[_jamesobrienblog_]

[_Annotation, Publication, and the Occupy Circle Closes_]

2011-12-15T08:16:00.004-05:00

Crushed but still squirming. That's the update, in a nutshell. Most of this week has been spent annotating a playscript that Dylan left behind in 1963 or '64. It's part of the dissertation, the reader's draft of which is somehow due in about six weeks. So be it. It will be done.

ISIS published my new article about "Talkin' World War III Blues," this month. It's available on deep-shelved newsstands around the U.S., in larger bookstores I imagine, certainly in the UK. You can get a copy at the magazine's website, too. The main point of the piece is that I've uncovered, with help from the New England Folk Music Archives, an early live recording of the song that suggests historians have been wrong for decades about its in-studio genesis.

On the Occupy front, the attentive reader will remember that I blogged this about the city of Boston's October actions at the Dewey Square camp. Later, I made this film about the reasons why people were there. Today, the Globe published this new piece that I wrote, which looks at what happens next, now that Occupy Boston is gone from its patch of land. And so, a full circle, in a sense. (If you'd like to feel the sensation of your brain running out through your nose, spend some time reading the comments under the article.)

Ms. Brown and I have made it out to the Haven's open mic twice this month. That makes it almost a habit. On the way home, late last night around twelve or so, I remarked that singing other people's songs means a lot more to me now than it did when I was primarily singing my own songs for a job. Last night, we sat around tables and played to the barroom, joined by a big-voiced blues singer named Sara Colb. Here's what I sang in the course of the night: 1. Party By Myself (Bern); 2. Paint (mine); 3. Black Tornado (Bern); 4. Simple Twist of Fate (Dylan); 5. Van Dieman's Land (U2). See? Ms. Brown was in great form, and it is always a pleasure to listen to her sing. I'm biased, these days, but I held that opinion before I was biased. So there.

[_Boston Globe: Ringed Boghaunter_]

2011-12-11T23:03:00.000-05:00

My byline in the Boston Globe, today:

Upton dodges a dragonfly problem, seeks better beaver solutions

[_Eastern Highways, Old Houses, and the 100-oz. Beer Tower_]

2011-12-08T18:00:00.003-05:00

Today, I went to the house chosen for the setting for the "Coffin Door" photos. This is the new short story I'm writing, on in which images play an integral role in shaping the narrative.

It was the typical drive north, weaving through the psychosis that is the landscape of the American East Coast driver, weaving through the sociopathic, consequence-free mentality of the wretched masses that use highway transportation to express their own nihilistic tendencies.

And airplanes make me nervous.

Anyway, the house is an old one, owned by my friend P.H. and his partner, and it's in the middle of a long-term renovation. One room had just the fireplace I needed, and plenty of hardware to build out a setting for the small door of the story's title. We photographed the door in various states, dressing the area around it with plaster that P.H. pulled from a section of wall that's under reconstruction. After that, we gathered some old wood from the attic and then went down to the fieldstone basement and constructed a small compartment that would stand in for what one character in the story calls a "coffin hole." I took photos of the inside of that. When the pictures are brought together in a sequence, the compartment interior will appear to be what is on the other side of the "coffin door."

When the work was done, P.H. and I grabbed a bite to eat. I have never been to Chili's before. This is where one consumes large amounts of everything, if one lives in the suburbs or has that kind of inclination anywhere, I suppose. A poster on the wall advertised a 100-ounce Budweiser "draught tower." The price was $18.98. The restaurant was mostly empty. News of the new Virginia Tech shooting played on the television. We talked about P.H.'s work out in L.A.

Later, I drove back to Boston, a mere twenty minutes on the highway, but then about forty in the Callahan tunnel, waiting for the hoards of homebound cubicle farmers to crawl their way south.

There so much work to be done, now, work left untouched because of my day up north. The price of the creative choice is that the rest of everything gets agitated in its box. It is rattling, but something will have to wait. I've been over-sleeping, over-everything really. I'm going to just sit here a while. It'll only be a while.

[_Crystal Cox, Frostbite, and The Fifth Estate_]

2011-12-07T11:21:00.017-05:00

I've been reading about Crystal Cox, an Oregon-based blogger, who's just lost her defense against Obsidian Finance Group. She's been saddled with an order to pay $2.5 million to the firm.

Seems Ms. Cox has been writing about alleged bankruptcy fraud in connection with the company for some time now, in addition to other unfavorable descriptions of its activities. Obsidian's lawyers responded by filing a defamation lawsuit.

The underpinning of Cox's attempt to defend herself against that claim is that she is part of the media. Ms. Cox, by the way, is defending herself. Of course that's unwise.

Cox asserts that the allegations in her postings are based on fact and published in the interest of the public, not as an effort to defame the company. She also protected the identity of what she says is an informant within Obsidian, someone leaking inside information to her (often in connection with the actions of Kevin Padrick, the financial firm's co-founder).

The District Court judge in Portland, Ore. threw out most of the blog posts that Obsidian brought to the courtroom as evidence of Cox's alleged defamatory writing, but then focused on one — the one that lost Cox the case.

Turns out that the most apparently reportorial blog, in the judge's estimation, is the one that he ruled defamatory. Not surprisingly, it's the one that Cox says is most connected to the confidential informant. Cox claims media-style protection from having to divulge her source(s) — Oregon has a media shield law on its books — and she was not willing to reveal her source. Thus, she found herself unable to outright prove that she did not make up what she presented in the now key blog.

The judge, however, has decided that she was not employed or connected to any "newspaper, magazine, periodical, book, pamphlet, news service, wire service, news or feature syndicate, broadcast station or network, or cable television system. Thus, she is not entitled to the protections of the law …" And so, no media shield for Cox and she's been sent up the river to the tune of two and a half mil.

One problem, according to Bruce E.H. Johnson, a Washington-based expert on media shield laws, is that Oregon's media definitions were in all likelihood written into that state's statute before the Internet and blogging were prevalent. Maybe so. But even if that weren't the case, taking a quick look at ORS 44.510, one finds, under revisions, that the list of media is provisional. The portion of the sentence before the list of acceptable media outlets reads: " … includes, but is not limited to …"

So, I can't see how Cox won't win on appeal. The judge seems to have made an activist statement about the media, ignoring the precise language of the law.

But here's the real problem:

Protected by shield laws or not, if a member of the media wants to prove that what they've written is not defamatory, how else can they ever do so other than by revealing the source(s) that provided the information that is in dispute?

Shield laws crinkle paper-thin when it comes to the bind a reporter is going to face in the courtroom. As a matter of fact, expensive and prolonged libel and defamation lawsuits against reporters is an excellent way for very wealthy individuals or corporations to chill investigative news activity. They simply create an awful crossroads. The writer is confronted with libel and/or defamation charges based on stories that rely heavily on confidential sources, and, in a lawsuit, they're left with this impossible choice: (a.) reveal the source to dodge the charge, but in so doing blow up their own professional credibility and ability to do such work in the future with future sources, or (b.) concede to the inability to prove the factual underpinnings provided by the confidential source and take the libel/defamation rap.

Good work, America. Once again you've empowered the rich and sought to freeze the Fourth Estate — but you've been doing that for a long time, haven't you? And now the Fifth Estate — bloggers, under Stephen D. Cooper's analysis — can feel the chill too.

[_Dylan, Coffins, and About Six Weeks_]

2011-12-05T09:25:00.003-05:00

Not a bad weekend, all things considered, and especially when compared with the hellfire that was last weekend, with all its sudden crushing research schedules. But this weekend I almost sprang back to my full and normal dimensions. I slept until 11 a.m. on Sunday. I haven't done that in far, far too long.

And then I ran yesterday, circling Jamaica Pond and taking in the sound of my own breathing, the ever-more-bare autumn trees, and the cold air (finally) of early December. It still isn't cold enough for the time of year, it seems, for the season.

Seeing "White-Blue Light" in print sure helped, along the lines of restoring my impression of the worthwhileness of breathing. If you haven't read it yet, click here for the story.

Otherwise, progress continues apace on the Dylan dissertation. The final six weeks of primary work is the window in which I find myself. It seems impossible, but it's true. I have some introductory and headnote material to write and/or rewrite, and some annotation of a bit of playscript that he wrote sometime in the early '60s. These are the things that will consume me for the coming month and a half.

This week, I expect to finish the short story "The Coffin Door." Completion involves photography, which I delayed last week as I sought to catch up on dissertation work (and I owed a woefully overdue story to The Boston Globe). Now it's back on the schedule for Thursday. I have a pair of doors waiting for transportation, leaning against the bookshelves in my office.

Anyway, there are other words to be written today, some 1,600 for blogs and then Dylan material and then some more work on "The Coffin Door." I must transcribe a typed page to a messily handwritten page. A facsimile of this will be included among the pages of it.

If you haven't picked up a copy of "The Dirt Baby," today's as good a day as any. It's $.99 at Amazon.com.

[_Deadlines, Soft Parades, and The Adirondack Review_]

2011-12-02T13:38:00.005-05:00

There are some weeks that seem to have been designed to try to break you. The span of Friday to Tuesday, of this past seven-day stretch, was just that. It did not, I am happy to say.

I won't go into specifics about why and how the schedule exploded, regarding one particular project that was due, but let me write this down for the world: I am a believer in deadlines. When they involved me, my name, my reputation, I do not suffer lightly my encounters with belief systems that vary from my own adherence.

Anyway, the week started to spring back to normal after Wednesday. I would not say that I have entirely sprung back to normal, but I'm working on it. Let's just say I spent a blistering amount of time in libraries over the past weekend, into the first half of Tuesday.

Last night I found a small gray cat in our front staircase. He or she was wearing a tag, so I carried the little bundle to its home and delivered it to its owners. So, that helped, somehow.

Also, yesterday, "White-Blue Light" was published at The Adirondack Review. Believe me: that helped mightily.

[_READ_IT_HERE_]

I'm very fond of this one. And I'm honored that it made the finalists' list for the 2011 Fulton Prize in Short Fiction — a shortlist apparently only two stories long. Thanks especially to Angela Leroux-Lindsey at the journal. She's among the best. Some heavy hitters have praised Adirondack, so she doesn't need me to tell her that it is a good one; but there it is, my two cents.

I hope you drop a note if you find "White-Blue" of worth. Thanks for reading.

[_Journalized_11.23.2011_]

2011-11-23T14:16:00.002-05:00

Back in 2001 and 2002, before I started to record what would become Church of the Kitchen Sink, I was demoing songs that were — as I remember it — coming out of me by the throatful. Suddenly, there was this one: "White Leather." It's one of my favorites, though I never seemed to play it at all. I think there's a live recording of it in the stack, here, somewhere, one from Club Passim. Otherwise, it might have showed up three or four times in the live set. Weird, that.

So, now it has a home. Enjoy.

[CLICK_HERE_TO_LISTEN]

[_Journalized_11.22.2011_]

2011-11-22T17:52:00.003-05:00

A day of overwhelming tides, but a good day.

I'm working on a research project for a certain intellectual luminary, creating some potentially useful contextual annotations (we shall see . . .) to a clutch of absolutely dirty poems by T.S. Eliot. I've spent the last few mornings plinking away at that.

Otherwise, more work underway on the Dylan dissertation, and a meeting with my adviser today to map out the last thrust of that effort, in its present phase (as it were, so to speak; no not that kind of thrust). On a related subject, I continue to (sort of) broker exchanges of Dylan-alia between people who've amazing things at their disposal. And that is kind of an amazing experience, itself. I've just been made aware of what may some interesting Basement-Tapes related material. We shall see.

Otherwise, the Cassavetes project again rears its horny head (no, not that kind of horny; jesus, okay, enough). It may never end.

Fiction Note: My short story "White-Blue Light" — a piece wholly unlike any part of "The Dirt Baby" — has been accepted by The Adirondack Review, placing as a finalist in the quarterly's Fulton Prize for Short Fiction. "White-Blue Light" is a deeply meaningful piece, to me. It is part of a trilogy of sorts, three short stories that explore different ideas about the absence of 9/11 (more on that, another time). All three in the trilogy (the loose, loose trilogy) have been pinged as finalists in various prizes over the past eleven months. This is the first of the trio to go the distance and get to the published page. And so it goes.

I have to do an interview about dragonflies, now. And this is the life of working for not any one being. (You know that a corporation is now a being, right?)

[_Journalized_11.21.2011_]

2011-11-21T09:47:00.002-05:00

"The Coffin Door" advanced toward completion, this weekend. Most of the time that I spent on it, on Saturday and Sunday, involved shaping and re-shaping a Word doc that will soon be converted into a handwritten, scribbled, and drawn-upon page, and then scanned and added to the story as a facsimile page from a character's notebook. The titular door — well, two of them — have arrived by UPS. I've found and acquired a pair of antique cabinet doors, in fact, and one of them will serve well as the small portal upon which the unraveling mind of a main character is so profoundly fixed.

And so, today, I must schedule the photo shoot that will generate the story's final pages. That's among the heap of to-dos that my to-do list threatens. And then there's French class tonight. There are about four weeks left of it, and while it's a total pain in the ass to schedule Monday afternoons around going to the classroom (even after testing out of two-thirds of the original three-hour duration, at midterms), I also know that I will miss it when it's over.

On Saturday afternoon, Ms. Brown and I snuck in a film by Matthew Porterfield: Putty Hill. Nominally, it's about the days just before a funeral for a dead junkie. There's a whole universe that orbits that idea, though, long and sad and rich in photographic detail; rich in performance textures and achievements. If you're ever curious about what independent cinema allows artists to do with these ideas — that is, when the filmmakers are free from their corporate-marketing paymasters — compare Porterfield's portrayal of family, drugs, and estrangement to the treatment given such things in Winter's Bone (and the vulgar simplicity of that movie can be discussed without even counting its moronic horror-movie last act).

