Think Tank for Human Beings in General - Jordan Castro/Richard Wehrenberg Jr

Can someone please tell me the difference between a "chapbook" and a "zine?"

Jordan Castro sent me this chapbook after I commented on his prize-winning entry into Tao Lin's contest. My entry is here http://flyinghouses.blogspot.com/2010/07/my-essay-on-tao-lin-and-our-histories.html. His is here http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/jcastro/2010/08/a-comprehensive-review-of-richard-yates-tao-lins-second-novel/. In it, he reviewed my essay and gave it high marks and I thanked him. I think it was the first time anyone ever reviewed anything I wrote on the internet. He sent me a chapbook for explaining that Dakota Fanning was not in The Sixth Sense.

That movie came out in 1999, and I think he was about 7 then, and perhaps its "twist" has been ruined by everyone in the intervening 11 years so now it is no longer quite the "best picture" event that it was then. Plus, M. Night Shyamalan's cultural cache drops with each new film he makes (though everyone seems to think he "may turn it around with this one..."), though I assume that NYU is still proud to have him as one of their more successful recent graduates.

This is the grand finale, the electrifying conclusion if you will. Please note that Bob Pollard broke up GBV on 12/31/04, and now, no more than 5 1/2 years later, they are already doing reunion shows. Flying Houses will be silent for a while, but this is not the end.

In my essay on Tao Lin, I began by stating how I embarrassed myself by a certain comment on his blog made perhaps 4 1/2 years ago about all of the zines I published at NYU while we were both there. I first became aware of zines my freshman year and I put out my first zine my sophomore year. It was entitled "Xenophobia," which was probably not as original as I thought. It was about 16 pages long. There was a poem in it about "almost" getting mugged. There was an essay about meeting 3 celebrities in New York City (Thurston Moore, Carson Daly, and Janeane Garafalo, though I did not technically meet her). I think there was a poem about smoking a cigarette on bleachers in an empty schoolyard near my parent's house during one of my holiday breaks. I don't remember what else was in this zine. I sold these zines for $1.00 out of a milk crate in Washington Square Park and gave out a complimentary kiss to anyone that wanted it. I gave a copy to my creative writing teacher from the summer session of 2002, Paul Gacioch, who was an instructor that I think was about 24 then and obtaining his MFA and trying to get his first novel published. I am going to Google him now and see if he accomplished that. Here is what I found: http://www.sidebrow.net/contributors/paul-gacioch. I left him a copy in his faculty mailbox and I ran into him in Bobst Library and I asked him if he got it and what he thought of it. He said it was "short."

My second zine was a collaborative effort between me and several of my friends entitled "Honey I'm a Prize and You're a Catch and We're a Perfect Match," which is a line from a song by Pavement and in honor of the date it was published, February 14, 2003. I don't remember anything in it (except for a poem called "horse shoe crabs" by my friend Emily, which I think she later published online) but more people read it due to the nature of the contribution process.

My third zine could probably be called a "chapbook." It was entitled "Autointoxication" and it was the best thing I had done up to that point. Arguably it is still the best thing I have done because it was published. I went to a printer in Greenwich Village and asked for 100 copies. I tried to sell them for $1.00 and probably sold about 3 or 4, which is about the total of "Xenophobia." Had I a blog at the time, who knows what might have come.

There were several others but none as important as those first three (except for "Uck Ar" but I played too minor a role in that for consideration). I include this autobiography because, this is a highly symbolic gesture. Jordan and Richard are young, and they probably know what they are doing way better than I did (or do, for that matter) but I am here to warn them about the dangers of literature. But a review first.

I have never reviewed poetry on Flying Houses before, which is another reason I wanted to do this as my last post. I wanted to do something audacious. Each writer contributes 9-10 poems of 1-2 pages in length. Jordan's are slightly more experimental and Richard's are slightly more typical of poems popular over the last 20 years. Both are talented, and while their chapbook may be "short," it deserves commendation.

