Scribbles on Working Assets notepaper, found in an otherwise forgettable book defending New Urbanism. From the Portland library.

Pictoral ode to Newsies, found, marvelously enough, in a volume of Emerson’s journals (also from the library). “Never Fear.”

When I admit that I wasn’t allowed to watch much television — except for Benson, which my uncle was on, and the evening news, which was educational/nightmare-inducing, in the Reagan years — people always ask what I was allowed to do. Well, I was allowed to watch movies, for one thing, even R-rated movies provided they possessed sufficient artistic merit. By this logic The Godfather was okay (Coppola), but Night Court was not (?). Lest you think I was raised in some hoity-toity high-brow cultural surroundings, let me assure you, Monty Python also passed muster, as did Kenny Rogers records — and, later, Kokomo-era Beach Boys, Murphy Brown (Candice Bergen) and the YM subscription that my grandparents bought me for Christmas. At the time it seemed to make sense.

I read, too. There were no limits regarding reading material. Violence? War? Adult themes? Fine, on paper. My father collected the Doonesbury books and I spent the better part of 1986 parsing Death of a Party Animal, trying to understand the jokes. I was nine. There was probably something good on TV. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I went through a snobbish phase where I measured a book’s value by its word count; this led to the Year of the Russians, in which I told anyone who’d listen that I was slogging through War and Peace (although I’m sure I put it in loftier terms). Finally, after turning the last triumphant page, I told my mother that I’d liked the epic well enough, but felt the ending was weak — too abrupt, too many plot lines left unresolved. That’s when she pointed out the Vol. I in small print on my paperback’s spine. I never mustered the energy to tackle volume two.

As an adult this is fascinating to me, the cultural references we amass and the ones that pass by us like sheep in the night, how they frame the way we write and talk and think and regard the world. Which brings me to the title of this post, Neon Spaghetti. That was the name of my first zine. It consisted of twelve xeroxed pages, no name or attribution, and I made twenty copies. I don’t remember everything it contained, but I know my friend D. and I had reworked many of our gripes about the pettiness of public high school into anonymous screeds — scathing satire, we thought. I did the bulk of the writing but D. helped me linger after the final bell in order to slip copies into lockers chosen at random. The plan was for the recipients to discover the zine the next morning, read it, be blown away by its daring wit/fiery truths, and spread the word to everyone else in the hallway. We wanted it to go viral, even though such a phrase did not exist back then.

Morning came, lockers opened, and Neon Spaghetti got the same response I got at Waterville High: most people ignored it, several made fun of it, a few people said it was interesting or at least well-intentioned. The following year I abandoned the anonymous classroom ranting approach and began a proper zine, one that had my name on it and was distributed just about everywhere except my high school, and that worked out well for a number of years. All of this happened because the Mister Paperback bookstore on Upper Main Street received two copies of Sassy each month, and I’d buy one and Leslie would buy the other, and that is how I learned what a zine was, courtesy of Christina Kelly’s Zine-O-the-Month feature.

Anyway, sometimes I wonder what might have happened if I hadn’t picked up that magazine, or if I’d been watching something on television instead, or if my parents had cracked down on my mail-order habit when the envelopes and manila packages began piling up. What if, instead of knowing the Cometbus tagline, I knew the theme song to Who’s the Boss? What if I could make jokes about Gary Coleman without having to Wikipedia him? What if I’d gone to parties where everyone was singing along to the new Michael Jackson album? What if I’d gotten invited to parties?

Sometimes I think all our differences are differences in place — cultural place as well as geographical place, the way my Texan cousins said “crown” instead of “crayon” and wore wind shorts before anyone I knew in Maine. And whenever I bring this up in conversation someone inevitably says something along the lines of, The internet is erasing all these interesting differences, everyone exists in the same cultural place, the internet has made the entire concept of place virtually (ha!) meaningless. Etc.

Maybe. I’m not prepared to believe that quite yet. Right now I think the nice thing about the internet is the fact that it gives us an efficient way of telling other people what it’s like where we are and finding out what it’s like where they are.

For example, I just told you about publishing an anonymous, carob-stained, G.B. Trudeau-fueled zine in central Maine. I did that right here on the internet.