And, yes, "The Dirt Baby" is my new short story, published by Mixer. Thanks to every single person who's taken the time to, and been thoughtful about, telling me that they've picked up a copy. Every time I hear that, it matters to me. Thank you. If you haven't had a chance: Buy "The Dirt Baby" at Amazon.com.

[_Journalized_11.18.2011_]

2011-11-18T12:58:00.008-05:00

My Friday recommendation to you is this new song by J-Krafty.

Joe Kowan (a kind of Clark Kent to the Kraft-er's harder persona) is a Boston-area singer/songwriter who's currently a finalist in the USA Songwriting Competition for his work on a particularly twisted bit of parental-love imagination, a little chestnut from the old Kowan setlist that he calls "Double-Sided".

That's not this song, this new one that I want to direct you to, but once you've got that piece of information under control, it's not too hard to understand where he's going with his newer work. (In 2010, he blew up the probably never-before-invaded gray area between crafting and gangsta rap: a song call "Crafty" that comes with a ridiculously well-done video: HERE.)

Now, it's Sasquatch. His newest work is another piece of novel(-ty?) hip-hop called "Bigfoot Likes the Ladies." One part Andy Samburg/The Lonely Island, one part Digital Underground: I can't excuse myself, when it comes to loving this weirdo-music that J-Krafty makes. I can't impose some kind of ironic overlay. I'm not certain that Kowan is, in fact, kidding. I think he might mean it. If he does, it's all the better. As it stands, his newest work is good; it's smart and it's original. It just might be great.

So, have a listen to "Bigfoot Likes the Ladies", which is the new J-Krafty joint: HERE. You can tell him I sent you.

[_Journalized_11.17.2011_]

2011-11-17T13:13:00.004-05:00

Ms. Brown and I went to an open mic, last night. It's been years since I've done any such thing.

This one was held at this little Scottish pub: The Haven. It was pretty close to perfect. Starting at about ten o'clock, two talented and personable fellows played a few songs and then invited others to do the same. Ms. Brown played "Ottawa" and "Geneva". I played "Party By Myself" (not mine, but Dan Bern's) and "Who's On Your Shoulder Now?" (mine). No signup lists, no weirdos, no bullshit. Heard some good music, some very good singing, and, because this was a small Scottish pub, we all consumed a bit of ale. Let's just say that it's been a slow Thursday morning.

Before that, yesterday was a day of writing, and getting through the endless gray light that seems to have perma-cloaked Boston. The new short story is called "The Coffin Door" — have you picked up a copy of the newly published "The Dirt Baby"? — and it's turned into something a bit unusual: a series of psychiatrist-patient interview transcripts, and some notes from the psychiatrist's laptop files, and then a short series of photographs. The photographs, as it turns out, at this stage of the writing, tell the end of the story. Oh, and there's a facsimile of some handwritten notes found at the patient's home.

So, the piece is going to take a week or two to finish, as I've got to assemble a few items that need to be in the photographs — particularly, the door of its title — and then go to an old house I know about up on the North Shore of Massachusetts and make the pictures. One hopes there's an editor out there in the world willing to find all of this foolishness interesting, and not simply annoying. And so it goes.

Have just downloaded Greil Marcus's new book about The Doors, titled: The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years. Recently, NYT writer Dwight Garner got something essential down on paper about the experience of reading Marcus:

"Reading Mr. Marcus at his best … is like watching a surfer glide shakily down the wall of an 80-foot wave, disappear under a curl for a deathly eternity, then soar out the other end. You practically feel like applauding. He makes you run to your iPod with an ungodly itch in your cranium. You want to hear what he hears. It’s as if he were daring you to get as much out of the music as he does."

Yes, I agree. And, more please.

[_Journalized_11.16.2011_]

2011-11-16T13:31:00.004-05:00

After a bit of break, here is the next in a series of live recordings from my days as a performing singer/songwriter. I write "performing" because I do not do that very much at all, anymore. I do still mess around with the writing part, sometimes.

There's not a dramatic story behind the reason for the end to the performance phase of my life, or some behind-the-music moment. I just stopped wanting to live in precisely that way, and I started wanting to live a more powerful creative life than the one I thought I was living.

I write "thought I was living" because one never knows, once enough time has passed. Maybe things were as powerful in their own way, nine years ago when this recording was made, as they are now. What I know now, and this is something that I could not understand then, is that one must never view one's work as inherently able to survive undo outside influence.

Make your own art. Make it ugly if you have to, but never try to pretty it up for any purposes. The "purposes" are all too often someone else's dreams and needs, and not yours. There are reasons for this, but they are particular to me, as they would/will be particular to you. I don't see that comparing reasons would be useful. I do emphasis the probable universality of the advice that I offer. It is true, as far as I know what is true in this world. And so it is given in that spirit.

This song is pure me. More than any other, perhaps. It's called "Speak Clearly" and this is probably my favorite recording of it. Enjoy.

[CLICK HERE] to listen.

[_Journalized_11.15.2011_]

2011-11-15T10:40:00.002-05:00

So, let's talk about The Doors. Not that it's a burning issue, but let's talk about The Doors in the Twenty-First Century. (No, not The Doors of the 21^st Century.)

Nov. 8 is when Ms. Brown and I sat down at the Wilbur Theatre in Boston to watch Ray Manzarek and Robby Krieger play a set. It is one of the very few ticketed performances on which we have walked out before it was over. I can count the total number of such shows on one hand, and in so doing I'd have enough free fingers to type this sentence without too much trouble.

I should frame my thoughts on the Manzarek/Krieger show with my attempt at justifying an interest in The Doors long after the age of twenty-five.

Well, eighteen. And truthfully, no justification needed. Listen to a giant chunk of their catalog again, if you haven't recently, and you'll hear a dangerous-sounding band with a great singer. A touch of melodrama in Mr. Morison's delivery, yes, but one must frame that with the understanding that he was a very young man — say, twenty-four to twenty-seven years old in the span of his prominence. So, he gets a free pass on some of the melodrama.

It's a dangerous-sounding band with a great singer who is a fine writer. Great writer? Not always; but very, very good within the parameters of his genre. He pushes the boundaries of style and form when it comes to blues-inflected psych-tinged rock-and-roll in the late 1960s. The band has its detractors, and that's fine, but if you'd like to see what happens when a very, very good writer gets a chance to present his work in a way that is brilliant, watch some of the concert clips in the film When You're Strange. Morrison was an uncommon performer. Even with all the lights on, his stage work is scary, strange, energizing, and to even the half-educated eye, informed by experimental theatre, performance art, and a slew of ideas and practices about which perhaps this very young man was aware, but maybe not. Maybe he was just that good.

Now, Nov. 8. Take away Morrison, obviously — and all of the considerations I've just offered regarding his art and his craft — and put on stage an aged Ray Manzarek (keyboard player) in what looked to be a kind of Cosby-era zipper sweater, and also Robby Krieger (an extremely small man, who seemed to be wearing chinos and an XXL soccer T-shirt). With them comes the typically anonymous and rock-solid drummer, the one who replaces uninterested members of such quasi-reunion acts. On vocals: a man who seemed to be playing the part of Val Kilmer, circa 1991. The bass player: apparently the janitor from a Philadelphia boxing gym: tiny, probably Asian, wearing a tracksuit with red piping along the arms and legs.

And so it begins, and for just a moment it might be all right. But it is not. It turns out to be not all right at all.

Sometime, during the second song of the set (after the utterly predictable opener: "Roadhouse Blues"), I remember it to be "Break on Through," the bank enters a bit of an instrumental break. This might have predicted a satisfyingly independent musical direction for the show — familiar songs in not always familiar ways — but what happens is a deal breaker. That is, Manzarek begins to shout into his microphone: "Open the doors of perception! Open the doors of perception!" Well, it's a shout-singing kind of thing. It doesn't stop with this hammy offering, though. He goes on: "Marijuana! Smoke a little weed, yeah! Mary-ju-wannnnah! LSD! LSD! Get high!"

Now, this is the first time I think to myself that it is time to go. But at forty bucks I imagine some sense of satisfaction will arise from attending the event for at least forty minutes. A dollar a minute is apparently my price for mild-to-moderate suffering. I'm available for parties and other functions . . .

It gets worse. Manzarek's bizarre and awful ideas manifest in new and stomach-churning ways. Every time he speak-shouts between songs, it sounds like he's introducing the circus. Maybe, I try to believe for a moment, he's playing the part of vaudeville barker. No, he is not, and as the show goes on in this fashion I begin to think that this is the kind of bullshit that their late lead singer would have hated.

The lead singer of the night, as it turns out, does his best to stay out of the way. His name is David Brock, and he used to front a Doors cover band called Wild Child. Looks like Val Kilmer. Sings more than a little bit like Jim Morrison. Mercifully, he doesn't pull too much in the way of shtick on the stage, but he did do this: sometime around the third song, he says to the assembled: "How does it sound? We want to give you a good time, this evening, all right?"

No, not all right at all. No at all, Mr. Brock.

See, I didn't go see Manzarek-Krieger show so that they could give me a good time. So that they could entertain me. I went so that I could watch and see something like: how do these two musicians make a kind of music, a kind that has always been a little off, a little threatening, a little bit mad and worthy of going a bit mad to, yourself (if that's your thing).

Instead, what I found was a couple of aging fellows doing a Las Vegas review. "Heeyyyyy, everybody, now for a little song we like to caaaallll: 'Liii-ght My Fiiiirre. Hope you remember this one!!"

Now, this doesn't diminish my enjoyment of The Doors, when it comes to listening to their albums. I find that to be surprising, in retrospect, but it really doesn't. What it does do is help me to understand that it's not the music of The Doors that matters, really. It's a horrible cliché, I suppose, but it's the singer. It's the singer getting it across. If nothing else, Morrison got the song across to the listener. Like it or not, you can't say he wasn't going for it most of the time. These guys at the Wilbur, though, in 2011 . . . they weren't going for anything, save maybe a little payday.

I've got it: have you ever watched those public television revue concerts? You know, the ones they broadcast around the time of fundraisers: themed concerts like Legends of Doo-Wop? Manzarek and Krieger were doing that show, for that audience. Awful, awful shit. I finally leaned over to Ms. Brown and said: "You wanna' get out of here?" She leapt from her seat. I don't blame her at all.

[_Journalized_11.14.2011_]

2011-11-14T09:53:00.002-05:00

And so comes to a close what seemed like an endless crush of deadlines.

Yesterday, I pressed SEND, and off went an article to ISIS about a Dylan recording that I discovered in the process of working on something else. If nothing else, what I've written about seems likely to correct a little corner of the history about the artist's catalog.

But also, the Cassavetes project, while not entirely finished, on my end of things is complete. I may have some light administrative work to do, before month's end, but no more heavy lifting for it, as of November 3.

What I'm looking forward to between now and February is time to annotate and write the prose parts of the Dylan dissertation, and also the time to resume my daily fiction-writing schedule. That went on hold back in October, as I remember it, as the magnitude of the then-current project-load became fully apparent.

In the vein of resumption, I started a new short story yesterday. It was born in one of my nightmares, the kind that I have that can fuel things like my short film I Was Blank (and Dreaming). Only, this one sparked a story.

It is titled "The Coffin Door." Ever since reading the exquisitely dark A Heritage and Its History by the inimitable Iris Compton-Burnett, last summer — I was on my female novelists of the middle Twentieth Century jag, at the time — I've wanted to try a piece that is all, or almost all, dialogue. "The Coffin Door," as it turns out, is that piece.

Have you tried the new short story from Mixer Publishing, yet? It is my haunting little single, "The Dirt Baby," and today would be an excellent day to drop a dollar on a copy for your Kindle. Where is the link, you ask? Oh, right here to Amazon, I say, as I supply it. Thanks, friends. I hope that you enjoy it.

More to come.

[_Journalized_11.10.2011_]

2011-11-10T12:09:00.009-05:00

On Joe Paterno's firing (via NYT): "Kathryn Simpson, 20, a junior studying graphic design, was weeping as she walked away from the university’s administration building, Old Main, with a friend. 'This is devastating for us,” she said. “I never in a million years thought I’d see this.'"

Ah yes, another devastated learner, thinking of college sports on the scale of geologic time! Breathless hyberbole! Coupled with a breathtaking enthusiasm for the most mediocre parts of being alive! Later, her academic colleagues would rage in the streets of State College, destroying private property to make their point: sports are very, very important to them. Or something.

I suppose that Simpson and her friends represent the light beer of cranial contents, but, still, as she speaks — and as people like her continue to utter nonsense to what must be somewhat bewildered news crews — increasingly, our co-inhabitants on this continent reveal to us that the United States deserves whatever fate comes due. In the end, really, who'll throw a flotation device to this nation of pickup-trucks/Sunday-sports dunderheads?

Sad thing is, one has to wonder if there aren't altogether many Americans who view last night's Penn State riot with a greater degree of sympathy than they'd ever express for all the Occupy protesters. And what would the grizzled Tea Party freak-jobs, obsessively cleaning their unnecessary guns while counting the tax-subsidized sickbeds they'd like to empty, think about such a riot if it was conducted by (say) immigrants, or Muslims, or all those others about whom they seem so constantly infuriated (pssst: afraid). The airwaves would be ablaze with their call to arms.