My favorite poems of Jordan's are "a list of things I am going to do," which I didn't like that much until the last few lines; "weak," which is the first poem I have ever read about the dilemma of autofellatio, thus worthwhile; "haiku" which is certainly topical and formal; and "last poem," which is about achieving inner-peace. Four out of ten is not bad. The other ones have moments but overall seem too "cheeky" or "cute" or "silly" to fully praise.

My favorite poems of Richard's are "excuse me," which is a lament for internet culture, "dumpster dive alone," which I don't really understand but references Scottie Pippen, so I like it; "snow-people easily identify the sun as their enemy," which is pretty original and may be the single best poem in the chapbook; and the so-called title track, "think tanks for human beings in general," which, like most title tracks in music, I usually feel are better than the majority of other songs on the album--but is the best way to end the chapbook.

I like the idea of chapbooks and zines because they are not too time-consuming. They are like regular magazines except they are not filled with useless trash about celebrities and reality stars. They are filled with serious writing by mostly unknown people, reaching out and trying to establish themselves. There is something noble about them. For some reason I do not think self-publishing a novel is as noble as self-publishing a zine.

Do I really have anything else I want to add? When I was 17 I wrote a one-act play for my high school and after my classmates told me how much they liked it (though I was unsure of its quality), I made it my life's mission to write, until every MFA program I applied to rejected me in February of 2007. I did not stop writing after that, obviously, but my confidence was shot. Here is my advice to Jordan and Richard: if you are going to get your MFA eventually, apply to a safety school. I applied to U Chicago's MAPH program, UT-Austin's Michener Center for Writers, Iowa's Writer's Workshop, University of Oregon, Columbia University's esteemed program producing writers like Rick Moody and Wells Tower and James Franco and offering zero aid in general and a $50,000 price tag (and you thought law school was expensive, and didn't offer enough career security). Every single one rejected me. Apply to a safety school. Or don't. Maybe I just suck at writing, and at life.

Do I really want to be at law school, and quitting my blog, and quitting my creative endeavors? No. I intend to work on my 3rd novel whenever appropriate over these next three years. I am 28,000 words into it. It is the best thing I have done, no doubt, but still unpublishable. Too many "fatal flaws." Everybody in or associated with law school says you have no free time and if you have free time you should be studying. Well, now I am going to start doing that and stop blogging. And I have serious doubts about my career in general. I waited too long to do this.

More advice to Jordan and Richard: never move to a random city (like say Los Angeles) because it seems fun and you have enough savings in your account-----unless you have a job there waiting for you. Had I not done that, had I applied to law school 3 years ago, or now without that stint, I'd be having a blast, not pinching every penny, not failing to leave tips for take-out orders, not feeling guilty about an endless reliance upon my parents and not feeling that I have a dubious future in general. I would feel much more confident.

Finally, that is very far in the future for them. They will be at college soon and probably have the time of their lives. I would recommend NYU but I feel as if it is changing. It is expanding, somehow, despite already having been the largest private university in the country 9 years ago. John Sexton is really emphasizing how important it is to study abroad so they can get as many students as possible out of the Village and into their other, expensive international branches in Paris, Florence, Buenos Aires and other places of which I am unaware. They are putting up students in hotels, because the new dorms they have opened since I have graduated still don't provide enough space. Faculty members would complain about their salaries. Still, I wouldn't have rather been anywhere else. Except UT-Austin or maybe Oberlin if I had gotten in there. Liz Phair and I have the same birthday and she is exactly seventeen years older than me and she went there.

Thanks to Jordan for sending me this chapbook. I apologize for using this as an opportunity to explain why this blog will be slipping into a coma and writing so many other random things. I wish him and Richard the best of luck, and hope that their method of e-publishing will work out okay for them. They are on the first-wave of this stuff, and they should ride it out and see where it takes them.

