Sean Lovelace is running right now, far. Other times he teaches at Ball State University. HOW SOME PEOPLE LIKE THEIR EGGS is his flash fiction collection by Rose Metal Press. His works have appeared in Crazyhorse, Diagram, Sonora Review, Willow Springs, and so on.
It was a little fishy because there was a water bottle next to my ball. That was a little fishy there. But whatever.
I don’t know where I’m going, I swear to God.
His shadow was in the way.
I can’t blame my whole year on one week. It was a pretty rotten year all around.
Just bear with me.
Snoop Dogg is my neighbor.
And I’m not being nice to myself, trust me. I’m ripping myself. As ugly as it is and painful as it is, believe me, it’s really tough for me, and I’m trying.
It was a pretty big tree, and I asked for any volunteers to climb up the tree, but nobody spoke up.
There’s this timing, and if I miss that timing, then I have to start over.
As crazy as it sounds, I really don’t know.
The rest you saw. I don’t really want to go through it again.
It hit me in the inner thigh.
I’m going to try to take out the whole waggle, no waggle.
Honestly, it’s going to be a battle.
James Merrill died in Tucson. Tucson is a city where men walk around with Rottweilers and wheelbarrows. Sometimes inside the wheelbarrow will rest a console television. These men do not wear shirts.
Some writers were afraid of James Merrill. It’s like that time Dick Cavett interviewed Marlon Brando. (Go to 5:45 for some inspiring tension) Cavett was shaking. He was addled and rattled. He was overwhelmed by the Hugeness of this Thing, Brando.
Factoid: People think Calvin Cordozar Broadus, Jr. is all that, but James Merrill was the first to sing, “Come dusk lime juice and gin.”
Remember to remember!
James Merrill’s most famous quote is obviously, “Life is fiction in disguise.” I’m trying to decide if John Gardner would approve. Oh, fuck Gardner, man. I just realized Hemingway is always talking about how he doesn’t like to talk about writing, and even saying that is talking about writing and anyway Hemingway actually wrote and talked about writing all of the time. But I digress. Better quotes from Merrill would be, “I’ve watered the geraniums, the pot of basil + the pot of pot” or “If nobody ever wrote a book, do you imagine it would be possible to catch up?”
Or
Then I addressed to a closed door a little speech about how the Great Ideas, far from being the achievement of men of genius (or look what happens when they are—Nietzsche + Hitler, Einstein + Hiroshima), are the work of thousands of anonymous generations, and take the form of those brain-coral reefs, slow myths + taboos, which keep the shark from the shallows our children swim in, and now if you don’t mind I have taken a pill and must try to get some sleep.
One time James Merrill made a concrete poem in the shape of a Christmas tree. I find concrete poetry as sort of airbrush T-shirt level of entertainment.
Champagne. Mythology. Technical mastery. Memory. Atomic science. The big bang and black holes. Quatrains. Environmental degradation. Key West. AIDS. Neckties. Similes. Flashlights. Elizabeth Bishop. Small mirrors. The Piano. Good outdoor lighting (example, Peru). Waving through windows at people. O’Keeffe paintings. Dogs. A well-considered title.
I don’t like titles that applaud the author’s seriousness or whatever, titles like “Necessities of Life” or even, forgive me, “Responsibilities.”
Many lovers.
Sometimes, while rereading Changing Light at Sandover, the irony keeps me at a distance, but then again it might just be something I ate.
Factoid: You can say what you want about Dick Cavett, but in 1969 Jefferson Airplane sang on his show and it was the first time the word “fuck” was uttered on live television.
We’re going to spend a lot of our life alone in rooms.
