One of the great things about the rise of online literary journals is the ease with which people can now actually read short fiction. It used to be that if you were published in a literary journal, you'd be lucky to get 200 eyes on your work, and none of those eyes would belong to anyone you actually knew, since unless your friends and neighbors made a point of crawling on their hands and knees along the bottom rack of their local Borders' magazine section in search of the literary journal section, well, they were unlikely to actually find a print copy of, you know, Esoteric Sounding Review. But in the last several years -- as the links on the left side of this page indicate -- it's become far easier for readers to find great online markets for short fiction or, at the very least, print journals have become much better about providing more online content. Who knows if people actually read that content...I'd like to believe they do. Either I believe that or I'll spend all of my waking hours making playlists on Spotify and not writing.
Which leads me to this next project I'm releasing. Not Spotify...the belief that people want to read more short stories. And, well, hopefully, my short stories. I've been lucky enough to publish two collections of stories with the excellent Other Voices Books and my hope is to continue to do so for ever and ever. Right now, however, I'm in the middle of writing a new novel (based, it should be noted, on a short story of mine, "Mitzvah", which was in Other Resort Cities) that will likely take me another 3 months to finish. Maybe longer. And so I'm probably a good few years from finishing another collection of short stories. (And, in fact, I haven't even written a new story in about nine months [the story "How Will The Pilgrims Survive?" is in the debut issue of The Rattling Wall], though I have to write one soon for an anthology...so...yeah, I better do that, I suppose.) So in the interim, I'm going to release a series of what I'm thinking of as suites of work, both fiction and nonfiction, since it's going to be a while before new work of mine is on the shelves. The first is a mini-collection of short stories called Where You Lived, which will contain three previously published, but uncollected, short stories, that will be released as an ebook in late September. This will be followed by a mini-collection of essays. And then a pop up book about my favorite meats and cheeses. And then a Choose Your Own Adventure. Okay. That's not true. (But, man, I'd love to write a Choose Your Own Adventure. Maybe I'll see if I can restart the Burn Notice series as a CYOA...if you're a spy, turn to page 20, if you're an arms dealer, turn to page 24...)
I don't know how many of these little projects I'll do, but I feel like it might be a fun way to get some new work out into the world while I'm working on larger projects and it's cool that with the rise of ebooks, there's an actual platform to do just this sort of one off.
Recently, I've had the uncomfortable realization that songs from my childhood that seemed to be about relatively normal things -- drinks, cowards, magazines, girls, etc. -- are really about some seriously fucked up things. I submit the following for educational purposes:
1. The Pina Colada Song by Rupert Holmes.
I submit that this song is about the two very worst people on earth. As a kid, apparently before I was able to comprehend the meaning of words, I thought this was a song about, you know, pina coladas. And for many years after I happily sang along to it when it came on the radio or was plucked out by some lounge singer at a pool bar...just a happy little song about drinking and escaping. Then, one day a few months ago, the song came on the radio and I actually listened to the lyrics and realized it's about two horrible people who, after realizing that they hate each other, decide to not just cheat on one another, but cheat on one another by placing the worst personal ads ever -- I mean, who the fuck would even go to a bar called O'Malley's to plan their escape? You have to know that a bar called O'Malley's in 1979 was probably just about to become a Carlos & Charlies, which means you'd be planning your escape surrounded by people sitting on bar stools shaped like catcher's mitts. At any rate, so they both go on over to the bar in order to fuck someone else and get out of their horrid lives when, lo and behold, they run into each other and have a nice big laugh about it all. "Oh my god! I've been living a lie!" she says.
"Oh my god, I've been living a lie, too!" he says. "Everything I thought I knew about you, all the things that I felt, all the reasons I fell in love with you before I got tired of you being my lady, all those things were complete fabrications on your part, right?"
"Right!" she says. "And the same for you, right?"
"Yes!"
And then, presumably, they drive back home in their separate cars, climb into bed, have wild animal sex and then realize, oh, fuck, I still fucking hate this person as much as I did yesterday, I just happen to hate myself slightly more for having lived a fucking lie with a total and complete con artist by my side, like I'm some kind of episode of Dateline (or whatever the 1979 equivalent of Dateline would be...20/20, presumably). Now what the fuck do I do? Time to take out another personal ad and hope it turns out better. Except it won't, because they've fucked each other up forever. And they'll probably have a kid to try to reconnect and that kid will turn out ugly on the inside, because its parents are the two worst examples of earthlings ever created, and that child will one day start an emo band or a rap-rock band and we'll be left, for the rest of our lives, with fucking Better Than Ezra or Hoobastank or Daughtry, the soundtrack of our collective despair.
2. Centerfold by J. Geils Band
I freely admit that when I was going through puberty this music video was VERY important to me. I had no idea what the singer was singing about, I just saw, you know, better looking girls in negligee than existed in the Sears Catalogue and that, friends, was more than enough for me to declare this song and video the most amazing thing since scrambled porn. I also liked the idea of singing along to the words "centerfold" over and over again. It was somehow more awesome than singing along to "Greased Lightning" and muttering that line about getting shit and tit, even then having those two things together in such close proximity seemed, well, sordid. But centerfolds!
