the Newis Glad:

Things to keep in mind:
A secret of story.

While I’m writing a story, I am subject to a set of tensions indistinguishable from those that overtake me when I write poems. The distinction is most of all technical, because I find the idea of “poetic stories” more horrifying than yellow fever, and I am always very careful that what happens in my stories suggests to the reader a definite structure, a given reality, as unreal as it might seem to the eyes of a newspaper reader and those beings with-their-feet-on-the-ground. (What are feet? What is the ground?) If I find in your stories a fraternity that excites me and makes me want to be your friend, it is precisely the supreme nerve with which you plant your word trees.

Things to keep in mind:
The secret of the technically impressive and theoretically laudable.

The book established Whitehead’s intelligence and originality as a novelist, but I wasn’t too excited by the world of elevator inspection, and I was frankly irritated by the author’s choice of Lila Mae as the protagonist. Although it’s technically impressive and theoretically laudable when a male novelist succeeds in inhabiting a female persona, something about the actual practice makes me uneasy. Is the heroine doing double duty as the novelist’s fantasy sex object? Is the writer trying to colonize fictional territory that rightfully belongs to women? Or does the young literato, lacking the perks of power and feeling generally smallened by the culture, perhaps believe himself to be, at some deep level, not male at all?

Things to keep in mind:
A secret of the internet.

I think “solidarity” is what Freaky Tales would call it, a movie which, believe it or not, I’m actually going to talk about. But again: I’ve given myself permission to write the longest essay anyone will write about Freaky Tales, as an exercise, experiment, statement, and/or self-indulgence; I like writing, and I am enjoying writing this, so I am. But the more I write, the more that length gives permission to anyone who doesn’t want to read it—even encourages them—to close the browser and move on. You’re not stuck with me, after all, the way you have no choice but to see a mural as you drive past it each day. You can go find something you like better and leave me to my fun.

Changing channels.

A sharp eye might’ve noticed some changes to the various outlets listed on the Books page, as other places where: Spectator Books in Oakland has been added, there’s a selection of zines on the shelves there now, so if you find yourself on that side of the Bay, head on over, say hi; and but also, Smashwords has been removed.

the most Recent installment:

the Last chord

The last chord floats from his strings, a brightness falling shimmering dissolve, and his fingers lift from the fretboard, the soundbox, but his arms remain curled about that big-bellied guitar, his head hung low, face obscured by a lone long lock dyed blue. There’s no applause, but the stillness all about him breaks as one by they lower hands, or lift them, look to their friend, their neighbor, to him there on the stool by the cold and empty hearth, the crowd of them in that big front room, lit only by dim lamps set in elaborately fronded sconces, and somewhere in the middle of them all she takes a deep and shivering breath, “Oh, my,” she says.

“White boys shouldn’t ought to play the blues,” murmurs the woman beside her, “always ends up something different when they’re done with it.”

“Now, Mother,” she says, but frowns as she looks to her, much too tall, head and shoulders draped in the hood of some loose, brief jacket of pale gold, or brassy silver, high black boots laced up past her knees, but her dark thighs bare between for anyone to see. “Forgive me,” she says, “I had thought–”

“You keep doing that,” says the woman, not unkindly, moving away through the crowd, leaving her to herself, her long full navy skirt, prim pink sweater, hair neatly tucked in an up-do, folding her arms as the crowd, released, moves about. Up there by the hearth the guitarist speaks quietly with a short man all in black, his beard a whisper of curls to line his jaw.

“I shouldn’t be here,” she mutters, and casts about, the front door there, she sets out toward it, but her first step stumbles, something clatter-thump underfoot, and she kneels, skirt pooling, to take it up, a lone shoe, a loafer with a strap across the softly wrinkled vamp of it, and tucked there the winking copper of a penny.