Well, the dog needs bossing, also the baseball practice (batting balls) and the plumber on the copper pipes (he looks like a man who enjoys a good banging) and the general lack of cheese, shredded. Suddenly there is a rash of either lost cell phones beneath couch cushions or fleeing blackbirds on wing and car doors slamming all around our block and I think to myself this is it, they are coming to take me away. I hold my breath waiting for my garage door to rattle open, loose teeth of nuts and bolts falling, wondering how I am going to get at my toothbrush now that my illicit lover has locked herself into the bathroom (they do this, eventually). But then the government truck farts and rumbles off, there must have been another opportunity at the Walmart across the road. I want to be arrested so that I can read books of poetry, right through from the beginning to the end.
Example, Predatory, by Glenn Shaheen. (It had another more melodramatic title, Shaheen told me, but I forget the exact. It was a beery evening. [I think])
This book is paranoid. Or maybe just ill that way with perception.
All night, a howl
outside the window. All night an animal
is sick.
(Feral Cats)
The rain stopped. At that point the guy (knobby head like an asteroid) from the repair shop comes out to tell me that my baby-baby scooter (sweet ride, ODI grips, Kelsey throttle, a desperation of chrome) needs another ninety-four bucks’ worth of repairs, even though they just got finished fixing it, or saying they fixed it, and he says what do you want to do? And I say I don’t want to do anything, Mr. ASS (teroid), you owe me a scooter I can drive away from this crime scene after the last two hundred bucks I spent here, and he says it’s not their fault, it’s a piece-of-shit scooter that hasn’t been properly maintained, and I say hey, I am not paying another cent for repairs that don’t repair, and he says okay, fine, they’ll junk it, and I say okay, fine, junk it then, it’s junk now anyway since you guys mangled it, and he stomps off, so there I am, up a creek and scooterless. So anyway I call my brother, sit down, and finish reading The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Get in my brother’s car (a brown turd Kia) and he hands me a beer and sees the pink/yellow/retina-detachment bus of a book cover and prowls the title and says, “Is that the kind of shit people who drive scooters read?”
The bottle is ceramic. It has an oatmeal look. I thought, “Oatmeal.” Oatmeal is an OK word to have conked in your kettle while drinking Belgium ale. Has a slight bottled taste to it and that makes some sense. The finish was bitter. I like bitter finishes, I do. I like gas station coffee and going to bed after a big, crazy fight. I find it comforting. One time I took my car for a tire change and afterwards I felt taller. I’m not kidding. I felt taller. My car was purring along. Then about eight minutes later I crashed into a deer committing suicide on highway 69, Indiana. This deer just leapt into its moment. I wanted to take the poor doe home for dinner but they said I’d have to contact the local game ranger and get a special permit and who wants to deal with yet another guy in uniform? Ah, bitter finish, this slouched gray bag of bones, I felt, as I watched my thunked car towed away into the cornshine. There are some peppery notes, too.
What my brother really meant was, “You should have already read that book, like when you were 20.”
Some have serious heat. Some have flavor. I’m looking for both. What is your favorite hot sauce? Links would be fine.
So I was fudging juggling judging a poetry contest yesterday
And
Stumbled upon many Centered Poems. Why do I retch them so? Where
Did they come from? Origins? Why am I biased since one
Was about a glass basketball and I like that general idea
And this was for cash $$$ (Wait, I thought poetry
Couldn’t make money.)
Sorry. They seem like cover letters on purple paper to me. Or I
mean like people who ask about copyright. Who knows?
Who writes Centered Poems?
I am drinking beer now so wanted to
Bring this question in front of the quart
Of public opinion. When you see a
Centered Poem, what do you think?
Is it arbitrary for me to hate them?
I don’t know.
(moon, gossamer, wings, love, tendrils)
What u think?
2. Ander Monson wades into the whole D’Agata thingy.
2. Matt Mullins interview.
1. I Take Back the Sponge Cake is a choose-your-own-adventure collaboration between poet Sierra Nelson and visual artist Loren Erdrich.
1. Seems to me we flash fiction folks don’t really get enough book contests. Hell, here’s one.
14. Duck tape and eggs greeted vehicles traveling down Highway 3 in the early morning hours of Friday, March 16.
5. We learned about student evaluations from a sociologist. She said studies show men rate female professors lower than male professors on student evaluations, but men and women rate male professors the same. OK.