Ugly Man - Dennis Cooper

Ah, finally Dennis Cooper came out with a new book. I never read The Sluts because the cover looked too gay to me. Maybe it is good, I don't know. But I've read everything else by him, and Ugly Man is average in comparison with the rest. It is certainly different. It's definitely far more comic than anything else he has ever put out.

The closest reference point for this book would be Wrong, his collection of short stories published in 1992. Since that year, his star has grown bright, and he is probably more popular than ever before, thanks in no small part to his blog. I first read Try in 2003, followed quickly by Guide, then later My Loose Thread, Frisk, and Closer. For a while I didn't read anything by him, convinced the rest was not necessarily worth it--but God Jr. came out relatively recently, and that was interesting to see a different side of the writer. Finally while in L.A., I capped things off with Period and Wrong, later re-reading Try, which is the only other book by him reviewed on this blog http://flyinghouses.blogspot.com/2008/05/try-dennis-cooper.html. Now I want to read Guide again because I look back upon the part of his oeuvre that I have read, and I feel compelled to rank it in this order:

1) Try
2) Frisk
3) My Loose Thread
4) Guide
5) Closer
6) God Jr.
7) Ugly Man
8) Wrong
9) Period

And if you were to include Userlands, his anthology of online literature (the impetus for this blog, and its 12th post, http://flyinghouses.blogspot.com/2008/04/userlands-new-fiction-writers-from.html), it would rank beneath Period, probably. I could discuss them all, but let's keep things on Ugly Man, because there is a lot to discuss. Basically, I think it is better than Wrong, while still being very similar, because of the strength of a few of its pieces that go beyond 70% of the rest of the material--in particular, "Jerk," "The Worst (1960-1971)," and the powerful, closing "The Ash Gray Proclamation." Mostly it consists of really short pieces, varying in length from one paragraph to three pages. Flash fiction, I guess.

Sometimes the really short pieces work ("The Boy on the Far Left," "Graduate Seminar," and "Brian aka 'Bear'") and other times they just bleed into each other and seem pretty pointless. "Knife/Tape/Rope" is pretty decent as far as the other pieces that avoid categorization--or rather, fit neatly into the preconceptions of what a short story should appear to be. "The Hostage Drama" is another example of something that works in the end.

But pretty much everything else winds up sounding like an echo of Wrong--and what went wrong with it, pardon the pun. Which is that, forced to work within the confines of a smaller piece, much of Cooper's work loses its emotional impact and instead more closely approaches "torture porn," as with the shorter pieces the torture and the porn are introduced rather quickly, and violently, abruptly cut off. The plot is practically the same for every single one of these pieces--sexually confused teenage boy wants to die, and he happens to find friends that get off by murdering and raping him at the same time, and then sometimes the story will shift to the perspective of his executors. That is what this entire work is "about," so to speak, the nature of sex and violence, taken to the extreme example.

While we are on the topic of obscenity, what with Ulysses being one of our most recent posts, let me just say that Ugly Man, like the rest of Cooper's work excluding God Jr., which is practically family-friendly, would rate a 10 on the obscenity scale, which makes it more obscene than Naked Lunch, primarily because it makes sense.

One piece deserves special note--"The Anal Retentive Line Editor," which is probably the most exasperating thing in the book. It is like the centerpiece of the collection, and probably one of its longest pieces. It is funny, it is clever, and some may enjoy it immensely, but for me it got old rather quickly--though some of Cooper's self-consciousness makes it one of the highlights of any of his work, period.