Nope, the sound of silence that you hear, my friends, is a product of a nation's majority offering its tacit consent. No large-scale outrage at the sports-related hooliganism, because we must admit that this country understands — no, it loves — when the masses fight for the system-endorsed opiates that keep them distracted from wondering about how hard they might be working for absolutely nothing. The youth of State College represent the best-case scenario for the system. They'll skip the economic and social battles of their time, but they will go apeshit over ... wait for it, football. (Well, in this case, a football coach who failed to prioritize human beings over the same old need for numbers, numbers, numbers that screws up everything else, all the time, every time ... congratulations, the drones have won.)

Because, in this country, in 2011 — it seems to me, more and more — it's not about the kind of life you should live (rich with personal opportunity, balanced by members of society working together to keep each other housed, fed, and healthy so that we can concentrate on science, arts, and growth as a species). No, it's about how much stuff the bitter and the personally unfulfilled who measure their lives by the square footage of their yards, and the numbers on their tax returns, get to keep for themselves: all for beer, buckshot, bibles, big trucks, and ballgames.

Welcome to the occupation. No, for real. You're living in it. Brought to you by the generation that walked home barefoot from Woodstock (and, now, their children).

[_Journalized_11.09.2011_]

2011-11-09T17:40:00.001-05:00

Hello, hello. Thanks to everyone who's dropped me a little note about "The Dirt Baby." I am so, so, please that you're checking out the new short story, published by Mixer.

However, more than a few folks have asked me this question over the past several days: "I do not have a Kindle; how can I read an Kindle story without one?"

Well, that's a paraphrase. But here's the answer to the question:

iProduct users: Download the free Kindle app from the app store and have at it in the Amazon store. The URL: http://www.amazon.com/The-Dirt-Baby-ebook/dp/B0063AMXEW/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1320878322&sr=8-1

PC Users: Download the free Kindle for PC app, which is available here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=kcp_pc_mkt_lnd?docId=1000426311

More to come. Thanks again.

[_Amazon:_"The Dirt Baby"_]

2011-11-04T16:23:00.004-04:00

Grab a copy of my new short story, "The Dirt Baby," at Amazon's Kindle store.

This one is published by Mixer, based in Indiana. They're a fantastic small press working on the line between literary fiction and genre. I highly recommend them. They do right by their writers.

[_Journalized_11.04.11_]

2011-11-04T15:31:00.001-04:00

The universe is trying to tell me to take my hands off the wheel, a little bit. To not take myself so seriously, I think. Figuratively. I don't believe in a sentient universe, you see. Anyway, I don't know whether I'm trying to listen at all.

Today, following a fellows' lunch at the St. Botolph, I somehow wandered onto a bus bound for Newton. I write this as I make my way back to Boston. Is this what it is like to discover some little corner of dementia, the Alzheimic mind?

"The Dirt Baby" arrived at the Kindle store, today, published by Mixer, out of Indiana. I'm holding off on putting the link here, although one can find it in other ways, because the store has mis-titled the story by one crucial letter. And so it goes.

The universe is trying to tell me something about taking oneself seriously, perhaps. I haven't figured out the part about whether I'm listening.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

[_Journalized_10.27.2011_]

2011-10-27T10:00:00.000-04:00

A story that I wrote for The Boston Globe:

Medfield couple share house with history (and perhaps a ghost) - The Boston Globe

[_Journalized_10.15.11_]

2011-10-15T23:12:00.001-04:00

I went to the camp kept by Occupy Boston, today. I asked people why they were there. These are some answers that they offered. This looks best when you click the four-way arrow button in the lower right corner of the YouTube embed.

[_Journalized_10.14.11_]

2011-10-14T11:35:00.000-04:00

I need to answer my own questions. This weekend, I'm goingto visit Occupy Boston and ask ten people what is their reason for being at thesite. If they'll let me, I'll film their answers.

Next weekend, I'll be in New York. I plan to visit Occupy Wall Street, if it's still there (despite today's momentary reprieve), and do something like the same thing.

Anyone done any filming at an Occupy event? What's theprotocol like? (if you've detected one …)

Otherwise, and somehow ironically with these things inhabitingmy mind, half a day was sucked into Apple, Inc., yesterday, dealing with theiOS5 update and the implementation (finally) of AppleTV in the home. I'm tryingto streamline and make all of my media-access issues go away. First-worldproblems, I know.

It seems to me that the novel is on hold, or it has been,mostly, since last weekend (the last time I worked on it, and there'd been abreak, before that, since Sept. 27).

With the Cassavetes project due to OUP on Nov. 1, and thedissertation-writing back in full swing, and The Globe getting more of my attention all of a sudden, and theblog-for-hire usualness, and an article that I'm suddenly writing for a journalabout a recent discovery I've made in some archives … everything is whirling,whirling, spinning madly up on that great big clipper ship. I hope the fictionsurvives the bump. Also, I've been moved into the next round for a (fairlymajor) fellowship. I'm to submit work examples that I haven't compiled yet. I'llfit that in, somewhere.

Is this not the best time to start a new film project? Well,I need to answer my own questions. What else can I do?

[_Journalized_10.12.2011_]

2011-10-12T12:34:00.001-04:00

Whenearly mainstream media reports came in about Occupy Wall Street, theyjustified my pre-existing suspicion that the protesters were not going to bepithy mouthpieces for a movement, but energetic say-nothings with a penchantfor hanging out in tents and holding cardboard signs.

Whathas happened since my first — admittedly cynical — post about the subject is thatthe nascent activity on Wall Street has turned into what looks to be thebeginning of a national phenomenon. I don't know if it's a movement, but it is something that is not immediately going away.

InBoston, the protests began at the start of October. The call, according toOccupyBoston.com, is for numerous things. One of them is that the United Statesundergo a reform of its financial dealings: with Wall Street (whatever thatmeans), between government and special interests (whatever that means), and, ingeneral, the upshot of the protest seems to be about some kind ofredistribution of wealth.

This all seems loose to me; nebulous.Maybe that's why it's started to stick: general outrage at government and richpeople is not terribly difficult to sell to a nation in which unemployment ishovering around 9 percent.

Butnone of this puts my feet on the blacktop. General outrage is not what I feel, and standing in the whirlwind is for leaves and dust devils, not a person with focused and defined views. I believe that, in this circumstance, letters to representative officials and action on the election front are still the option that thinking people must employ. Protests are for when those systems show themselves to be entirely deficient. They have never shown themselves to be entirely sufficient in the United States, and sometimes street activism works. I'm not there yet, when it comes to matters financial in the U.S. Give me another year, perhaps ...

In any case, I do support the right to demonstrate, and I rather love that it's making the media — and someelected officials — grapple with just what the U.S. means to do about its very apparently very fucked-up financial and economic landscape, at this point in time.

Whathas fired my rocket, in Boston, are the events of October 11.

In the early hours, some700 Boston Police arrested approximately 141 of the Occupy Boston protesters for allegedlystanding in the wrong part of the city. The event, by several reports, was markedby a kind of general mopping up of whomever the blues happened to encounter.

On the one hand, Isuppose that's what police do, when it's time to round up the citizens. On the other hand: total bullshit.

For an example of what kind of bullshittery I mean, here, look at what appears to be the Boston Police arresting U.S. veterans for standingon the master's turf.

Were these men part of the "second camp"of "foreign anarchists" to whom Mayor Thomas Menino is attributingthe need for a crackdown?

‎"Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino blamed the after-midnight melee on a fewdozen anarchist agitators who hijacked the peaceful squat-in.

'These 40 people come from another country, another city, (and) want to causetrouble in my city? They defied us. They broke the law,' said the mayor.'Allowing these 40 people to take over for all the people who are there iswrong.'"

— Boston Herald, 10/11/11

And, via James Memory Hole (I know his full name, but he seems to have shiftedto this nom de plume for Facebook purposes), who's keeping excellent track ofvideo and photo artifacts from the night: "At about 58 seconds, you'llclearly see Urszula, head of the Mass NLG, wearing a bright green "legalobserver" hat being arrested by the BPD."

Well,what's next, Boston?

[_Journalized_10.05.11_]

2011-10-05T19:42:00.001-04:00

Where is my mind. Where is my mind. Whee-eeere issss my-eeemind??

The last thing that I remember is listening to The Pixies onthe way home from French class on Monday night. That should tell you somethingabout the week, so far.

Tuesday morning was gobbled up (I looked up; it was11 a.m.) by the revision of "The Dirt Baby" and "Roots" forMixer, and then the afternoon was consumed by the Dylan dissertation. Sometimearound 7:30, after some hastily ordered and eaten Chinese food, Ms. Brown and Ihit the ICA in Boston for the opening of its new show.

Oh, and new poems went out to one editor that has asked tosee them. I will now enter the finger-crossed phase of life for the next sixweeks.

When we got back, I finished all but the last hour of Prohibition. Ms. Brown and I havedecided that Ken Burns is does notmake excellent documentaries. Instead, he make documentaries that people agreeahead of time are important, and thenhe fills them with barely comprehensible narrative until his audience is sooverwhelmed that they concede the battle. This is not because the narrative is difficult. It is because it is cellular, and edited together for people who need to feel like they are receiving information, and not a work of cinema, or art, or expression. And you can't say that this is some functional deficiency of documentary. How then, explain the entire career of Werner Herzog? (The only man I know of who could make a gripping film about a volcano that does not explode.)

Today was another Dylan day, working on his unpublishedpoems. Then, just as I was getting ready to switch to the Cassavetes project, Igot word that the dissertation prospectus is due on Friday.

Now, there are a handful of reasons why I did not know this.Some of them are reasons that I must own. Some of them are not. But, in thisgame, the bottom line is the deadline. And so that was the afternoon.

Ms. Brown and I ate dinner. And now, anesthesia please.

[_Journalized_10.02.11_]

2011-10-02T12:14:00.000-04:00

Yesterday began with a viewing of Minnie and Moskowitz, segued into some major word whittling on theCassavetes project (cutting some long entries to more closely comply with OUP'sauthor guidelines), and then switched to a marathon social experience that spannedthe hours from four to ten. Or ten thirty. It was a wedding. It was beautiful,and fun, but sometimes it felt bewildering and full of brushes with a heavier kind of life. Past and present, art and attention, allsorts of things rushed into the rooms of the reception.

While there, I ran into a songwriter I used to know from theHarvard Square scene of the early 2000s — he was waiting tables on thisparticular evening. I talked pianos with a man who seemed to know his ivories.A guest at our table told us of her two automobile-related experiences inMexico. Her story included kidnapping, guns, crashes, fire, and leaps from movingvehicles.

I realized, after hearing her, and then going back to findher later and express my gratitude to her for her tale, that I don't know a lotabout myself when it comes to the moments that require one to act decisivelyand fearlessly, those moments when one's existence is probably at stake. Ms. Brown knows more about it than I do, I think.

At another point, a mentor, someone very important to me asked me if Iwas likely to turn the story of a friend — a person dealing with somecomplex middle-of-life issues, those of the mind — into art. I was taken abackfor a moment, realizing that I make most of my work out of experiences of anger— not sadness or happiness, but from what anger leaves behind in me. We talked about making art out of what is creditable about people, about theirstruggles, about their victories, and not just from what is infuriating aboutthem. (And, yes, out of their failures, too, I suppose — but perhaps bythis I mean those failures that have a dignity about them and are not just thechapters of misfortune in someone's life).

These are high up among the things that I am thinking about,this morning.

Ms. Brown and I slipped away, at some point, and during the short trip back across town we discussed all the things we'd heard. I got word, after settlingin for a late-night look at a U2 concert from 2001, that Tidal Basin Review has accepted two poems of mine for publication.The poems are "The Grown Shore," and "Warm Winds". I thinkthey'll show up in the Fall/Winter issue of the journal. The last piece Iplaced with them was "Night Voyage".

The rest of today is for what work I can squeeze from thesponge inside my skull and chest. The cats have taken over the workstations,though. I'll have to fight them for space and time.

[_Journalized_09.30.11a_]

2011-09-30T14:07:00.000-04:00

The media is doing Bob Dylan a disservice, but it's not the kind of disservice that you think about, right away. You have to turn it over once or twice, to get what's going on.

No, Bob Dylan is neither being singled out, when it comes to current scrutiny of his paintings hanging at the Gagosian in New York, nor ishe with any certainty safe from a copyright-infringement suit in the near future. Journalists, however, as usual,are reporting this story with a glaring lack of attention to what is important right now about the case, on this point in particular.

An important point: Dylan may have obtained permission to make paintings fromextant works by the likes of Henri Cartier-Bresson. To my knowledge, so far, the Daily Mail has reported on this element of the case. And by "report," I mean that they include this onerather miserly line in an article of Sept. 29, 2011: "Some of the photographs are protected by copyright but it appearsthat Dylan may already have obtained permission to use them."

Any details? From whom are these details obtained? How many of the paintings are not copyright protected. Bueller? Bueller?

The press lovesto bring out the condescending ledes, the ones that include phrases such as "globe-trotting rock star" (even when they're mostly defending Dylan) and other foofy bullshit, but where's the harder stuff? The New York Times certainly left the question unaddressed entirely. Writer Dave Itzkoff was too busy giving grafs of his story over to Michael Gray, writer of doorstop-sized tomes about Dylan,and now keeper of a blog about the artist.

Let's get another thing out of the way, too.

The situation that surrounds the matter of Dylan's allegedly(well, probably) copied paintings is almost certainly different from that ofhis quotation of a melody or lyric in song. That kind of borrowing, lifting,adaptation, and reworking usually falls within the allowed parameters offair-use, as I understand the law (and don't let me, or anyone else, lull you into thinking that one can fully understand fair-use as it applies to every givenscenario …).