6. A little breakfast treat on tennis and DFW.
The woman is my own regret.
The children are my friends,
how they cannot reach, or save
me. The birds are my eyelashes,
the wolves are my hands.
There is no secret to this at all. Use the CW vocabulary. The creative act is a feed triangle of writer and work and reader. Technical issues: beginnings, titles, structure, characters, language, setting, corn, mood, etc. Are we talking birds? Can you give me a map to that tunnel through the mountain so I don’t have to spend so much energy climbing this stupid mountain? Whether they’re absorbing it or not? No clue. Positive AND constructive comments. I’m getting a feeling you are a bigot. Comedians get to see if someone is actually laughing. Coaching and nurturing (editors don’t do this like in the past. Now groups and workshops and universities do this). WORKSHOPS are not debates! Makes art cooperative and collaborative. Were you ever lost? Did we understand the ending? Any transition problems? Is the horse believable? If I slap Barbie, how does she react? Dialogue realistic? Any places you felt tension? Don’t write the story where you kill the class, I beg you. A desire to see what happens? What is the central conflict? I love when characters say strange or funny things. The pilot said. “Hey, Tiger,” as a greeting to the little boy. After a brief pause, the kid said “I’m not a tiger.”
What is your mental image of the main character? THEME PLOT LANGUAGE Should you accept all of them, or ignore them, or what? It’s like Russian nesting dolls? Get inside the syntax. Maintain equilibrium so they can keep moving the work forward. Cleavage! Polite. Always respond to the story! Don’t ask her out with a comment. As a consequence I end up feeling at a loss when I don’t have a pen in my hand—it’s just a kind of job hazard that the pen is part of the reading life. Compare to things in class, other texts. Take notes as you read. A work is a work IN PROGRESS! You can accept or reject an opinion. If I say 2+2 does not equal 5, it won’t hurt your feelings. You will get last word in your FINAL DRAFT. I can’t move people in cars. Grammar concerns, editing, corn. Rudeness, sarcasm. Do NOT be prescriptive. It’s not your draft! A lack of honesty. “It was all good.” “This is not college level” etc. Remember, this is a draft. Is that beer? Confusing the writer with the material. (I can write from the perspective of Billie Holiday, for example.) I really can’t see that anything has changed. And the people in either of these extremes can vary greatly from room to room. You have to define the rules when using magic. The writing is too good to be written by a bad writer. Corn.
I’m in the early stages of developing an online CW class. I’m thinking an intro class. Anyone taken one? Advantages? Entanglements? I wouldn’t mind hearing some anecdotes. Was it synchronous or asynchronous? Did it matter to you? Face-time versus online time—what IS the difference, to you? What can ‘physical’ time offer online could never? What can online offer over physical?
I’m asking big picture questions here, sure. As I said, I’m in the early stages. One key aspect of early stages: Do I want to do this? I feel it could be innovative and high quality, but I could be wrong. I haven’t taken or taught an online CW class. You?
One writer is very earnest, a Poet, sprinkling tendrils, donning hats, trying to enunciate the fuck out of words, trying to pull a stick of butter out a badger’s ass, something, and in one way you think, young, trying, at least still believes while another hand says (hands talk now—this is poetry) relax Thing, calm your gossamer spirit down, flutterby, it’s only poetry and I need to ABS glue the couplings on the toilet drain on Monday—it’s going to smell like shit. One writer has recent stories in Paris Review and New Yorker and steps up to the mic and quickly contextualizes an excerpt and reads calmly, clearly, slowly for 7 minutes and thanks the organizers of the reading, the audience, sits down and shares a beer with me. One writer screams penis!/penis!/penis! into the microphone but only for a short while so it’s fine. (The word penis makes everyone think; I mean it has built careers [Freud or Hilton or your own, etc].)
