The New Orleans Bookfair, which I'm supposedly involved in organizing, went swimmingly, but a few other things didn't. What's germane to this blog is that I lost my beautiful, beloved writing space when the old warehouse at 511 Marigny, also known as the ARK, shut down for good. This was a blow. I depend on my writing space even during the hours I'm not in it. I need to know it's there, the place where nothing matters except my prose, a private room behind a locked door. It's the bedrock on which I build peace of mind.

A view from the window of what was my writing space.

I have a busy domestic life. If needing a writing space that isn't my bedroom makes me a prima donna, well, I've been called worse.

My fellow novelist Nick Fox writes each morning at a cafe, but I cannot enter the deep-focus state I need for writing in a coffee shop. The soundtrack alone would drive me bonkers. Libraries here are often noisy, and more importantly, every time you go for a piss you must pack all your belongings with you or lose them to theft, something true of most coffee shops as well.

The coffee shops where I wouldn't have to worry about securing my (ancient clunky donated) laptop are those run by, staffed by and frequented by friends whose conviviality would make writing impossible. I don't wish to perform my writing in front of anyone. To get the best from myself, I need to enter into almost trance-like concentration, an unusually un-self-aware condition. Even the possibility of interruption can be distracting.

Once 511 Marigny was condemned, doomed to become condos, I began finding it difficult to write there. My grief distracted me. Some artists had lived in the building 16 years; I'd only been haunting its hallways for 4, but I mourned it intensely. I loved my writing space, a beautiful room with 20-foot ceilings, a broad, long room whose 8-foot-tall windows gave me a view of the downtown skyline. $100 a month I paid for that shit... ah, well.

With only a week left in the old space, I landed another in a punk warehouse right off Frenchmen St. I'd have to build the walls, but I'm butch like that, and I have friends who do such things for a living. The day before-- really, just the very day before I was planning to move in, the new warehouse got 30 days notice that the owner was booting everyone out. It's to be condos as well.

The fallback that fell through

Downtown New Orleans is fucked, but that's a different and larger subject. I had no more writing space, and I was too worn out to keep looking. Time was up at 511 Marigny. I gave away most of my office furnishings and moved the rest into the small house I share with 4 other people. I knew something would come along eventually, but I needed to focus on doing some work-work, for money, and to be honest my spirit was a little broken.

The weeks rolled on. I became sullen. This week, I barely left my house at all. I didn't answer my phone except as it related to paying projects. I constructed the toweringly time-wasting vampirefish.info and spent hours poring through the Classified Ad archives of a small-town Rust Belt newspaper, because I felt like it. I've been vaguely intending to build a Danny W. Shultz archive for years; it took this mild depressive phase to make it happen. I was sulking, and I was determined I would sulk until someone called me up with some good news. Good news! Good News! Not a request for a favor, not a question for me to answer, not to see if I wanted to do some work for free, not even to extend a social invitation-- GOOD NEWS.

Yesterday it happened. I got a call that a dear friend had found me a tiny office space in an old funeral home, "down the hall from where the gay Alcoholics Anonymous meets." It's perfect... I'm somewhat gay, an alcoholic and fairly anonymous; there's no-one I'd rather be neighbors with. It's ready for me to move in Saturday.

Five minutes before I left to go see the new space, I got an e-mail offering me a part-time contract for some book editing. I rely on exactly these kinds of small gigs to pay my way through the world, so this is a windfall. Four months of part-time work is enough to support me for half a year.

So yes, I know it's childish to sulk, and self-pity is contemptible; I know waiting for things to land in one's lap is immature, and constitutes "magical thinking" rather than the stolid rationality we're told is the way forward, but fucking whatever. I'm a grown-up, not a naif, and it's clear to me life has almost no rhyme or reason, almost no cause-and-effect. Terrible things happen to lovely people, blessings fall out of the blue, existence is absurd. I sulked, retreated into a snit, and was rewarded with good news-- not because I deserved it, but because life is a collossal joke and I'm unusually lucky. That's the state of things.

I have a writing space again!