The paintings in question, however, and any allegations ofcopyright infringement that could follow if Dylan has not obtained permission or used works not covered by copyright,these matters are likely to be guided not by passionate arguments about the "folk process" or quotation, but rather by leading fair-use cases such as Rogersv. Koons. The copying artist doesn't always win. I'll come back to this in a moment, but first, I'll elaborate on the concept of Dylan being somehow singled out.

In 1963, Roy Lichtenstein painted an adaptation of somepanels of a comic book. The painting: Whaam!The comic book: All-American Men of War.

(Whaam!, Lichtenstein,1963)

(All-American Men ofWar, No. 89, 1962)

Until 1964, the painter continued to replicate art fromcomic books. He'd take a page, select a panel (or more than one), and createthe large-scale canvases that now hang in (say) the Tate Modern. David Barsalouhas put up a website, tracking the relationship between the printedpage and Lichtenstein's painted picture: Deconstructing Roy Lichtenstein. You don't get a lot of context from Barsalou's site, but you doget the impression that Lichtenstein's methodology was repeated over and overagain, and you must see the similarity between what Lichtenstein did, and whatDylan has been accused of doing.

So, now comes the NewYork Times (and other) piece(s) about Bob Dylan's paintings that arecurrently on display at the Gagosian. It seems clear, given the examplesattached to the online version of the Timesnews story, that Dylan, the painter, created several canvases that are basedupon photographs that he didn't snap.

For example, here's Cartier-Bresson's 1948 shot (via the Times):

And here is Dylan's decades-later painting, Trade (via the Times):

Not much of a question, regarding resemblance, is there? Butthere is nothing new under the Gagosian sun, and, no, Dylan is not beingsingled out differently than other artists (at least, not in this way). As Barsalou's web-work showsus, this kind of detective-work has been done before, and it has been done inconnection with famous artists.

Still, prominence breeds exposure; exposure breeds scrutiny.Both Lichtenstein and Dylan are in the kind of spotlight that unknown artistsdon't necessarily ever have to experience.

For example, when I see that certainwriters and visual artists, those that I keep an eye on, have used some band'ssong as the soundtrack to their YouTube video — that is, one that showcasesthe unknown artist's own writings and/or drawings — and I don'tsee a used-by-permission statement anywhere in the production, I maybe too-quickly suspectthat they are probably violating that band'srights, when it comes to the recorded song. Yes, the artist could be issued a cease-and-desist, or even sued by the musicians if the situation went far enough, but that probably won't happen. A lot of water goes under the bridges, you know. Someone has to notice you, to notice what they notice about what you've done. Famous people get caught easily; so many minds are turned to their output.

(What I do find offensive: these same artists, however, hop up anddown when someone lifts their work to dress another article or web page. They put up little warnings on their websites about such things, in some cases. Many of us are relativists, it seems, about the dynamics of copying.)

Let's go back to Lichtenstein. The way it worked out, by thetime anyone got a good handle on what sources the painter had used for hiscanvases, the statute of limitations on possible copyright claims had run out. Roy was never sued.

But if Rogers v. Koons tells us anything about making newart out of older photographs, Lichtenstein couldhave been sued, and he might have been sued successfully.

A summary of that case: Jeff Koons made four sculpturesbased on Art Rogers' photo, Puppies.The lawsuit that emerged from Koons's sale of three of those sculptures eventuallyended up in the U.S. Court of Appeals. In the court's decision, it deemed thatKoons's sculptures hadn't parodied, commented upon, or represented anything that fell underfair-use, when it came to Rogers' work. They ruled that Koons had simply copiedand sold art too closely based upon someone else's extant saleable art— and that Koons had apparently done so without that Rogers' knowledge orpermission. This, the law would not abide. Koons had to pay Rogers a lot ofmoney, and he had to give him the fourth, unsold sculpture, too.

Again, it is possible that Dylan's paintings, those thatresemble certain photographs by other artists, are the result of the painterobtaining all the necessary permissions and rights that he needs to hang themon gallery wall and, presumably, sellthem to buyers.

Again, the media has apparently not asked any such questionsto the extent that would serve to either elevate this story, or to deflate it.Or, they have not had the opportunity to get those kinds of questions answered.But reporters working on this story should at least raise the concept of such apossibility, in their articles, yes? I think so.

But let's face it: the public outcry about Dylan's paintingsis really not about copyright law. (Yet.) I'm not even sure that it's about plagiarism ... about any moral offense of plagiarism. So far, it seems to be about copying, and maybe it's, in that sense, about news consumers who love astory about a "globe-trotting rock star" getting caught copyingsomething. Like in class, when they were kids: you know, bad boys copied the answers to the tests. That kind of story.

If you don't believe that the media, and the consumers who lap upwhat the media (most of it) poops out for them to swallow; if you don't buy that we live in the same old culture that has always thirsted for a little village-square condemnation, then read some archived stories on the death of Amy Winehouse from amonth or so back. You'd have thought they had pictures of Amy dead with needlesin her neck. Turns out she probably died because she'd quit drinking the wrong way. Nobody made a whole lot of that development. It was old news, though, wasn't it?

Comeuppance (real or imagined) trumps comprehension. "Step right this way, ladies and gentlemen. We've got Bob Dylan, red-faced and caught in the act."

Except that it might be a non-story, when it comes to copyright, deflated by one important question. And nobody's reporting on that.

[_Journalized_09.30.11_]

2011-09-30T09:33:00.003-04:00

The engine has been at that kind of high, persistent whinethat means, yes, all the valves are working but, no, the details outside thewindshield do not figure largely into this part of the trip.

Monday, I don'tremember it at all.

Tuesday, I do remember some highlights to include a majorreformatting of the Dylan dissertation, and, on both days (it's all coming back to me now), some excellent progress on the novel. Another 1,000 words on Monday,revised on Tuesday — all words towards solving a problem that I discovered backon page twenty-something, at the end of last week. So, that's fixed, and a new beat is introduced to thewhole.

Wednesday was for jury duty in Dorchester. This meant sitting inan air conditioned room for six hours. I read two-hundred fifty page of Accidental Genius, which is Marshall Fine's biography of John Cassavetes.

The project, the Cassavetesproject, is now moving into its final month. Ray and I met for about threehours yesterday (Thursday) and worked out a set of categories into which all ofthese bibliographical entries will be sorted. I need to write another twenty-five or thirty citations, during the next four weeks, and also a few four-hundred word headnotes. Revision, revision,all along the way. The whole thing goes off to the publisher on Nov. 1.

Today is bright and almost autumnal, in Boston. The air herehas been tropical throughout the week, and I'm tired of it. The sun is comingthrough the sheers, here, though, and the cat is silhouetted in them, taking abath in full view of the street below. Such is his way.

I've a Globe-related interview to give, in a half hour. Thisafternoon is for some more reporting, catching up on a series of blogs that Iowe to clients, now that I've reached the end of this insane week, and then some academic work — I hope— meaning work on the dissertation and on matters Cassavetes. Tonight, Ms. Brown and Iare off to see Laurie Anderson at the Paramount.

And I still haven't addressed the Dylan situation at the Gagosian.Tomorrow, that is. I'll write about it, tomorrow.

[_Journalized_09.26.11_]

2011-09-26T10:44:00.003-04:00

A live recording from The Point made during my last tour, in 2004. There was something about the room that lent itself to the performer, a connection between audience and artist that led to the kind of moments you hear in this track. The Point is gone now, a victim of what happened to so many of the smaller rooms that I loved, in the late 2000s. In the end, a little extra cash at their counters couldn't do the trick.

[_CLICK_HERE_TO_LISTEN_]

"The War Has Come" is the closing track of my second and last studio album: Church of the Kitchen Sink. I offer this soundboard capture as a kind of companion to the album version.

[_Journalized_09.25.11_]

2011-09-25T13:10:00.001-04:00

Reading about what is apparently a devastating lack of basic goals and knowledge among the protesters, now dwindling, in the streets of New York's financial district, it occurs to methat perhaps this is the result of a generation raised on Star Wars and New Kids on the Block rather than one that hadmentors like Ginsberg, Kerouac, Dylan, Leary, and all the echoes of HUACdarkness still ringing through their literary/artistic/political elders.Forus (for them, if not for me) it has only ever been the echoes of disco and The Gong Show ... (oh, what do I know,but what about it?) ... Anyway, this is Ginia Bellafante's take on Occupy Wall Street.

Obviously, this is but one reporter's article, and it is necessary toapproach it as an anecdotal thing, and to understand that there may be ideasand agendas not represented — or not represented very well — in the storythat it suggests. And it is terribly simplistic of me to remain satisfied withmy initial reaction: that the quotes in Bellafante's piece are reflective ofany societal or generational activism trend. But I can ask the question: what are the effecst of whatever is culturally foregrounded upon the minds, what is gleaned from education,upon the personal intellectual arsenals that a group of would-be activists can bring to bear?

I currently imagine that it goes something like this: If you've been filledwith the stuff like that of my much-too-short list above, some of the culturally influential figures of the middle 20^th Century, and those are your underlying ideological and cultural referents, are youbetter "armed" than those who've swallowed all the Madonna, the glammetal, the boy bands, and the commodified film and television that Marketingchas squeezed these past three decades from their tubes? Does the advent of the YouTube/American Idol-think of perhaps a large segment of a generation mean that public action is subject to base reduction …that it becomes primarily, for many, only about spectacle and making a record of one's presence, content (as it were) to share withthe great anonymous worldwide digital sea? What about the effort required to become a functional mouthpiece, a shouter witha cause and an appropriate (if brush-up) education about what the opponentdoes and does not do? Who perceives this to be required, a necessary component, among the Occupy Wall Street clowns and dancers?

Maybe, though, that is all we're seeing, but not all that is happening, down there. Nobody in Bellafante's piece is quotingMarx and Engels or any other philosopher, poet, economist (or, well, anyone oranything), and maybe it's just the freak-out that it seems.

(And this is not new, I know.The middle of the last century also had its hundreds of thousands of morons, too.For every bullhorn campus occupation there were contingents of youngsters (andoldsters) who were just there for the drug, the boobs, and the chance to partyand be seen.)

I guess I'm interested to know where might be the balance, when it comes toOccupy Wall Street? Where's the even partially studied, angry, active voice among that crowd? Do we only get roid-ragers overturning cars after sporting events or stragglers from Burning Man as our mobs? HasBellafante failed us, as readers, or is it really that these narcissisticvacuum-brains were the best and brightest of the protesters to be found? Based on what she wrote about the numbers, maybe it's already too late for anyone to tell.

[_Journalized_09.23.11_]

2011-09-23T10:21:00.002-04:00

Tomorrow, there's this in Salem. I'm one reader of several,and honored to be there. Please join, at the Salem Literary Festival. 2 p.m.

Which means that today, at some point, there's got to be thesorting out of what to read. A few pages from two different pieces, I think,both forthcoming from Mixer Publishing. The one, "The Dirt Baby" andthe other "Roots." If there's time, I may slip in a first page or twofrom a newer work: "Free Pass," or maybe the newest of the new, "MotelWork."

Deep into the Cassavetes project, now, and closing in onsome final books and articles that it should include. The deadline is stillmore than a month away, but there are meetings to be had, and revisions tomake, and a general kind of finishing up that will take over, come the middle of October. Allthe while, I'll be pushing to get a few more citations into the bibliography.It's addictive, this building of the thing. I've felt thankful for theexperience, all summer. To seek out and record this much work about thedirector's films, I would probably never have found it all (looked for it all), otherwise.

The novel continues. I've paused and gone back over thefirst fifty or so pages, line editing, making small changes. In the process,I've determined that two several-page chunks want a full rewrite, and that's onmy list of what to do before I push forward toward page one-hundred. I've still not had thefeeling that, since the week of writing the Dylan paper, the whole rhythm ofthe thing has been back under my control. I mean the daily rhythm of writingit, sitting and writing one-thousand new words. It's because of my revisiondecision, I realize, and next week should be a return to forward-moving expansion. Untilthen: just patience, patience, and patience.

Finally, never have so many treacly words been written abouta rock band.

First, the beginnings and endings of bands are tentativethings, are they not? Perhaps they'll stay gone, this one. However, its membersare active and busy artists, apart from that one band, and not dead.Endless eulogizing as if dead, however; that is what we've had.

I remember listeningto a tape. And, oh! My life was transformed. Or, oh, weepingly I say it: My life was not transformed like those around me, and I felt so alien ... so strange to those I called "dear friend." Oh, how I grapple with these implications, in the wake of it: the end!

Insert song-title punnery — HERE — hack before ithappened, but resistance is apparently futile, in these cases.

Look, it is not any end of any world, but a shift in tensesfor three men wrapping up a project. Would that the worst offenders, the most earnest of the onlinememoirists —the jabbering and vapid of the lot of us, rolling in our own memories like puppiesin poop — wrote as volubly and at such length about Troy Davis. Give thatsome public passion and apply to it the same endless stream of anecdotal self-incorporation. Or don't.But, enough already, all this forced gravitas about R.E.M.

[_Journalized_09.21.11_]

2011-09-21T14:30:00.002-04:00

I knew I was onto something in my music-listening life whenthe hippies at the party kept turning off UnknownPleasures. Yes, what did they know that I did not? That the music made by Morris, Curtis, Hook, and Sumner was too dark for a crowded, smoky room? That it was.But it was perfect for my head, and, as I've grown older, the music of JoyDivision sounds less and less dark. I hear the drums and chords of itdifferently. It sounds like light. It sounds like struggle(s). It sounds likeeverything the adult unfettered mind could need.