One writer opens with, “This is the shortest story in my collection” and I feel a shiver through the room as three people turn to the bar to reload their urns with beer. It’s still not quite right to text, turn away, talk to someone, rumple yourself loud, walk through, at least not too often—the writer is looking right at you. The writer is a human being. One writer sort of sways and/or faints. I feel for them. One writer reads and you want to grab them right then and sleep with them—who can say words don’t work? One writer reads and you want to put a bracelet on their ankle, to monitor them, so you can stay reliably away. One writer wears a black shoe and a brown shoe, and it’s a fun bar conversation, this presentation of shoes. One writer is terrified; one writer might as well be in their own bathtub, luxuriating in the warm bubbles of audience eyes. “I don’t know what to do up there,” she said, when I asked her opinion. “Just don’t be that guy.” Well said, I suppose. But which guy was she asking us not to be?
God and man? But isn’t it searching in a dark bar at three a.m. for a hipster magician that isn’t there? Yes. No. Maybe. If you asked Graham Greene what he would take to the desert island, he would say, “Sunblock, three ribbed condoms, a tube of camouflage, the bible, and Power and the Glory.” It was his favorite book. History lesson: While President Calles is sane on all other matters, he completely loses control of himself when the matter of religion comes up, becomes livid in the face and pounds the table to express his hatred. You can trust God to make allowances, but you can’t trust smallpox, or men. The dentist metaphors are supposed to be about the “teeth” of your beliefs—without them you only eat mush, or a stale BRAT meal: bananas (“ripe, brown, and sodden, tasting of soap”), rice (an annual plant), applesauce (favored by children and criminals), and toast (brimstone bread). Miracles, do you believe in them? Yes, but not for me. In his 111th collection, Graham Greens’s characteristic M.O. is intact: casually enjambed verse-prose stanzas marrying the narrative apotheosis of microfiction to the fatigued hope of a Shakespearean monologue:
I found a married priest in the snow
And not knowing what it was or why it was there, I ate a tart and gutted it
as if a LieutenantTo me, up to my polished gun holsters in bladder, the brandy was a surprise
I drank it in like the cunning wink of an exploding butterfly
on the lip
of a teacup while God upstairs puts a bag over His head
& gasses the house& says, “Well if I hated you I wouldn’t want my child to be like you, it makes no sense.”
Enter a shaken rooster of sin.
The ocean is full of flowers that betray most readers. Or Graham Greene’s adulterations of poetic form in The Third Man are particularly well suited to his subject—racketeering. As we all know, on March 13, 1938, Germany took over Austria (termed the Anschluss)–a contingency specifically disallowed in the Versailles Treaty. Then we all took Austria back, but then it gets messy. This book is a tale of a “secret agency” (in the words of Sun Tzu) told through dialogue, exposition, tunnel chases, elegiac couplets, literary quotations, assassinations, and letters. Greene continues to be, as one critic has put it, “compulsively readable,” especially in his characterization of his villain, a charismatic but chronically unfaithful racketeer who publishes his friend’s writing as his own (westerns), and who is capable of saying “…I never lied to myself.” For example, the author spent nearly five million pounds, and employed over 150 researchers, in his mission to destroy martini lunches inside and outside the country (concerning events that happened over 60 years ago!). When needs arose our author may have used words that lied. Nonetheless, the hatted fellow cannot resist the money (this book was meant to be a screenplay), and his complicity is evident in the desperate acerbity of their dialogue (whispered). At one point, spy # 7 unleashes a terrific string of epithets: “lazy… plotter…sewage sucker…acronym…shootout child…liar…destroyer sadist fake.” Our hero Bond counters:
If you wish not to go on with this I’ll shoot.
Don’t shoot.
I’ve shot everything before.
What’s wrong with us.
Fog of war.
Why are we at war.
Because I don’t want to give up my penicillin.
Your dreams are a mess.
They are my masterpiece.