I hesitated over that first opportunity because it was a gig writing about New Orleans music. I love music, and New Orleans music especially, but I've always been happy loving it as a fan and an audience member, someone under no obligation to analyze the music, attempt to describe it, or work out just what it is I love about it. It struck me writing about music might change that relationship, imperiling the purity of my enjoyment, and the possibility made me nervous.

But I met with the people behind the project, and it was clear we had things in common. The folks running the Juju Association are also fans of the music, first and foremost, and their affection for it shows in their attitudes and their aspirations. Seeing the work they were doing, I put aside my fears. I realized I was basically being a big superstitious baby.

When something makes me happy, I enjoy sharing that happiness. It's not a zero-sum system. Having written a profile of Nasimiyu for the Juju Association's new website certainly hasn't dimmed my ardor for her work: I spent almost an hour yesterday listening to "When Autumn Came" off Nasimiyu's debut EP two dozen or so times in a row.

...which might seem weird, but "endlessly on repeat" is often the way I listen to music I like. Ask anyone who's lived with me.

I also wrote a piece about the Sweet Street Symphony, and a basic promotional bio of Nasimiyu for the site's artists section. There will be more of my work on the Juju Association site going forward; I feel like it's a solid and promising partnership.

<a href="http://nasimiyu.bandcamp.com/track/when-autumn-came" mce_href="http://nasimiyu.bandcamp.com/track/when-autumn-came">When Autumn Came by Nasimiyu</a>

The other writing opportunity didn't turn out so well. I knocked myself out, produced some amazing work, and for what? Is it anywhere that anyone else can see or read it? No. All I've gotten are broken promises.

I'm only on earth for so long. I don't like when I write something tremendous for someone and it turns out I've wasted my time. Everyone has excuses-- there are always excuses-- and everybody falls down. I'm not a dick about things; amongst other reasons, I can't afford to be. I give chances, and sometimes I need chances myself. But when I really feel burned, and I've set my face against you, you're out in the cold in a serious, unto-the-seventh-generation way.

I was really excited about seeing what I wrote for this other venture in print, but at this point I have to quit hoping. I have to assume it's not happening. C'est la fuck.

There are a couple big-- big, book-length big-- projects in the works, and I'm gonna be at a couple events in the lead-up to The 10th Annual New Orleans Bookfair on November 5, but all them will get their own entries.

It's fall, alright. "I feel a cool breeze rise off the Mississippi/
and hear it rustle the glistening leaves..."

These Barnes & Noble Editions are often editorially chintzy affairs, unannotated and with slapdash intros that give away the whole plot in the first paragraph, but the texts speak for themselves, and a copy of Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence with an Octave Morillot cover will get my two bucks.

I consider Maugham not only a great writer, but a great writer who stands in for other less famous writers who shared in some part Maugham's style, priorities and sensibilities. Thus, though he is flawed, he is unmissable, and even something like iconic. There is a lot I could say about his oeuvre, and how he brought Proustian depth of feeling into an English vernacular, but why bother? According to this Barnes & Noble edition's bewilderingly crass back-cover capsule bio:

 
Ladies & gentlemen, the ostensible literary psychology of the complex and nuanced prose craftsman W. Somerset Maugham, helpfully summarized by an anonymous back-cover blurber. Lord have mercy!

I don't care if a novel's by Gypsy Rose Lee, Alan Hollinghurst, James Baldwin, or Karrine "SuperHead" Steffans (all writers whose work I enjoy btw), an author's sex life has no place in a back-cover biographical blurb. It's idiotic and ignorant to reduce anyone's life and works to her sex life, but it's particularly galling-- and condescending and inappropriate-- when the author in question happens to be queer. Haven't we come a bit farther than that?

So, until I find an edition of a Kingsley Amis book whose back cover says "A militant misogynist and serial heterosexual adulterer, Amis took revenge for his own male insecurities through fiction," the above grossly dismissive summation of Maugham will have to serve as your Back-Cover Bio of the Month.