It is right that Peter Hook is touring with a bandhe calls The Light. They came to Boston last year and played a set heavy withsongs from Unknown Pleasures. Lastnight, Hook returned with largely the same outfit, and leaned into cuts from JoyDivision's second (posthumous) album Closer.The songs are more challenging material than those of its predecessor, but they're strong, they're good, they're worth standing there to listen. I asked Ms. Brownif she could hear it in the way one might hear any band play any songs; if they could be judged on merit, and did they work well enough the first time through. I think that'sthe question, regarding most bands, but last night especially, in themiddle of the show, I kept thinking about The Light as a new band, playing songs that not everyone would know.

Anyway, at the end, The Light's concert became a celebration. Hook brought outthe usual singles, then the threshold number, "Ceremony" — not quiteJoy Division and not entirely New Order. I wondered what to infer, if anything at all, from its set-concluding spot on the list.

I left exhilarated: young and excitedfor what was left of the night. I associate that feeling with the streets ofBoston, coming out of rock rooms with the smell of them on my clothes (thatmild, oaky mix of old beer and basement mold). At some point, I realized howmoving it was to watch this older man re-encounter the art he'd made withothers in his youth. That he could have a conversation with the great, lostIan, and explore the mind of the missing writer by enacting what they'd once-ago constructed, this seemed like a gift for the living to enjoy.

Time travel, to my way of thinking, is not about technologyand science. It is about rethinking memory as, not a kind of dream, but an actualperception of what will be and what was, and what still is. Unless there's some "satchel" into which all moments are deposited, this seems available tome, this idea that everything is happening all at once. In such a continuum, IanCurtis is still singing, standing sometime on the edge of any Manchester stage.And while he's doing that, Peter Hook is singing, in Boston, on a different butsimultaneous September night. And everyone is doing everything they ever haveand will, and we're in the immediate universe of all things: present, future, and past. It's not magic, it's more like permeability, and if I think about it longenough I start to think it's real.

Anyway, that was last night. And here's some video I took ofHook playing "Atmosphere."

Also, this just in: good night R.E.M.

[_Journalized_09.19.11_]

2011-09-19T23:37:00.001-04:00

Life is gradually returning some kind of swing, although of what things that swing may be, I do not yet know.

It is a pleasant kind of intensity, the rattling vortex of an academic paper; the being in the middle of it; the being in the middle of its end. When it's at its best, whole days are swallowed down into it, and then there is the surfacing, and then there is the slow resumption and steering toward what's next.

What's next at the moment is to conclude my work on the Cassavetes project, an annotated bibliography for Oxford University. Once that's done, it's the rest of fall and winter to finish the dissertation, which I am eager to get back to, but this deadline comes first. And so it goes.

The novel experienced the hiccup, but I've worked it back in after a two- or three-day interruption, revising and editing the first sixteen-thousand words, bit by bit, a little of it every evening. It continues to perform this somewhat magic act of sewing itself nicely together. I thank it by attending to it as much as I possibly can.

On Saturday, I went to the New England Folk Music Archives, where back in March we filmed some of Long Ago Way. There, I spent some time looking at boxes of papers that belong to the late Mark Sandman. The idea is to sort them into better shape for archival storage and see what's what.

There's a kind of quiet that I felt as I went through them. Pictures, mainly, photos of young, happy, and ambitious bands. The one that resonated for me the strongest is one shot that was apparently taken from a traveling van. The shadow of the vehicle ripples against brown cornfields. I could hear the shush of passage through the metal panel walls. The whir of the big block engine, the soft changes of the blacktop. The photo was a movie of that moment, the amber sun-glow country, just an instant of his time on some paper stock. Now it's in that box, down in that basement. It's not sad to me, that it's there, just part of knowing life.

[_Journalized_09.17.2011_]

2011-09-17T18:44:00.001-04:00

A week of the kind I've not had for, well, months. The new Dylan paper, to be included at this October's conference of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers, is done and sent away. It ate up more time than I had expected, not for problematic reasons but because it took the time that these things take. Now, it's Saturday, and I'm behind on almost everything, and I'm tired and my eyes twitch and it's going to be a long night.

Chief among the activities of the evening: a visit to the Museum of Fine Arts to see Christian Marclay's The Clock. Our tickets for the twenty-four event are for eleven. Ms. Brown says that midnight is the time to see.

I spent part of the afternoon with some papers of Mark Sandman. More on that, in the future, yet to come.

It is freezing, here in Boston.

All hail Popul Vuh.

[_Journalized_09.14.11_]

2011-09-14T18:59:00.002-04:00

Ms. Brown and I sat and listened to about half of the March20, 2002 show at Club Passim from which I took and posted "TouchYou," last week. I have many thoughts about that night, in particular, butright now they're staying upstairs, and here's a second track from the sameevening.

[_CLICK_HERE_TO_LISTEN_]

There was a particular direction that the songs werestarting to take, in early 2002. This song probably captures that, and thoughthe effects pedal are a bit nuts, and the whole thing is a wee bit out of tune,I've been fond of going back to this one over the past several days.

This is, by the way, the first unreleased song from my archive that anyonewill ever hear (as far as I know) that features a live performance with DylanCallahan playing the drums. Yes, he's on both studio records, but thoserepresent — and you'll have to trust me on this, most of you — it is avery different beast … or very different beasts.

I have some regrets that Dylan and I did not develop furtheras a performance duo. The interruption was entirely my doing. People tell younot to have regrets, and that is stupid advice. Regrets are the most normal reaction a person can have to theunderstanding that something in his or her past did not turn out very well, andin the case of regret it is probably because of their own actions.

If you can make art for any length of time, or do anythingpassionately for a great length of time, and you don't come out of the processwith some (a few, many) regrets, you're probably doing it wrong. I haven'tgot a lot of 'em, but — regrets? — yeah, I got some.

Not about this song, though. Enjoy the recording.

[_Journalized_09.13.11_]

2011-09-13T17:51:00.001-04:00

Here's some art I've seen and heard in the past four days, the stuff that's keptme going as I push through the last six inches of rock between me and thedaylight at the end of an academic paper.

It's going fine, thank you.

In themeantime, this is the good stuff.

JakobFioole: I discovered Jakob's paintings at Voltage on Third Street inCambridge, at Flux Boston's new show that opened last Friday night. This painting, in particular, has filled a corner of my imagination since then. Andthen there's this one. His palette is comprised, in part, of whites that looklike dirty snow; grays scraped from Paris ashtrays; browns that seem pushedinto the fabric, becoming the old dead-cell red of dried blood. All of thesethings are what I like. But I also like his subjects: the illusion of furiousmovement in the hands of the seated diving suit; the tilted menace and thoughtsof urban crashes in the nose cone of his passenger jet. So, yes, haunting andwonderful. If anyone has a middlin' four figures lying around, let's buytogether, shall we. I mean, you buy it and hang it in my domicile. Okay?
Cold Weather: Of all the films Icould encounter this month, as I grapple with recurring ideas of genre andliterature, I get Cold Weather. AaronKatz has made a mumblecore mystery, a fusing together of what I think are the best parts of Americanindependent cinema and the best elements of a strange tale set in the Northwest (the film is set and shotin Portland, Ore., so it's a bonus if you have fond feelings for that cityscape). Katz's brilliance is that Cold Weather is not weighted toward one end of his spectrum orthe other. You never feel that it's an indie film invadedby the mystery genre, or that it's a genre flick with aspirations. It worksbecause the mystery is compelling, but the film is both about it andnot about it all. If you get mad at Cold Weather's final moment, you're not doingit right.
PopulVuh, In den Gärten Pharaos: Thesecond album by this often miscategorized German ensemble is a richtapestry of (what seem to be wordless) vocalizations and resonant, overlapping instrumentation. Acoustic and electric instruments, here. It's strange, but it is most definitely not "cosmicrock." I've been listening to the four-song 2004 reissue. The 1972 LP hasonly two cuts on it.

All right now, back to the mines.

[_Journalized_09.11.11_]

2011-09-11T10:49:00.001-04:00

We walked through Union Square as we tried to get closer. Every few blocks we'd find somewhere to stop. On the top of some steps to a building, a man in rags had built a mountain ofclothes. People were emptying their closets by the bagful. Already, that afternoon, the request had come through on the news: Stop putting out the clothes.

What everyone needed was bandanas — or the unobtainable paper mask — any cloth that could be wet and tied on, to help breathe in the chemical air. The sky overhead was black with what wafted.We stopped in at a Duane Reade: no bandanas. The firehouses left out masks in big boxes, but the boxes were all empty that night.

Atop his pile, the man dressed in rags laughed and laughedand laughed. It seems like we watched him a moment, and then continued our walk to the south. We might have turned back when the air got too bad, but I think it was the soldiers who turned us back.

Later, uptown, a young woman in an apartment made plans for the Hamptons. Girls on their cell phones: "my city is under attack." A lot of that, as we came in from our walk. In thedining room, almost everyone played Asshole, hands full of cards next to glasses of scotch. Oneyoung man seemed less involved in the party. When he told us his story, it was this: coming up his every-morning subway steps, climbing tothe street as a body exploded against the pavement.

The sky was clear and full of stars, up there, that apartment. It was Sept.12, 2001.

[_Reading_Scheduled_09.24.11_]

2011-09-10T10:20:00.000-04:00

NEXT APPEARANCE:

Salem Literary FestivalSaturday
9/24/2011
2 p.m.

I'll read some new and published fiction, as part of Mixer Publishing's showcase at the festival. The focus of this one is the line between genre and literary fiction. It is up for consideration and debate, this topic. It's one that interests me.

Check out the details, here: salemlitfest.com/2011/mixer-publishing-reads-literarygenre-saturday

[_Journalized_09.09.11_a_]

2011-09-09T16:51:00.000-04:00

I wrote this song sitting on a green foot-stool in a hallway of a third-floor apartment in Jamaica Plain, during the morning and the afternoon of 09.11.2001. I had on an old radio. I didn't watch much television, that day, until later in the evening.

Listening to this recording of the song, "Touch You," made on 03.20.2002 at Club Passim in Harvard Square, I notice a younger man's words, but I still hear how it felt to sing it, back then, at that time.

[_CLICK_HERE_TO_LISTEN_]

This is the best example of it that I can find. It's not a song that always made everyone happy, in the early 2000s. It's one of the few lyrics that I have written that I cannot entirely figure out.

[_Journalized_09.09.11_]

2011-09-09T08:50:00.003-04:00

Not a bad thousand words on the novel, yesterday, though mybrain was scrambled eggs from a day of working on the conference paper andsqueezing twelve-hundred blog-words out of the old noggin'. Wednesday was afabulous morning and early afternoon of working on the Cassavetes project,followed by a brush with the concept of mortality that completely derailedall best intentions.

I learned that my friend Will, a sharpanalyst and maker of the screenplay, and a talented filmmaker, is very ill. Willand I most recently worked on Long AgoWay. He sat with me for an afternoon during postproduction and helped clear away some of theclutter that was making it hard to get to the film I wanted (versus theone I had in the version kicking around last April). Before that, he was my teacher for a semester. Long sessions of deep conversation about film and scripts and the persona of the artist. Over the summer, Will took a teachingpost in screenwriting, out in Montana. I helped see him off over lunch onAug. 17. We talked about the movie he'd just been working on, andabout the gig upcoming, and then off he went. He mentioned that he'd just gotten over a flu.

Come to find out, he's been laidlow, and has been living on machines in Midwestern hospitals for days, since then. A life-threatening infection. Ican't help but think about Jim Henson: it was supposed to be only theflu. As of yesterday, the word is that Will's rallied a bit, and may now beat the beginning of a long, slow mend. Breathing on one's own is a good start,when one hasn't been doing that at all.

So, yes, the rest of Wednesday was a wash. I had drinks withthese friends, then drinks with those friends,and finally fetched up in Jamaica Plain with Ms. Brown and two other companionsat the local eatery. I bought myself a hamburger and a martini. You only liveonce. Or, as the lesson suggests: it's all tentative, baby.

As for today and the weekend, I only need to finish writingthe paper about "Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie," complete aGuggenheim fellowship application, make up for missing my mother's birthdaythis past week, and attend to some matters of a recent invitation to take on apoetry fellowship at a particular Boston organization. Plus there are galleries and a later-evening birthday dinner for a friend. Oh, and a tutorial session on a web concert that I've agreed to help host from the home office. More on that, Monday.

Somebody fire the assistant, please.

[_Journalized_09.06.11_]

2011-09-06T23:29:00.000-04:00

A great deal was put back on track today, though the post-holiday-weekend parts of my weeks, as far as journalism goes, are alwaysexercises in patience. Still, beyond tinkering with what the Globe is due, I worked through muchdifficult fact-crunching made further headway on the Dylan paper for the conference in October. Except that it's due at the middle of this month. So, chop chop, hopeful scholar.

I should work on the paper, in face, allweek, but instead I'll be back at the Cassavetes wheel, tomorrow, pushing thatproject a little closer to completion. Part of the reason that it has to be tomorrow is that the university library only keeps the non-lending books that one requests from storage at their circulation desk for seven days. Yet another way they've found to be inconvenient. But, hey, whileall those books are locked up at Iron Mountain, they've made pleeee-nty of roomfor students to lounge, talk, and use computers. Because no one has a laptop ora desktop in their dorm room or apartment, and libraries should be like common areas. I understand everythingperfectly. As you were; there's nothing to see here.