The players: A woman, 40s-ish; her teenage son; an Unrelated Observer. All are in line (also known as “on line”) at the checkout.

Son: Hey, we forgot something. Be right back. [Son dashes away and returns moments later with a box of granulated sugar.]
Mom: Why do we need sugar?
Son: For the Kool-Aid mix.
Mom: I’m pretty sure that has sugar in it. It’s in the mix already.
Son: No, we have to add sugar.
Mom (reading label): It says it has sugar…
Son (turning the package of Kool-Aid over): No, see? It says “reduced sugar.” So we have to add some.
Mom: Oh, okay, you’re right.

* * *

Sometimes when the car thuds over a bad frost heave I think the phrase “frost heave, a roadway,” to the tune of “Frosty the Snowman.” Try it yourself and see!

* * *

After three decades on this planet I have decided I like the taste of coconut. I have no idea why or how this happened. It reminds me of when I was thirteen, the year I grew three inches between April and July — what up, cells that form my being? Who’s in charge here?

* * *

I have read, or am reading, a long list of books right now, some for “work” and some for “pleasure” although there is a sizeable subset that qualifies as both — a most enjoyable turn of events. Highlights include Ed Lin’s This Is a Bust, which evokes New York’s Chinatown so vividly I can see the sidewalks, smell the eels in white plastic tubs; Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask, which I’d been saving for a treat and now cannot put down; Game Change, which is exactly the way you think it is; and fellow New England nonfiction buff Elyssa East’s Dogtown, which is both thrilling and impeccably researched.

FYI, southern Maine, events of note on the horizon: speaking of Ed Lin, he’s visiting Portland on Saturday, April 11. Don’t miss it. Also pay attention to “Heroic Tales from Portland” this Wednesday the 7th and the Maine Festival of the Book (April 9-11) — oh yes, and of course the first-ever Scratchpad Reading Series event on April 20.

Not bad for the little city. Not bad at all.

* * *

The post-procedure painkillers I popped half an hour ago are working their magic. My mouth has stopped hurting, the world’s edges have softened, my thoughts are verging on the grandiose. This is the point at which I should either stop typing or start typing faster.

A reliable source has suggested it’s time for bed. It probably is.

I’ve been feeling type-ish of late, despite having less time than ever to type things that are not on the regular typing schedule. Perhaps I will come back here and type for you soon. Perhaps I will even re-introduce the concept of “paragraphs,” which I’m told are all the rage these days. (LOL.)

The task: Turn this spam headline into something entertaining: Police end funereal striptease acts.
The format: Short story, comic, photo essay, pop tune, whatever, as long as it is bloggable
The prize: A box of awesome from tryharderland sent straight to your door!
The deadline: Friday, July 3

Want to enter? Of course you do. Go here.

Item! Tri-named virtuoso John Dermot Woods has a sweet offer for those who pre-order his forthcoming novel by July 15.
Details go a little something like this:

My novel (with drawings), The Complete Collection of people, places & things, is being published by BlazeVOX Books next month. To celebrate we’re offering the book for $12 with free shipping (that’s 25% off) to everyone who pre-orders by July 15. AND, the first 50 people who order will also receive:
- a signed and numbered silkscreen print, to commemorate the book’s release
- a personalized copy with a signed, limited edition book plate

Take advantage of John’s generosity right here.

Item! I once played a newsboy in a production of Irwin Shaw’s Bury the Dead. My only line was “Extry, extry, read all about it!”
Delivered with gusto, and a little tweed cap.

Front page of the hometown paper today.

Via the local paper, obvs.

My point is, this is going be in the running for Great American Novel status, even (especially) if it is “nonfiction.”

Let me tell you another story first: I once saw a man with his remaindered books. They were in three cardboard boxes that had been unsealed and they were all that was left. The phone had rung; it was official. These books would be more valuable as pulp than as books. It was like having a dead body in the room. I understood the rules, but I still wanted to drape a sheet over those gaping boxes, or close them, or bury them. Books are meant to be the permanent ones, aren’t they? The things that will become archaic yet outlive us and our blogs. For me and perhaps for you books are anchors in time and space and memory — not the idea of books, not the stories within them or stories about them, I mean the books themselves, the tangible things.