For example, Matt Mullins and Three Ways of the Saw (Atticus Books). The “jagged” school. Certainly Eugene Martin (this book amazing, BTW). Sometimes XTX, Mary Miller, sometimes KGM. Certainly Jamie Iredell. A Hubert Shelby Jr./Iceberg Slim/Patti Smith continuum. Lipstick on the edge of a knife, balls clanking. Thrown/thrown down bottle of flungward. Slash. Krash. You wake up to vomit and your breath smells like burning tires, wonder, jamboree and regret.
Matt Mullins lives in a three-room apartment in a quiet business section of downtown Indiana. His apartment, located in a fifties-futuristic building in sight of four pawn shops and a hat store (That’s not really a hat store, Matt told me), is comfortably unimposing, though it does testify to his days as a traveling musician: souvenirs from Kalamazoo, Mexico, the Eastern Shore, the steppes of Kansas; a bookcase lined with personally inscribed records by Kiri Te Kanawa, DMX, Matt Salesses, Ginsberg (spoken word), Dee Dee Ramone; an entryway in which vintage amplifiers and various guitar cases are stacked shoulder high, as if headlining festival tours of indefinite length were perpetually in the offing.
Our first meeting took place in the summer of 2011. I arrived at his door in the early afternoon, but it was not his door, it was a small bar. There was an elderly woman behind the bar who looked exactly like a cross between a nocturnal monkey and Anthony Perkins. I had a shot of vodka and a very cold beer then asked, “Does Matt Mullins live around here?”
Night-monkey Perkins nodded to the ceiling. “Upstairs.”
I found Matt Mullins newly awakened, his thick brown hair tousled and pale blue eyes slightly bleary; he was obviously surprised that anyone would come to call at that hour of the day. As he finished his breakfast (a Pop-Tart and a grapefruit) and lighted up his first cigarette, his thin, somewhat wiry frame relaxed noticeably. He became increasingly jovial.
“There’s a bar below this apartment, can you believe that?”
“There is?” I said.
“Yes. Let’s go down and have a look.”
We never did get to the interview that day. But there were other days.
Tonight White Castle expects about 6,400 people during its candlelight dinner event (they take reservations). Love writing? Love to be writing or to have written? You date a short story, marry a novel, so what’s a poem? Will we watch more or less porn today? (It smells like more.) It’s easier just to watch TV. TV is closer to reality anyway; it’s truer than the book. (The insanity of TV is the insanity of human life.) Liars of the heart. I wrote today might just mean a check to your garbageman or lord or where some say we lost our romance, our thumbs (oh those ghost phones): LH6, NSA, RUH? I read that book means you’ve heard of the title. It all a circle jerk in here, isn’t it? In the beginning was the word, but what type of love was that? Ah, the seduction of eloquence. I read for plot. Do you? No, but in 1990 David Letterman, in an odd reversal of his usual policy, paid Miss USSR to appear on his show. And then what happened? (The fee was four cartons of Marlboros.) I don’t know but it was lyrical to have her in the Green Room and ever put bananas in your coffee filter and made the coffee (why not?) so I pray to the big brassy lie of books.
First love is pretty great until you meet your second love at a bar one night. A man spends $1.60 today for every dollar a woman spends. Love reading a book or to have read a book? The insanity of reading is the synapses lifting 2D to 3D—you believe this shit? Or, why do we write/read books at all? Because, as you well know from your own clip-clopping, books are not pills that produce health when ingested in measured doses. Books do not shape character in any simple way-if, indeed, they do so at all-or the most literate would be the most virtuous instead of just the ordinary flesh-sacks with larger vocabularies. Sadly, my second wife caused me either horror or horripilation during love (her kisses decalcomania). Or, can we bring more love around here? Time kills it all, your passion, your dachshund and/or funny hamster, and then the stacks of books you’ll never read. (Words are clocks) I mean can we stop with all this literature and art stuck in the self-reflective light of the here and now, a lonely place inhabited by the solipsistic me. Also can I get some greasy fries? I mean big ol’ gas station gloopy tater wedges? If no, then GYPO. And beer me. Then shut out the light and let’s get to writing.