The most pleasant surprise about Ugly Man, however, is the "P.S." feature at the end of the book, which is sort of like a DVD extra, brought by Harper Perennial. It seems that Cooper has hit the big time with this kind of attention--I've only previously seen one of these in Francine Prose's "Reading Like a Writer." And this one was much cooler. It has an interview with Cooper, by one of his fans, of whom Cooper is also a fan, apparently (Robert Gluck), and most interestingly, lists of his top 50 poems, top 50 songs by Robert Pollard, top 50 songs in general (which includes songs by Robert Pollard also), top 50 novels, and top 50 films, I think, in no particular order. This was easily the best part of the book. The interview provides the most quotable material:

"Well I guess I did become the writer I imagined I'd be, didn't I? My work seems to mean a lot to a certain kind of young person, and I get a lot of really moving e-mails and letters from young writers who say my work inspires them to write. So I guess your theory makes sense. Of course I never imagined the whole publishing world nonsense and the difficulty of cracking the literary establishment and the lack of financial reward for being this kind of writer. But, yeah, when I'm discouraged by the insurmountable problems that my work creates for itself and for me, realizing that I've achieved what I dreamed of achieving keeps me on track." (4, P.S.)

As if that were not enough there are also five poems by Cooper. Basically, I don't recommend this if this is your first time reading him--but I think fans of his will find much to like about it. I do think it is better than Wrong, and certainly Period, which threatened to collapse under its overwhelming desire to experiment. Ugly Man is experimental, but in a way that adapts the present climate of fiction, which has moved increasingly towards this "flash" thing--something between a poem and a story. Cooper may not be the master of this genre yet, but he has certainly added his own personal stamp to it, and on that basis alone, much of what he has created can exist comfortably alongside more celebrated short, short fiction.

I really hope that he comes out with a new novel soon, though. That would be cool. If I could I would read his blog and ask him to read S/M, because I never would have written it if it weren't for reading his work.

Hunting Accidents: A Brief History of Guided by Voices - James Greer

There are only a few bands to have "made it" that may give non-musical aspiring singers, guitar players, drummers and other instrumentalists hope that their "meaningless noise" may find the audience to appreciate its genius: the Velvet Underground, the Sex Pistols, Beat Happening, Sebadoh, Pavement, and Guided by Voices. The latter three were lumped together into the "lo-fi" nametag, applied to capitalize on the truly innovative ways of that middle band. Sebadoh's earliest recordings date to the mid-80's, Pavement's earliest recordings date to the late 80's, and GBV's earliest recordings date to the early 80's. None of these bands featured the typical accoutrements of standard. debaucherous rock and roll bands. GBV, however, came closest to approximating that cliche.

But this is not a review of that band, this is a review of the book about that band, which came out not long after the biography on Modest Mouse and the proliferation of the 33 1/3 book series, featuring a volume on Bee Thousand. Modest Mouse is not a bad comparison point, as they toiled for years in indie obscurity before the breakthrough of "Float On" (no disrespect to MM, but one of their hokiest songs to date) in 2003. Likewise, GBV toiled in obscurity through the 80's, had little reason to retain confidence, stopped playing live, decided to record one last album to put all their musical ambitions to rest, were "discovered" on the basis of that album (Propeller), gained more confidence, made more albums, and eventually settled on the classic Bee Thousand in 1994 which won them a legion of fans for the rest of eternity, but still didn't make them as a big a name as say, The Strokes, who would champion them in 2001 when it would appear it should have been the reverse. Nevertheless, Alien Lanes, Mag Earwhig!, Under the Bushes Under the Stars, Do the Collapse....through Half Smiles of the Decomposed, their final album, all featured songs generally better than anything else released in those years, but still filtered through the "weird" mentality of their hyper-prolific, borderline-alcoholic frontman (R. Pollard, God to James Greer) so that relatively few people cared enough to notice.

Hunting Accidents begins inauspiciously. There is an "Introduction" which is one of the most fawning, ill-advised screeds ever to open a book of rock journalism (that I've read). Even Steven Soderbergh's reasons why you should like GBV seems a little forced. A book about a band that is not known to everyone but for the few that do know the truth that they really are the greatest band never to be acknowledged (i.e, GBV or the Fall) need not try to convince the reader as to their greatness. The Introduction ends up getting repeated later throughout the book, and the whole thing would be much improved if it were edited out in the final review.