This evening I burned through more than 1,500 words on thenovel. It's well over 14,000 words now, and I'm basically on track to finish itin late November/early December, given the word count that I think it will come out to, in the end.

There are, of course, surprises in these things. What this novel that I'm writing continues to do, ingeneral, is surprise me. No just surprise me because it exists, and I absolutely was not planning to write anything like it, but surprise me because it is happening so organically, and falling into place so completely. I write with a kind of flowing "map" that shows the nextseveral moves ahead, the ones I've though up. Beyond that, in my mind I keep a general concept of how the wholepiece will play out. To get from one point to another, I have to trust theprocess. So far, that has been nothing but enjoyable. Nothinglike the endless falling, spinning confusion that my first effort at a novelbecame, back in 2007 and 2008. Granted, I didn't know what to write all the time, then. Often I wrote to see what to write next. The process is different now. I know what to write. I write it, but it comes out in surprising ways. Perhaps returning to the short story and re-learning my approach to those is paying off. This is, if nothing else, a whole lot of fun.

And now, to the first night's sleep without the fans whirring incessantly,this week. The air of Boston has gone cool and dry, this first week of September. Perfect. Perhaps tonight Iwon't dream of combat.

[_Journalized_09.05.2011_]

2011-09-05T21:45:00.003-04:00

Another lost day, writing-wise, yesterday.

We woke lateafter a late night on Saturday, and we watched Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams. As far asHerzog's work goes, it was less impressive than others in his oeuvre: too longby half, and bloated with strange Frenchmen who blathered on, perhaps spuriously, about spear-making.

The cave was the thing. It needed some time, but thefilm did not need what Herzog wrapped around it. And after all this forcedtalky-talk? Herzog includes a bizarre coda about a manmade subtropical biosphere inwhich crocodiles were raised under steam produced by nuclear power plants nearthe cave. This might have been thefilm, in fact. It was worth the time spent to hear the director intone thequestion (and I paraphrase): Are we the crocodile staring into the abyss ofhistory?

I am, if I want to be, I answer you, Herzog.

Or whatever.

After that, a sudden text from P.H. brought up the prospectof a houseguest editing film in my office, all afternoon. An excellent prospect, really. I tell myself that this is the life I wish to live. Sudden creative waves breaking over the seawalls of routine. Of course, the answer was "yes." P.H.has helped so much with recent film projects, over here. What was needed on my part,however, was a full backup of everything I've been working on for weeks. Or at least that's what occurred to me when I realized some pretty heavy processing was about to be asked of the home setup. Allprevious backups have been but piecemeal. And so, I went to work. When P.H. finallyarrived, I tried to help ensure that his raw footage was imported correctly. Then,in the middle of that, it was off to a family dinner. Still no writing done.

Home from family time, and poor P.H. was still laboringunder the yoke of Final Cut Express. We made a quick assessment and opted to dothe whole reel, quick and dirty, via iMovie. That worked out well, but grindingforty minutes of hi-def footage into burnable files takes the time it takes.When all was set, and properly labeled, it was well after midnight. At leastthe good man brought some good beer. We drank Long Trail Belgian Whites to getus through the night. I feel asleep around a quarter to two.

Today was much better, for the most part. I woke late again, wrote some blogs for clients, and then spent the afternoon working on theDylan paper for October. Ms. Brown is tackling the end of a longstanding office filing project, as we hope to convert our back room into a new living space. Much progress was made.

Tonight, after a dinner of salmon with a beer-mustardsauce on which I've been working in my mind — it finally came out today,tangy and spicy and sweet — Ms. Brown and I made s'mores on the backporch. I growled about the charcoal that inevitable ends up in my attempts and about what I find to be mostly flavorless gooey blobs, for all the effort they require. Ms. Brown ate hers happily.

The remainder of the evening has been spent on some newpoems that are in the works, and a newer one still came to me in the middle ofit. Now there are three of these in the new batch. On one bookshelf in my office, I have a notecard from an editorat a prominent publication. He's asked to see these new additions. If it worksout, his acceptance of any of these works would be a situation unprecedented in my small publishing life. We shallsee. The novel whispers, unhappy with the gap I have left.

[_Journalized_09.04.11_]

2011-09-04T00:45:00.001-04:00

Friday was a day of line editing and then some pushingforward into parts of the novel. Meaning: adding scenes, extending it from thewritten-up-to point and generally assessing what has gone before.

In a lot of ways I was workingaround the first problem I've encountered, in the process of this book, although as far as problems go, it was aneasy one to have. I started with the solution. Today, I figured outwhere to apply said solution — an eight-hundred word scene that came allat once and then sat there. In the shower, I realized exactly where it should be placed:prologue.

Not only is it a better first several pages than what previouslybegan the story — that part now works much, much better as the follow-up scene tothis new scenario — the immediately apparent effect of its inclusion upon the chronology of the wholeexisting work seems to be the enrichment of the following first fifty pages. Aswith everything that's happened during this project, so far, the recipe for right moves continues to beone of trusting myself and simply writing what feels like it is supposed to be written.

It still feels like I'm getting this thingas a broadcast from somewhere distant — soft but crystal clear, complete but notalways in sequence. One only has to make enough quiet around oneself, and thenset down what is heard, think about it, and make small adjustments to itsordering. I passed the 12,500-word mark today, and have been writing it forabout seventeen days. At this pace, including some anticipated interruptions asdeadlines come along in September and October, I should be finished with it bythe start of December. And then? I don't know "and then."

Last night Ms. Brown and I watched Joe Swanberg's Uncle Kent, a fairly unsettlingexploration of what an affair can mean to two people of emergently differentmindsets about the consummation of a romance. Rife with disconnected behavior and uncomfortableand prolonged bouts of strangely unsatisfying heavy petting, we cleared ourminds, in a manner of speaking, with Trouble the Water, Carl Dean's and Tia Lessin's deeply partisan but horriblyaffecting documentary about a single household during and after Katrina. Forthe home footage of the hurricane roaring through the Ninth Ward, alone, it isworth your time. Everything else is an exercise in balancing the gut's reactionagainst the mind's detection of a point of view that is askew, and of the omission ofdetails that would further round out the family involved, but probably rob thefilm of some of its razor-edged message. Still, worth your time. This morningit was John Cassavetes' Gloria. It isthe first film I've seen by the director that has disappointed me, though by spendingtime with it, talking about it with Ms. Brown afterward (her ideas about itwere better formed than my own, right away), and reading some of RayCarney's and Marshall Fine's words about it, I think I established some helpfulperspective on its failings.

This evening, we met with two people we really did not know,but they both interested me — based on the little bits of their lives Iunderstood via Facebook (and I shared a music-research class with one of them). Over cocktails we discussed opera (she is a singer ofit), education (he heads a private high school English department), film(Coppola and Cassavetes), and 9/11. It seemed to go pretty well, four peoplejumping into a deep end together. I keep talking with Ms. Brown about activelyexpanding the radius that encompasses the people we know, especially those active in creative arts andlearning. And so there it is.

I keep thinking about the scene that I wrote today. It playsin my head like a movie I've seen. I think it is the best bit I've written forthis book so far. It feels like a secret in my head.

Now for dreams. I hope they're all right to me.

[_Journalized_09.02.11_]

2011-09-02T09:41:00.001-04:00

A much better routine yesterday, and an evening of feeding my head rather than just juicing it. I made a relatively painless 1,000 words for the novel, banged out two blogs for clients, and then spent the afternoon working on a paper that's due mid-month for a conference in October.

This one's about the poem "Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie," by Bob Dylan. It existed as a spoken-word performance, then a recording, and finally a published text (performance in 1963, bootleg recordings circa 1970, printed in 1973, authorized album release in 1991). I'm writing about what that sequence of events might do to our understanding of the poem. In part, I focus upon issues surrounding choices made in the printing of it that do not correspond with earlier choices evidenced in Dylan's recorded performance of the piece. The upshot is about primacy of text, and how understandings of these things can be influenced going forward and backward in our perception of how they are received — the recording influencing the way the text is received, and then the text influencing our reception of the recording.

In the evening, Ms. Brown and I went to the James's Gate pub in Jamaica Plain, where we ate a light dinner — mine was a plate of smoked tuna, salmon, and trout, with a salad of tomato, field greens, and slices of mozzarella — and then we walked up South and Centre streets to visit some of the galleries (it was this month's installment of what the neighborhood calls its First Thursdays event). A new design store has opened on South Street, Room 68, and there you can purchase a wooden bench for $3,000. I wonder if they'll do all right in this part of town. At Aviary, a gallery, we learned that the basement is being renovated into a rent-by-the-hour photo-editing studio. That's an idea I do think will fly in JP. Finally, we stopped in at Salmagundi, where I liked to buy hats, when I was wearing them. Ms. Brown purchased a new necklace, or pendant — a timepiece on a long necklace chain — and also a wooden bracelet, striated bands of light and dark wood.

At home, we watched an episode of Californication, and then I read about fifty pages of Samuel Beckett's Murphy, and the rest of Gasoline, Gregory Corso's 1958 volume of poems. I had strange dreams, only half remembered now, about arguments — arguments with journalists; arguments with family members. What processing was this, in my sleep?

Finally, a new recording from the vaults. This is "Toledo," recorded in 2004 at the Sidewalk Café in New York. [_CLICK_TO_LISTEN_]

[_Journalized_09.01.2011_]

2011-09-01T08:09:00.002-04:00

Ms. Brown and I touched back down in Boston around 9:30 on Tuesday night, and had significantly better luck with Delta's baggage carousel than we did with the L.A. end of their operation. That is, the device actually turned on, ran, and delivered our bags in less than an hour.

Only at Logan Airport, however, can they have figured out a way to make catching a cab more complicated than walking to the sidewalk and hailing the next car. Now, you queue up behind a freaking pillar at the weird, tapered end of the sidewalk to the far left outside the baggage claim. A cluster of cabs come up, you wait for the Massport worker to anoint you among the now-taxied and then it's your pleasure to grip the sides of the vehicle interior as a guy who last operated a Peugeot on the streets of Istanbul, evading the TNP, takes out his frustration with life on anything that moves along the short stretch of I-93 between East Boston and Jamaica Plain.

We were pretty much up for a little Chinese delivery and an episode of Californication before collapsing. On the plane ride home I managed to line edit a massive chunk of the novel, adding a few hundred words along the way. When I woke up yesterday morning, there was time to bang out a couple blogs, write some news briefs for The Globe and then ride the MBTA to Boston University, where I holed up on the fifth floor of the Mugar Library, working on the Cassavetes project. I'm now at thirty-five of the needed minimum of fifty citations toward the annotated bibliography for Oxford UP. There will be more than fifty, but knowing one has crossed the minimum mark makes it feel like less of a push toward deadline.

Home, jet lag got me, and I crashed on the couch while the cats climbed all over and Ms. Brown headed out for a guitar lesson. Later, we ate vermicelli — garlicky and hot with red pepper — with chunks of tomato and briny Parmesan. This was Ms. Brown's creation — as she realized that I was toast for the night. We unpacked the suitcases that still dotted the bedroom floor, and I made of mug of hot chocolate. A bit more Californication, and then I finished off Vidal's Death in the Fifth Position (I will say little more than that it was most-of-the-time charming, and occasionally smartly written, but that in general I had to be patient with Gore's all-too-pedestrian generic moves). Finally, as sleep crept around and made promises, I read some Gregory Corso, and then I turned out the light.

Yesterday was a lost day for fiction writing. But I turn to it, now, and then there's the matter of getting starting on a paper about Dylan's "Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie." This is due at the middle of the month, in advance of a conference seminar in late October. I've been tinkering with notes on it since last week or so, but pages must be written. The cats are still stunned that we've returned.

[_Journalized_08.30.11_]

2011-08-30T15:10:00.001-04:00

In the air over Nevada, now, en route to Boston. Yesterday was a day of exploring L.A., starting with tacos at Sky's and then moving on to the La Brea tar pits, and Johnie's Diner (both places figured prominently in Steve De Jarnatt's criminally underknown Miracle Mile).

We drove north through the city to Sunset Boulevard, and then east to the Whisky A Go Go, where a promoter tried to convince us to come back in the evening for a night of "pop rock" (or so he kept telling us). Up at the Rainbow, it was happy hour, but we skipped afternoon drinks in favor of more neighborhood crawling.

Eastward, then, into Los Feliz and then a turn north up to the Griffith Observatory — yes, the location featured in Rebel Without a Cause. The interior is closed on Mondays, but from the veranda one can stand high above the web of city below, noting the valley's band of brown-yellow smog, noting the ripple of mansion-dotted hills rising up to the taller craggy mountains. The Hollywood sign looks clean white and intact, from this vantage.

South again, we took I-405 out to about the west-most point of Mulholland Drive and then made our way back into the city proper. Mulholland is narrow, high up in the hills, and it makes its way down through nested, gated mansions.

Home in Venice, for our last night, we made quick work of packing back up, and then it was out to the beach for one last West Coast sunset. We watched the skaters at Dogbowl crisscross the orange wash. In the very final moments, the disc of the sun seems to actually drop under the rise of land. The sky floods with after-colors. We walked up to Larry's, the bistro at which we started, last Wednesday, and enjoyed a long slow dinner. Ms. Brown and I shared steamed mussels, garlicky and tanged with lime and ginger, and a margherita pizza smoky with a bacon-flecked red sauce, topped with bright yellow heirloom tomato slices. The staff remembered us, and as the tables next to us filled with the crew and actors of a music video that had been shooting on the beach all day, we were treated to a complimentary dessert of warm peach cobbler.

