll just tell you the things I can remember. Scott Treleaven finally arrived here. I haven’t seen him because he was very jet lagged, but I’m seeing him today. Gisele and Stephen suddenly got this idea that they might want to move out of Paris and live in a castle in Grenoble because it’s for sale and cheap, and they went down there for a few days to investigate, and she asked me if that was a crazy idea, and I said, yeah, kind of, but, you know, if that’s what you want, etc. I guess I’ll find out if she’s moving to Grenoble when she gets back here on Thursday. Kiddiepunk showed me the design for the ‘French Hole’ chapbook, and it looks beautiful, and I guess that’ll be printed soon, which is cool. My sister called to tell me about all of her usual stuff. I started putting together the Antonio posts based on the things I’ve received so far, and that’s been taking up some time and has been pretty melancholy. This LA poet I used to know and who was a really singular, cool guy named Scott Wannberg died, and that’s been depressing me. I think I ate what I always eat. Yury had a bad cold for a few days, but he’s feeling better today. Uh, I don’t remember much else, so I’ll leave it there. I’m determined to go out and actually do something today, and, if I do, I’ll tell you about it tomorrow, and, if I don’t, I’ll tell you about what I didn’t do. How was Tuesday? ** Misanthrope, Hey, G. Oh, okay, that’s cool, just get it to me as soon as you can. Yeah, I was just talking about the Kardashian wedding/ media frenzy thing. I can not believe people give the tiniest shit about that, but obviously they do. Jesus. That peeing story suggests that you are part French. ** Right. I think I’ve curated a good gig for you today, and I have this feeling a lot of you are going to think it’s ‘weird’ or something and just skip right to the p.s., but I hope you don’t. But if you do, hey, that’s showbiz, and no big. One last request from me for things for our Antonio celebration, please. Thanks. Otherwise, yep, I’ll see you tomorrow.