This week, while poking around reviews of L.P. Hartley, I came across the issue of the British Council's fine old "Writers and Their Work" series that discusses both Hartley and Anthony Powell. The Powell portion, written when only 5 novels of Powell's Dance had been published, dwelt on the writer's earlier work, specially praising his satirical debut Afternoon Men. It is from Afternoon Men the following excerpt is drawn:

There is a huge slate of events and occurrences which I'd like to draw your attention to.

On Saturday, June 11 I will be attending (and urge you to also attend) an Eris Benefit Variety Show. Learn more at the Eris Parade Arrestee Aid website! This will be filthy and fun. I will not actually be reading or... performing... but it's a very good cause.

I will however be the somewhat uncomfortable center of some attention that morning (Saturday June 11), delivering the keynote address at the June meeting of the Gillespie Memorial Community Breakfast.

The subject I've been asked to speak on is the recent closure and re-opening of the Iron Rail Book Collective. There will also be a brief background provided on the (late twentieth-century portion of the) history of subversive literarture distro in New Orleans. That-- the local history aspect-- is of great interest to me; I am beginning work on a larger, informal study of the subject, generously assisted by those who were present at the time.

On June 28th, I will be attending another 'zine reading, this time reading & unveiling the long-unawaited nonservi.am/002. I'll provide more details when I have them.

Speaking of second issues, I have two pieces in the brilliant and visually irresistible Issue 2 of the Raging Pelican, available now all over (or by mailorder). One piece is the full version of my interview with the founders of Eris, and the other is a local historical nonfiction piece on the Bizarre Case of Dr. Victor Alexander. Enjoy!

An updated, truncated & generally much-improved edition of my article "New Orleans, No Lifeguard on Duty" can be found in the new, Summer 2011 print & web editions of Slingshot.

I feel there may be some other event or news I'm overlooking... but surely the above is the absolute limit a wilting, senescent literary aesthete such as myself can stand in so short a time...

Because Wallace hanged himself while writing it, the novel was edited together posthumously and as published is unfinished. The Editor's Note says,

 
and that's my Disclaimer of the Month.

Tip of the hat to a sharp-eyed reader in Petaling Jaya for bringing to my attention a style-sheet error on the blog. Sorry for your annoyance, hombre, and thanks for the heads-up & feedback!

The mix of mortal fear with arousal-- be the latter explicitly sexual or simply a marked subtilising of sensory experience-- seems characteristic of the sensuality and morbidity I associate with New Orleans. Think of gnats with 18-hour lifespans, mating in the air: it's the nearness of death that intensifies the pleasure drive.

Let us say a person is walking over the bridge between the Upper and Lower Ninth Wards at night, admittedly a stupid thing to do. In the lightless & still largely empty neighborhoods at the base of the bridge's immense stairways are concrete archways set into the bridge's upsweep, cupola-shaped niches, shrine-like recesses maybe five feet deep. In these spaces people congregate at night and will perchance hail the lone passer-by.

When the passer-by regards the archway's gathering of shirtless adolescents and smells the high-grade marijuana they are smoking, the passer-by will tend to experience a complex mix of desire and self-concern. The passer-by will want to be in among those gleaming mesomorphic torsos smoking that very good pot, but in spite of the hospitable, apparently friendly nature of the hailing will also feel anxiety over the intentions of strangers met in such a desolate area. This constitutes fearousal.

The young men coo like birds, which is bizarre and ambiguous. Is this about to be gunplay, or something thrillingly positive and even... dirty? The passer-by may feel on the cusp of a situation entailing loss of individual authority over outcome, a.k.a. loss of control, and yet the very fluidity and volatility of the interaction, the fear itself, renders it intensely exciting. There may in fact exist within the passer-by a compulsion towards pleasure-- to go nestle in among these young men and get high with them-- that is only abetted by the real possibility of danger.

Fearousal. The algebra for this is something along the lines of

Fearousal = Heightened Sensation √ Proximity to Death + Sensuality 

Is that a terrible thing to say? I can be terrible sometimes. Even in the midst of joy, I'm full of negativity. I hate almost all post-modern literature: how negative is THAT? Hate is such a strong word, in this case so richly merited.