Because after the introduction, this is a pretty good rock history book. Like a good book on Nirvana, or Our Band Could be Your Life, Greer makes it feel as if you actually knew Pollard and his brother and his crazy friends and that you were right there in the garage recording studio they often used with them (and I'm not just saying that as a cliched line of praise--the realism of this book on what it takes to be a band when barely anyone else cares is its most singularly impressive quality). There are plenty of good gossip stories about GBV and Pollard and other bands. The Breeders in particular are given a fair share of the spotlight, as they were the first band to champion Pollard and his gang, probably because they shared his hometown of Dayton, OH. Later on Kim Deal offers to produce a GBV album, and when they actually get down to the recording of it, sad antics ensue, and the story of what could have been a fantastic collaboration but never was comes to light. Deal and Pollard would be an interesting couple of indie rock stars to compare, but this is also not the place for that. There is also a story of how GBV and Ted Leo and the Pharmacists got into a brawl after a show they played together, which truly shocked me as I always felt Ted Leo seemed like the coolest guy on Earth. Now, Robert Pollard may be the coolest guy on Earth too, and it is just too hard for me to pick which band I like better, so I prefer to think this altercation was a result of alcoholic misinterpretation rather than anyone truly being an asshole.

About two-thirds of the way through Hunting Accidents, Dennis Cooper makes a surprising cameo (but not really considering Guide had a chapter titled "Guided by Voices" and quoted a line from "Awful Bliss," and considering the cover of Horror Hospital Unplugged contains the line, "Are you amplified to rock?") to extol the virtues of GBV, not unlike Steven Soderbergh, but with more elaborate praise, even going so far as to call Robert Pollard the greatest songwriter of all time. True, anyone familiar with Pollard will know that he has written and recorded hundreds, maybe thousands of songs, and that each one of them is unique in its own way. Greer is not wrong to have picked GBV as a suitable band to document non-fiction style, but he is wrong when he falls back on other's praise as if to say, "See! Other people like them too! They really are good!"

Regardless of all the superfluous attempts at converting the reader into a GBV psycho, by the time you get to the Electrifying Conclusion Tour and the final show on New Year's Eve 2004 at the Metro in Chicago, you will probably be sad that you were not there (I was because that night I was doing nothing in Lake Forest, IL, and was very sad).

One of the more interesting segments of the book details the recording of Do the Collapse (which incidentally, caused me to buy an 8 dollar used copy of that CD from Amoeba Music) with Ric Ocasek, who seems to champion bands like crazy too (Bad Brains, Weezer). Of course, "Teenage FBI" is a classic GBV song, and the first one I ever heard, and the rest of that album is very excellent, but Gerard Cosloy of Matador Records, who had begun to distribute GBV in the wake of Bee Thousand, gives the most interesting take on it. He also gives the best interviews in the book. First, he mentions how they had to have an intervention with Pollard, which he felt bad about because he admits he had his own problems with substance abuse (the difference between him and Clive Davis) because some of their shows had dissolved into alcohol-induced sloppiness.

Second, he goes into this great diatribe about the song "Hold on Hope" off Do the Collapse. He says he thought Do the Collapse was a really amazing album, except for "Hold on Hope," which he thought was a really embarassing song. Pollard almost admits as much, but also says he just wanted to write something genuine and uplifting. Strangely enough, Cosloy is embarassed because he was afraid "Hold on Hope" would get played on the radio. I think he didn't want people to be introduced to GBV through that uncharacteristic song, or something. But the whole discussion about that one particular song is priceless.

And there are deeper analyses to many other songs, some of which Pollard explicitly reveals the subject matter on, such as "Teenage FBI." This is great for any fan, but probably pointless to any with just a cursory knowledge of them.

And that last sentence probably illustrates the value of this book. But also worth noting (and surprising) is that Pollard was married and had children at an early age, and so has a son who is now 27 or so who contributes 3 vignettes to the book, which are hilarious just thinking about what it would be like to have such a ridiculous father.