Ms. Brown was soon asleep. I read some more Vidal, and then turned out the light.

The desert is below the plane, now, inky blue-black rectangles of solar arrays here and there across its surface. We didn't get to the desert, this time, though I badly want to see it. Next time, California, and next and next.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:30,000 Feet Over Nevada

[_Journalized_08.29.11_]

2011-08-29T11:44:00.002-04:00

Yesterday, after lunch with a friend from back east, we made our way northwest on the Pacific Coast Highway to Malibu. This was slow going, as just about everyone else with a car apparently had the same idea. At a turnoff for the beach, where a center lane formed to cross the lefthand side, we watched a black pickup lunge into the path of oncoming traffic. Apparently the driver needed to park right that second. What followed was an accident.

The small car in the far righthand lane of the opposite side managed to stop. It was one of those brake-jobs that cause the whole vehicle to visibly lurch forward on its suspension. The low and heavy motorcycle, however, moving in the same direction closest to the dividing lane, did not have the advantage of four wheels and a wide body to absorb all that suddenly applied energy. As its driver hauled in the grip, shoving his brake pads deep into the sides of his wheels, his back end started to fishtail. The speed of the bike was going to carry it, and its rider, into the back of the truck — which was somehow still lateral to the oncoming traffic. Why hadn't that driver moved? There was no time look for an answer.

The driver of of the bike ditched his hog. As fragments from its handlebars flipped up into the sunlight (these are details that stick with me), he rolled forward and onto his back, spinning, then, across the asphalt along his own lateral line. He came to a stop. He jumped up. He grabbed the side of the now-moving pickup's bed and he made certain that its driver did not complete a U-turn. The bike lay behind him, front end down. Rolling like a log rather than a tumbleweed probably saved him from injury. We were pulled along in our own lane and the scene disappeared behind us. All of this took just about six to ten seconds.

The traffic became interminable. Once we made Malibu, which is a ridiculous and perched thing — massive villas overlooking blue waters, yes, but everything looking ready to pitch forward, to tumble down those cliffs — we turned north onto Route 9. This took us into the Santa Monica Mountains. The real views are from up there. As our little rental car groaned with the grades, we slipped through tunnels cutting paths through the rock, and behind us was the half-moon of the bay and the deep blue band of Pacific. The water seemed to actually come up the horizon and comprise the lowest four inches of sky.

Eventually, the 9 connects with I-101, and that to I-405. The freeways took us back into Los Angeles, where we looked for parking for some time. At one point, two dozen LAPD cruisers, lights wheeling, roared up Venice Boulevard. There were a handful of gang-related shootings over the weekend, and a cop was shot as well. Ms. Brown said she thought a green mini-van had just raced away, in the same direction, before the police vehicles streamed past us. All night, the helicopter overhead chopped up the air. It clicked on and off its spotlight.

I made the last of the halibut from Thursday afternoon's shopping, and a salad of avocado, tomato, cannellini beans. We walked out to the beach to see the last of the sunset; the slip of it already under the arm of shore that stretched west into the water, north of Venice. The sky around the spot looked like lemon slush. At home we finished off our quart of strawberry ice cream, watched two more episodes of Californication (where is the third-season continuity of character? who are these people with familiar faces?), and I read another 50 or so pages of Vidal's Death in the Fifth Position.

Somewhat fewer words, yesterday. About 500 or 600 for the novel. The blog entry, with all those photos, somehow ate up two hours of my morning. Today, we're bound for West Hollywood, Hollywood, various museums and possible meetings. We've been invited to a Dodgers game, tonight. It seems like a lot, at this early hour, what with packing and cleaning up a bit before we leave for the airport in the morning. We shall see.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Venice, CA

[_Journalized_08.28.11_]

2011-08-28T13:42:00.002-04:00

Among other things, yesterday amounted to another 1,000-ish words on the novel, and good ones at that, by my scan of them this morning. Ms. Brown went out in search of Frank Gehry houses, and found several, and photographed them.

Later in the day, following what I will describe below, we washed ashore at James' Beach — a little bar down the street from our bungalow. Later still, after re-watching Tom DiCillo's still-excellent When You're Strange, we met the brother and sister-in-law of a dear friend back in Boston. The brother writes for the Cartoon Network. Sister-in-law is a dancer and a massage and physical therapist. Over beers and bratwurst and sandwiches, at a place up near the Santa Monica line, we talked about creative careers and their execution, and for a time happily descended into less savory, late-night topics. (Perhaps one patron left because of it, but, hey, it was just the word placenta.)

Sometime, in the late afternoon, I came up with a poem. I have not been looking for poems, very lately. There was one that came last week, in the column form that I have been exploring, but otherwise I've been a prose man, this summer. This new one came in a rush, and I will look at it again after a day or so, to see what I have done.

Now, here's the part about the middle of yesterday, and how it was spent.

When I was a kid, a teenager, Jim Morrison mattered to me for all the wrong reasons. As I've aged, but stayed close to the good stuff, trying to minimize the brainwash world — the one that will fill your skull with empty, flung-apart hurricanes so that you will dutifully generate profitable third-quarters for the television arms of its masters — the stuff on Morrison's pages have stayed with me. Though my interest in the recordings has largely fallen away, his seemingly half-finished, sometimes-strong/sometimes-fragile poems still seem worth a little time. There are glimmers of another life in there, his poetry being a place he seems to have tucked such things.

So, being in Venice, where Morrison wrote a significant chunk of his early material — most of it atop a rooftop on Winchester Avenue, or so the story goes — I assembled the best of the apparently factual addresses and made a short tour of the neighborhood to see what I could of his old haunts.

In the summer of 1965, Morrison spent a good deal of time with Dennis Jacob, sleeping up on the roof of his building at 14 Westminster Avenue, filling notebooks while his brain reeled with sunlight, the beachscape, and lysergic acid. This is what it looked like, yesterday:

The owner of the apartment building is clearly aware of the historical footnote attached to his rooftop. A modest sign on the southeast corner of the building reads "Morrison Apartments".

Down a different street, a garage door and a faded alley-side mural served as settings for publicity photos. Shots from both of these places, taken by Henry Diltz in 1969, were used in the promotion of The Doors' 1970 album, Morrison Hotel. The garage door is 50 Brooks Avenue, and the mural is number 30 on the same street.

Diltz's 1969 photo can be seen here. The label promo looked like this (via RayandBobby.com):

Finally, and unrelated to Morrison's biography, there is this mural at 1811 Speedway, in Venice.

Painted by once-local muralist Rip Cronk, it went up in 1991. It's fostered its own stories, with people assuming — and then writing online — that Morrison lived in the building, or that he partied there. Paul Tanck, after correspondence with a friend of the artist about the mural, writes that the Speedway building's wall was the right size for Cronk's idea, and the space was available to him at the time.

So, these are the Venice locations that one can be reasonably certain of, when it comes to Morrison's connection to the place. Geographically speaking, my self-made tour was not as fanciful as one full of the apocryphal stories and locations that the Internet would have one believe in and visit.

Not that a little bit of myth failed to manifest. The following incident occured during my walk from 14 Westminster to Brooks Avenue.

Out of the throngs of sweaty — sometimes half-clad — tourists that descended upon Ocean Front Walk, yesterday (maybe they do every Saturday), there emerged a svelte man of some approximately twenty-three years, no more. His finger hooked the white shirt he'd removed, draping it from the slope of his left shoulder. His hips disappeared into faded, frayed bluejeans, these cinched with a palm-wide leather belt and ending in dusty leather boots. Around his shoulders touched the curly-cue ends of a mane of chestnut hair. Under sleepy eyes, his lips were shaped like a Grecian bow, and, as he noticed that I'd noticed his slightly punch-drunk stride — and was it my imagination that he accented it with leonine runway moves, making his point all the more? — he parted them just enough to complete the illusion.

There are a handful of active Doors tribute bands, in Venice and just to the north in Santa Monica. I was immediately under the impression that I'd passed by one of the lead singers that front one of these groups. In a different state of mind, at a different time in my life, the encounter might have been too much to bear. I waited a while to tell Ms. Brown about it, over drinks at James' Beach.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Venice, CA

[_Journalized_08.27.11_]

2011-08-27T12:16:00.004-04:00

I ate a real taco, yesterday. Actually I ate two: one filled with grilled salmon, one with pork. I know that this is one of those dangerous subjects with certain people, and if I live to one hundred may I never have to endure the authentic-Mexican-food conversation with anyone in real life. I'd rather be crushed by a forklift-driven pallet of Old El Paso product.

Let me just write this, though: yes, they are different (and better) than any taco that I've eaten before. I will have more of them, while we are here. Oh, yes I will.

Karaugh ate lunch with the assistant to a famous artist and I was invited to join. In the course of the two of them discussing what it is they met to discuss, we talked about the tricks and frustrations of getting seeds to sprout in Californian soil, of neighborhoods and the housing stock in Los Angeles, and of the perils of ensconcing oneself within an island community (such as Martha's Vineyard). We talked about a mutual friend or two back East. I sipped sangria; they drank San Pellegrino. We left with tips about a new gallery or two to check out, this weekend.

After this, Karaugh and I drove east to Culver City, to the Museum of Jurassic Technology. This is an installation, but it is also a real museum, albeit one of a world that I can't prove exists for everyone — a world just to the left of the version that your television insists is important — one in which science grapples more directly with the strange, and in which the strange exists on its own terms, even under the scrutiny of science. Think pre-scientific cures; think oil paintings of Soviet canine cosmonauts.

MJT is daunting in its size, complexity, and completeness of setting. Somewhere within it there may be a sense of irony at work, but, if so, it is a loving irony. It reminded me strongly of Felix Barrett's Punch Drunk Theater troupe's conversion of a Brookline, Massachusetts public school so completely into the setting of Inverness during their production of Sleep No More. The level of detail in those rooms, there, approached the attention given to these installations, here, by Jurassic's creator, David Wilson and his wife Diana.

We were able (again, thanks to Ms. Brown) to meet and talk with the staff for a bit: Alexis and Annie, and then, finally, David himself, who had been downstairs, somewhere, melting glass before coming up. David took us through a curtain, and we emerged into a new part of the installation, under construction, a glorious chamber of light and sculptural detail. Open to the sky, in places the new space will soon be full of doves — a place of doves. I'm not sure it's in my gift to describe it further than that. We left feeling privileged to get a peek.

Later in the evening, we walked a part of the Venice canals, and stopped to photograph an egret that was perched on the edge of a boat, its yellow feet clutching one edge.

Up and out of the canals we made our way to the shore, to Venice Pier, where surfers waited and waited for the next set of waves and men and women of a different kind of patience launched ocean lures from their own perches atop the pier itself.

One man brought up a flung net. It was heavy with three puffy purple starfish. They looked bloated and soft, and were each about the size of a schnauzer. The sun slipped under the horizon behind a smear of clouds that turned the deepest cranberry and lavender, then burnt orange, then a shade of plum that meant darkness would be over the beach in short order. Night comes quickly, here.

Back at the bungalow, we seared strips of thick purple-white yellowtail and sautéed small, yellow, exquisitely shaped pattypan squash that Ms. Brown brought back from the farmer's market. That was dinner. Ms. Brown fell asleep after an episode of Californication (something is different in tone about this third season, but I can't quite put a finger on it, yet ... I can say that I don't think it's for the better of the series). I read some more of Death in the Fifth Position, a novel by Gore Vidal, who used a nom de plume to pen this and one other mystery in the 1950s.

This morning, the day sprawls before us. We've plans to meet new friends tonight. I've a fantasy about trying to track down the rooftop atop which Jim Morrison lived in Venice, that first summer that his rock-n-roll aspirations materialized, back in 1965. I thought of then making our way into the city, to the Morrison Hotel, where he sat behind stenciled plate glass, an almost-ghost of what had gone before, come 1969. I'm told I can do so, if I like. So, I may.

Otherwise, yesterday added about 900 words to the novel. I'm deep into a part that is set in a sprawling post-industrial part of the city called Dumpland, a part of my somewhat not-Detroit of 2011. I write a lot about characters that want to retreat to islands, woods, and other rustic places of pleasant feature. This time, it's trash. And that's all I have to say about that.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Venice, CA

[_Journalized_08.26.11_]

2011-08-26T12:23:00.001-04:00

Hurricane Irene is chugging its way up the eastern seaboard of the United States while I sit under milky-blue skies threaded with only high-altitude clouds. A hummingbird is over my head, at about two o'clock. Two o'clock in the directional sense, that is. It's only 9:04 a.m. PDT.

Yesterday we went to Watts, which is contiguous with Compton. The face of the city is both the same and different, there. Still the bright, beautiful bungalow constructions, but the windows are mostly barred, and the front doors are typically doubled by a heavy outer gate or solid metal panel. The landscape is industrial, or post-industrial, but not in the gorgeous, towering, abandoned-plant kind of way, just the trash-strewn rubble-yard and rusted-old-warehouse way.

We went to Watts Towers. A lone Italian, Simon Rodia, built these by hand for decades during the early- to mid-20th Century, a single man living in his home among the relative hardship of southern Los Angeles.

At some point, when he grew too old to construct these things in his backyard, he deeded everything to his neighbor and walked away. He then virtually vanished from history, as I understand it, living out the rest of his life in the southern part of the state.

We were the only people to take to 1 p.m. tour, and our guide (James) was amazing. He conveyed a sincere love of the structures, and he dropped small gems of personal experience into the mix — minor stories from his time in Vietnam, his time in France, and his relationship with his at-times troubled neighborhood, here in L.A.