The problem with tangible things, of course, is that they are subject to the laws of economics. Costs must be calculated against benefits and that means the bill from the warehouse vs. the revenue projections. I can accept this. Actually, I embrace this, most of the time. The laws of supply and demand will outlive us and our blogs and our books, and the system has its ways of working, however strange it seems. Like democracy (and like me) (and you too) the system is flawed and noble, full of hope and probably, ultimately, hopeless. It helps me sleep at night.

Back to the story.

I found out about this book called YOU or the Invention of Memory just last month, even though the copyright date is 2007. The book’s story is this: the book was published and then its small publisher “folded,” is the word that gets used, and what a pleasant but inaccurate thing to think of a small publisher being turned corner to corner, in half then again, and tucked away in a cedar chest. Really, though, what got tucked away was this book. Fell through the cracks! Dustbin of history! Crammed under some old towels in the cedar chest of forgetting! Tough break, man. Too bad you spent all those months writing that book that no one will ever read. Cue nagging grief, two years.

At which point the book’s author picked himself up and did what any right-thinking artist these days does: he emailed a publicist. Not just any publicist, either, but the smart and discerning Lauren Cerand, whose work I have admired for quite some time. [She is one of perhaps five publicists about whom I can make that statement.] This touched off a classic “girl meets book” plotline, followed by a “new publicity campaign” denoument, or should I say exposition? Rising action?

In order to help the author character tell the book’s story, the book publicist character began mailing copies of the book, for free, to anyone who sent an email requesting one. I heard about this offer on Twitter, in a sentence that must have contained fewer than 140 characters. I sent an email with my address information, and after a brief interlude in which the United States Post Office forgot the way to Maine, a copy of YOU arrived on my doorstep.

I opened the envelope and turned the book, which is pleasantly slim, over in my left hand. The NYTBR blurb on the back jacket refers to the author’s previous collection as “more than thirty years of work from an underappreciated writer.” In this context the word “underappreciated” is meant to convey both the quality of the author’s work and the quality of the NYTBR, for recognizing the quality of the author’s work when few others did. Perhaps also the quality of you, for the discerning taste that led you to hold this underappreciated thing in your left hand. Pats on the back all around.

(A pause for honesty. I am not well-versed in modern fiction. I lack the, ahh, the critical faculties. Left to my own devices I tend to read nonfiction about manufacturing and/or political intrigue. I become impatient with books about Love & Relationships unless there is also a good description of a factory strike or a corrupt governor or a boss with bad intentions. The author of YOU is the father of a filmmaker whose films I don’t like except this one.)

But this is a rare moment, an adventure! An owl, if you will, on my windowsill!

Cast in the role of reader, the reader character reads, and fortunately for the heroes — all of them — the book is good, funny and sad and gentle in its awareness of itself and the tricks it is playing. It is also, despite some shifts in setting, wholly steeped in New York. Listen:

I come home to my lonely apartment after spending the long escapeless day, parading through museums so crowded that someone’s head has morphed into almost every art work.

It is a sentence that would not apply in Boston, thinks the reader, who is now 70 pages in and feeling grateful for the experience. Not because YOU is the best book the reader has ever read — but then what is? — but because it is miserable and happy at the same time, a reflection on the twin ruts of longing and ambivalence. And also because it entered the story at just the right time and in just the right way, despite the system’s forces, a small reminder that a line is the shortest distance between two faces.

Tobias Wolff Wins $20,000 Story Prize

and then this video screencap:

And my first thought was 1. Included in this amazing $20,000 prize was the privilege of sitting on stage with John Darnielle! My second thought was 2. Or maybe sitting on stage with John Darnielle WAS the prize! Valued at $20,000! Third thought, overlapping: 3a. How would you value a thing like that? Maybe they asked Tobias Wolff for an estimate?/3b. Best prize ever!

Anyway, turns out none of it is related at all, the prize and the sitting on stage. Oh well.

Congratulations still deserved, Mr. Wolff.