I was watching a small child play indoor soccer and honestly it had its moments but I was feeling that inevitable weight, boredom. I mean the kid was falling down, sort of tumbling, and I just wasn’t feeling that, so I walked about a block in a type of cold, hard rain (like smoke on the sidewalks) and across two streets and into the library. I selected a novel by James Salter. It was one of those old yellowing hardbacks that smell like my grandmother’s hallway where she used to keep a bottom drawer of ‘toys’ for when the kids dropped by. (The toys were a wooden block, a rock, an ancient, battered lunchbox, and one leather shoe.) I love those types of books. And it was about rock climbing and lyrical and plot-driven, as is often the way with Salter and, you know, reading is odd, some odd, inevitable chain—this book leads to this book leads to—and I started thinking about fighter pilots (Salter was one) and way leads to way and I finished Salter’s wonderful little novel and got online and bought Once a Fighter Pilot…by Jerry W. Cook. This was a mistake.
You ever been in a conversation where the person finds out you write (Oh Jesus, here we go…) and they cough up some variation of, “Yeh I’m going to write a book when I get the time.” Hmmm…that sort of gives me mixed feelings. I first think, Fuck off. But that’s just a harsh thing that kicks in. I relax and think, “Go right ahead” in this sort of drawl-type thinking, still a tinge of acid. One time over beers my recently retired dad, a dedicated and experienced organic gardener, said “I should write a book about my life as an organic gardener.” I answered, “Good idea. Bring me the first three pages tomorrow.” He did not. Another response I feel is, “Just because you have material doesn’t mean you have a book.” Or I might think, “When you get the time, why not try brain surgery, too?” I have other responses but I’m rambling and I wanted to get to my point: not everyone should write a book.
I should have known. There were warning signs:
2. OK, you don’t want to read any fucking super “Can creative writing be taught?” posts on here so don’t, just skip this link and start pounding avocado into paste (for the guac dip later), but this one has some interesting points and some decent links. So.
Creative writing is about doing the work of writing, and the experimental innovator benefits from time, support, and guidance.
11. Super exchange between John D’Agata and a fact checker, Jim.
Really, Jim, respectfully, you’re worrying about very stupid shit.
7. Jim Ruland over at Hobart is REALLY cheering for the Giants tonight.
2. What’s your AWP book fair budget? I like to take a big bundle of cash and leave my card behind. I bring the card, and it’s butter my biscuits crazy.
3. How to handicap this Superbowl? Brady plays it cool but you can see in his eyes the wake up daily, the “WTF? I own $8,000 flower pots and can do things with my hair. This kicks ass!” Eli looks like he cuts Brady’s yard, and not well. He walks through life in a daze. Brady gets nightly cunninglingus advice from his Brazilian goddess wife (who could buy him out X 20). “Clockwise, fucker!” “Sorry,” he mumbles again as he rubs the back of his neck and walks out back and throws a football through his walnut fence (lands in neighbor’s spleen-shaped pool). Eli likes Applebees but thinks the Wonton Tacos Chicken are “Too dern spicy.” Brady sometimes eats sushi fried, OK? Eli once wrote a complaint letter to Wal-mart (about some frozen waffles that split in half upon toaster entry) but didn’t send the letter because, in his heart, he loves Wal-mart. Brady did attend the opera in Italy last summer, but he also took two Lorcet and a V&T before settling in his seat. Eli is scared of horses (their heads are way too big!). Brady likes to smell the tips of his own fingers. Who knows?
Tell me the last time you quit a job. That’s a tough thing. You have to look at yourself and suck up and do it. Paint it for me. Then you must look at “that person” when you quit. Tell me how/why. I bet there are “hell yes I quit” and “why did I quit?” and the other thing, the space between the two.
Tell me how you felt. I mean this could be good. I’d like to hear your stories. I will NOT rip them off for my fiction, until I DO.
BONUS: Ever been fired? I was fired twice. Both lovely stories.