Afterward, back in Venice, we bought groceries and returned to our temporary home to eat goat-cheese gouda and cherries. For dinner we cooked halibut and I made a sautee of vegetables: a kind of local white squash, cherry-bomb pepper, white onion, and tomatoes. We ate on the back porch, sharing a bit of rosé and then walking down to the beach. The sunset was edible.

Surfers were making good work of the waves.

A massive pelican eyed us with vaguely anthropomorphic disdain, and then we worked our way back up the sand to the skatepark. This part of it is where they hold the Dog Bowl (see the documentary Dogtown and Z Boys, for the relevant history). Much better than watching iceskating, in my opinion. Video:

YouTube Video

Yesterday I added another five hundred or so words to the novel. The going has been slow, these past two or three days, because I've been editing the first twenty-five pages — checking for continuity, making sure the whole thing hangs together, setting up what's to come in the rest of what I envision to be the first 25,000 words of the thing.

Last night, we started the third season of Californication. I like it very much, even when it's at its weakest, and the season opener was an example of the writing and editing at its weaker end.

Today, we're to meet with people from the world of art: a lunch up this way and then onto the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City. I've another few hours to write before that begins. Ms. Brown has just made her way to the farmer's market down the street. There's a piece of fresh, local yellowtail in the fridge. A new blog-for-hire client came through this morning. I'll be writing about film, television, and music. This seems like a good thing.

California uber alles.

Location:Venice, CA, United States

[_Journalized_08.25.11_]

2011-08-25T12:26:00.002-04:00

God, I hate flying.

We took off from Boston at 11:30 EST on Wednesday and touch down in L.A. at about 4 p.m. West Coast time. In between there was a change of planes in Minneapolis, which doubled the number of times I was able to confront the absurdity of putting on a seatbelt that was attached to a chair that would soon be hurtling through the sky at 500 miles per hour at about 30,000 feet off the ground. Better be one goddamn good seatbelt.

We waited for about forty-five minutes for Delta to find the button that made the baggage carousel turn on, and then we talked ourselves into, and then out of, an upgrade to a convertible. The nice gentlemen reminded us that we have only one life to live, and that we were in California, but I explained that we might instead use the extra $200 to, you know, eat and drink and be merry. He later explained that his main gig was preaching the word of God. That got me thinking about the "one life to live" part of his pitch, but, for the sake of politeness, I restrained myself from addressing the quandary he created.

We're now ensconced in a terribly appealing little bungalow about two blocks from the sands of the Pacific Ocean. The first thing I did was make Ms. Brown walk with me into the water. Now I've touched the other ocean.

Venice Beach is exponentially more impressive than I imagined that it would be. One part carnival (one fellow, last night, had a dummy on his arm, and the two were singing classic R&B melodies to a hidden CD player while passersby stopped to crack up laughing, then get their pictures taken with him), one part Pumping Iron — Muscle Beach! Where a man stood in bright red shorts and gold chains with a boom box perched on one shoulder, smooth soul sounds coming from its speakers — one part bohemian enclave, one part surfer hang, one part artists' colony/gallery row ... that's my first impression.

For dinner we ate a delicate potato salad, arranged on wide white plates in a line of purple and tan half moons, dressed with fresh herbs and topped with quail eggs, and then a wild mushroom flatbread pizza for dinner. We had an impromptu conversation with the people at the table next to us (he was drinking a Xingu beer, which I remember fondly from years ago ... not that it's gone away, I just haven't had it in that long).

At night, Venice Beach mostly closes after dark. The funnel cake stands, the ice cream shops, the trinket stores, the medical marijuana shops (where, for about $40, you can discover that you, too, are an ailing soul in need of the weed ... or at least that's what the get-a-permit signs seemed to imply) — all of these things are suddenly shut and it's just a few after-dinner souls, walking past the still bright tattoo parlors, with the sound of the waves and the rustles of the palm-tree tops.

This morning, we're on the back porch of the bungalow, drinking coffee and noting the bees — and the occasional hummingbird — as they light upon the morning glories.

I wrote a few pay-for blogs on the plane yesterday, and about 350 words of the novel. This morning is set aside for some work, and more of that. Later, we'll let the day unfold..

[_Journalized_08.23.2011_]

2011-08-23T10:14:00.003-04:00

Ms. Brown and I got in a weekend of music before we leave the ground and touch down again in Los Angeles.

On Friday night we watched Dan Bern play two sets at the Woody Guthrie Center in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. The venue is a converted church on the corner of two wooded country roads in the middle of pretty much nowhere. The first set was exquisite and the second set troubling.

The first set was exquisite because it dared to be quiet and, in that, new ideas and emotions emerged from Bern's lyrics. One song ended with the quietest of finger-picking and the songwriter speaking an imagined conversation between himself and Woody Guthrie, in a car on a drive, Guthrie offering him a sandwich while revealing that he hates a lunch with "kind of everything" inside of it. The song came to a whisper of a close on that. Brilliant.

The second set was troubling because Bern did exactly what longtime listeners want him to do: he took out a notebook and played three songs that were still in progress. The provisional titles of these might be: "Country Music"; "Magical Powers"; and "Massive Disconnect". The first two were very well written, and he played them well. The third was not yet a song, it seemed. This is the gamble one takes, playing new material in front of an audience. It's like pouring water into a vessel and hold it aloft. Leaks will out. The troubling part came because the songwriter started in on a fourth new song, then made a face and put aside the notebook. He returned to what one might consider his 101 set: safely memorized songs, delivered in safely familiar ways. The encore restored some passion to the mix, but the difference between the edge-of-your-seat feeling that came with listening the new stuff and the sit back, don't think, just listen session that followed was disheartening. If you're going to go there, go there.

On Sunday, we saw Bob Dylan at the House of Blues in Boston. One doesn't go to a Dylan show expecting to hear new songs (those enter the set after a new album is released, with this songwriter, in this phase of his career). Instead, the game is to listen to the songs and how they've been arranged, re-worked, tweaked, reinterpreted. On Sunday, Dylan was in excellent form — his voice, hands, and band were all at their road-tested peak. It was a long set, it was a smart and sharp journey into his catalogue, and it was the kind of listening that rewarded effort: the more you searched the song, while it was played, the more you heard that challenged your initial impressions of lyric, phrasing, music, and sequencing. Exhilarating.

All of this is not meant to suggest a comparison, though. These were the two shows, and how they went. I went into each with separate expectations. I came away from both with responses informed by different criteria. So it goes.

Tomorrow, we leave for Los Angeles. We'll be there for a while, by our standards. I hope to wake up each morning and get in a thousand or so words on the novel, go to the beach, and then see where the day takes us. So far, this week, it's been working on the unpublished Dylan material and the Cassavetes bibliography. Pieces of both of those projects will travel with me, too. I'll be the guy on the plane, tapping away on the laptop, praying inside for the gentle bump of rubber on asphalt. God, I hate to fly.

[_Journalized_08.18.2011_]

2011-08-18T00:03:00.002-04:00

There's finally time, late at night, to catch up on what's happened over the past week.

Last Friday, Ms. Brown and I took the bus to New York and spent the weekend there. I worked (meaning that I went to a private archive and looked at unpublished Dylan material), and she took advantage of some much-needed personal time (meaning that she took photographs of the city and visited museums). At night, we'd have dinner and talk about the day, and then repeat it again starting the next morning. On Sunday, we returned through the rain, and I had some eighty new sides of Dylan material for the dissertation scanned and safely backed up; a successful journey. I now have too much material with which I must work.

I've worked on the dissertation two out of three days, this week. The Oxford University Cassavetes project got all of Monday, however. Tomorrow is a toss up: Dylan or Cassavetes? The film-related project could really use my attention at the B.U. library. On the other hand, if I stay home and work all day, I could come close to finishing a whole section of notes to some of Dylan's unpublished writings, paving the way for a new start on new material come Monday.

I really must do some of the other writing, too. You know, the kind I get paid for. As usual, checks are late in that department. No naming of names, but I can say that the people most concerned about checks that they know are late are the checks I least predicted would come anytime soon. The payments for writings that have not come through this week are, sadly, the monies that I'm growing to never count on, though they used to come consistently. This is the nature of the freelance experience. Everything changes. I change, too. The paper I spend, when it comes it comes as if by magic, and like magic (of one kind or another) it behaves in uncontrollable ways.

This morning I worked on the novel. It is safe to say that the earliest stages of it have been successfully navigated. It is a strange book to find myself writing — entirely unsolicited — and I wonder what I will do with it when it is done. I will not say much about it here, yet. I want to preserve the way it feels, still. It feels powerful, like a secret can feel when you stand in a room and know that you possess one, and preserving that feeling is important. I will say that it is a genre-bending effort. I feel drawn into it, ineluctably drawn into it. So, in I go. Ms. Brown has read the first two chapters. She is sworn, of course, to absolute silence about the thing.

This weekend, we're set to leave for the Berkshires. The trip is twofold, to visit friends and to see Dan Bern play at the Woody Guthrie Center in Great Barrington. Dylan is at the House of Blues in Boston this Sunday, too. We'll be back in time for that. And then, sooner than later, we turn our attention west to Los Angeles.

For now, that's the dispatch. Good night from the deep well.

[_BostonGlobe_08.14.11_]

2011-08-15T10:16:00.000-04:00

A byline of mine in The Boston Globe:

Newton aldermen demand more details on union pacts, question new firefighter benefit - The Boston Globe

[_Journalized_08.11.2011_]

2011-08-11T17:53:00.004-04:00

One night I played in a noisy, wild bar in New Jersey on the night of the 2004 Sox championship. It turned out to be pretty freaking fun. Here's a slightly damaged recording of a song that I think exists absolutely nowhere else in my archives. By damaged, I mean only that it's a little peaked-out in one or two places and I had to deal with an end-song hiccup in the MacBook that recorded it, back then. It's called "Who's On Your Shoulder Now?" I think it's worth four minutes, now that I hear it again, after so long.

[_CLICK_HERE_TO_LISTEN_]

[_Journalized_08.09.2011_]

2011-08-09T23:17:00.000-04:00

It was a good day of Cassavetes work. I'm closing in on the halfway point of the annotated bibliography of writings about his films. It looks real, there on the spreadsheet, the accumulated work at this point. I hope to get in a viewing of Gloria before week's end. Perhaps it will be on the bus to Manhattan, this Friday.

Indeed, Ms. Brown and I are bound for New York City, for the weekend: I'm there for research; she's there for museums. We'll get a few hours in, at night, I think. A little time: some dinners and maybe a gallery or two, if they're open late enough. The research is in connection with the Bob Dylan dissertation. It has to do with unpublished materials. That's all I can really write, regarding the substance of it, right now.

Otherwise, today, I revised a bit of the Pee-wee's Big Adventure work for the American Film Institute, and got the new material back over to the editors. For other clients, I wrote the blogs I'm paid to write. I wrote some news for The Boston Globe.

It was a pretty good day. I got about 600 words further into the novel. It's provisionally titled Motel Work, just like the short story from which it emerged. It's about 4,000 words long, now. I know where it goes, tomorrow. That means it's still alive, that it will still grow. The goal is about 1,500 words before Wednesday's end. That's the amount that will keep me on track — one thousand a day for about two months.

One of the musicians that I know came by tonight — one of the ones that I respect the most. The three of us sat on the back porch, protected from the rain, with plenty of beer to share, and talked about projects, life goals, next steps, and people we've known for years … where they're at now. We moved inside before arguing about female sexuality and the stage identity. Things got fun at that point, a little bit dicey, and then we bid good-night all around.

It was a good day. I'll take it. There are more of them than I recognize, outside of my own skull. So, let me say it about today.

[_Journalized_08.08.2011_]

2011-08-08T19:38:00.003-04:00

It was a full morning, right to noon, of fiction work. I made some revisions, sent some material along to editors, and actually withdrew a piece that I recently felt very good about.

It suddenly seemed terrible, that's all. This has never happened to me before, with a "finished" piece. The opposite of doubt, it felt like a kind of certainty: This is not how I write; this is how I write.

I did my best to fix what I think is wrong with it — in all, my changed amounted to just a few tweaks, but the depth of each tweak went to the level of authorial voice (I suppose I mean by that: my voice, the murmuring voice that I actually hear inside my head when the work is at what I surmise to of an acceptable quality).

Once I did that, I sent the story back to the editor with a note about what happened. I have no idea if he or she will feel so completely unimpressed with my oddball maneuver that the story gets a pass. I would rather it get a pass in the form that it is now, than it get anything more than a pass in the form that it was then.

That's how that works.

Trying not to think very much about it, for the rest of the day, I wrote somewhat more than 1,000 words on the novel. Not the novel I thought I was writing. The novel that I am writing after realizing what I realized this morning. How that happened: the story that I wrote yesterday got its tenterhooks into my fabric, and I've walked around, since finishing it, thinking about what was clearly the next step to take. For now, it might be the novel. So, I blasted through the thousand words in about an hour, a little less than an hour. When I stopped, I knew just what would happen next. The trick is to keep the dish pointed at the star from which this signal originates for as long as possible. As always, the thing to do is not touch too many instruments, just sit there and set down what comes through. Sit down at the console every day. Shut up. Proceed.

For now, that's what I've got. There are shrimp in the fridge, and the Cassavetes project won't write itself, so there's that before bed.

I pulled my right ankle, some thing in my right ankle, running. How annoying. I've loaded up on ibuprofen and am waiting for the twinge to untwine.