I hate the post-modern novel

I hate the sterile, self-aggrandizing and joyless games of the post-modern novel. I regard them as deriving from the saddest qualities of late-industrial mainstream male acculturation. The post-modern novel is a "literature" of empty one-upsmanship that speaks only to its own narrow milieu, the printed equivalent of the television show Jackass or the relentless, market-driven innovations of hardcore pornography. Like these, it is aberrant without being interesting, spectacular but uninstructive. Ought I name names? John Barth, Mark Leyner. Fatuously proud to be alienated and alienator, writers unworthy of a reader's time.

But thank heavens for the passage of time! Fads and fashions fade, taking with them their proponents and devotees. Wherever we may be at present, I believe we can draw a line, or better yet a stone-laden burlap sack, around "post-modern literature." Now, I don't think awesome writers like Burroughs and Acker belong in the same category as the tedious mid-american masturbators named in the paragraph above. I don't think exciting novelists like Houellebecq belong in the sack either... but I also don't want to spend this time arguing what constitutes post-modernism.

Let's just say that to a hidebound formal traditionalist such as myself, books like DeLillo's White Noise and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest are rare, extreme-case positive examples of successful works emerging from or associated with a post-modern literary culture that lost its way.

What I like

At best, experimentation for its own sake, breaking convention merely for the accomplishment, is only as interesting to me as the performance of a circus acrobat. When successfully executed, the high-wire stunt evokes professional admiration, empathic nervousness, exhilaration as the stunt is carried out, and speculation about what the performer might be like to sleep with.

All these are commendable effects to have on an audience, in no wise incompatible with art, but they aren't in themselves what I seek from art. I'm looking for love, not just cheap thrills. There are reasons Wallace's Infinite Jest is hailed as a great book, and those reasons aren't its copious footnotes or Wallace's play with linear time.

I hold Wallace was taken from us before he could produce the novel that would have been the full flower of his authentic genius as a writer and moral philosopher, the book that would join Moby Dick in the uppermost echelons of American literature-- but Jest is a great book. It is a book rooted in human life, conveying brute anguish, millenial anxiety, and the recognizably authentic dynamics of addiction in a manner befitting those subjects. This entails extraordinary stylistic feats, e.g. a literary technique mirroring the dysphoric blurring of personal experience with mediated entertainment, cogent writing about the loss of cogence, all rendered readable and even fun. Of course I have my quibbles, but Jest more than deserved every success and accolade attending it, and I hope will enjoy longevity within canon.

What I don't

On the other hand, for an instructive counterexample I feel able to address without descent into invective or vitriol, let us examine Wallace's diffident and unmistakeably undergraduate first novel, Broom of the System.

Wallace's Broom, one reads in secondary sources, has a lot to do with the arguments of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. I haven't read Wittgenstein. It was clear while reading Broom that big ideas shaped the book, but as someone unfamiliar with those ideas, I did not find them emergent. They shaped the book only obliquely, & thus I experienced Broom as the canvas of a competent novel stretched and deformed across the framework of an indiscernible philosophical experiment.

I could tell there were very particular reasons things were happening within the narrative, but since the specific engine driving the events was unfamiliar to me, I was left to take the work on its own merits, leaving its presumably commendable integrations of Wittgenstein to congeal unappreciated back in the serving dish. As far as my experience of the novel, all I had to go on were the book's characters, developed (or undeveloped) by their reactions to occurrences within their lives. While Wallace even at 24 years old was a more-than-serviceable storyteller, I found the story as told to be rather thin broth.

That broth I so earnestly sipped, naively seeking sustenance, is Where The Rubber Meets the Road. It's the reader's experience of the book as written, as distinguished from a great number of other considerations-- an author's intentions, a novel's autobiographical context, a book's presumed situation within genre or trend, the other works in reaction to which the book was written.

The reader's experience of a book is something I revere, something I hold in almost fetishistically high regard. It is to me the measure of a book, the most important place in which a novel succeeds or fails.

Now pardon me; it's time for lunch, and then a parade.