Again, it wasn't until only a few months ago that I realized this song is about a guy who is having a casual beat off while looking at Hustler and realizes, oh, snap, that's the girl who sat in front of me in home room! The very girl I've been beating it to for, like, 20 years! My go-to child porn image, that's her! All grown up! And nude! The man is mortified, of course, while he slowly brings himself to climax, but then decides what he'd like to do is see this girl again, this time with her clothes on...but only for as long as it takes for them to drive to a motel room (I'm seeing a Motor Lodge, quite frankly) where he will then take her clothes off again, this time in private. Though the song doesn't say this, I suspect what happens next is he'll ask her if he can take some tasteful photos of her dressed in her old cheer leading uniform and/or a Nazi SS guard's uniform, while she cleans erasers.
3. I'm So Excited by the Pointer Sisters
This wasn't exactly one of my favorite songs as a kid, however I was under the impression it was about, you know, these nice sisters feeling excited about, you know, the world. Life. The blue skies. The hope for a better tomorrow. All that.
Apparently, it's actually about a woman having an orgasm and feeling free enough with it to share the greatness of the experience with her sisters, who happily harmonized right along with her while she lost control and thought, well, gosh, I think I like it. Now, at 11 I wasn't real clear about the idea of orgasms, granted, but it seems to me that if they'd been explained to me adequately at the time that I would feel as I do now: that this is a seriously repressed woman if she can't decide if she likes it or not. She thinks she likes it...but...well, who knows? Losing control can be scary. And involving her fucking sisters in it is creepy. I do find it somewhat comforting that she tells the man who is bringing her to these new found heights of pleasure that if "it" should happen while they are just "playing around" that "boy, that's fine." I mean, you know, no pressure to make it happen during the sex, boy, just make that shit happen.
4. Jessie's Girl by Rick Springfield
This was my sister Linda's favorite song, so, because I spent a lot of time hanging out in Linda's room and listening to her 45s, it became my favorite song, too. I have an unnatural love for Rick Springfield's music, which I blame on my sister Linda almost entirely, but also because Rick taught me some very important things, like the meaning of the word "moot", which, I'd wager, was never in a top-10 song prior to "Jessie's Girl". That said, I always thought this song was just about a guy yearning for the woman he can't have. Fair enough. The history of pop music (and literature and film) is all about unrequited love.
Then, as happens, I was sitting at my desk one night working away on some dark, sad literary fiction about desperate people doing desperate things, usually in the name of love or obsession or something equally prosaic, when I found myself singing along to "Jessie's Girl" when it came up on my iPod. That's when I realized this is a song about a dangerous fucking whack job stalker. I've had a stalker or two in my life -- the first one was in college and that wasn't a fun experience, but it was familiar when I heard Rick sing about how he watched Jessie hold his girl in his arms late, late at night. I think the popular definition of this act is peeping. Then he looks at himself in the mirror and ponders why he hasn't been able to connive this woman into his bed...perhaps just after he tucked his dick between his legs and asked himself if "he'd fuck me, because I'd fuck me" a la Buffalo Bill. His constant questioning of himself (and nay, I say, of the world) as to where he can find a woman like that is a sign of man disassociating into madness, his every day and night a fruitless quest for Jessie's girl...until, I suspect, he begins making every woman "Jessie's girl"...and that's when the killing starts.
5. Beth by Kiss
Well, first, when I was a kid I thought this was a good song. That was my first incorrect assumption. My second was that this was a song about loving a girl named Beth who, you know, isn't returning the love. Or something like that. All I know is that in my mind, this song is playing while I roller skate around a roller skaing rink, the stink of Red Baron pizza thick in the air, as I watch whomever I was in love with in 6th grade skating with someone far more desirable than I was. In my mind, Beth is that girl who in the movie of my childhood mind finally looks over her shoulder and sees my fat ass skating after her and stops, throws her arms around my dirty, sweaty neck and, you know, maybe French kisses me.
In fact, Beth is a horrible song about a woman who stupidly hooked up with the drummer of a shitty band who spends most of his waking hours in a garage somewhere re-working the disco beat of "I Was Made For Loving You" instead of being at home with her, presumably making sweet music in the bedroom. Beth, it turns out, is lonely because her dumb fuck boyfriend refuses to come home, mostly because he thinks he hears the boys calling, like the members of the band have telekinetic powers. All of which makes it seem like a pretty one sided relationship. Yeah, yeah, he's making music, but there's some girl with feathered hair sitting alone by herself, quietly drinking TAB and watching Dallas, because their house just ain't a home. The reality of the song is not that Beth has chosen a better person than the fat Jewish kid at the skating rink, it's that Beth is probably about to hang herself because she's in a loveless relationship with a guy who paints his face like a fucking cat.
One of the very strange things that's happened over the course of the last few years that I've been writing these Burn Notice books is the number of emails I get from people telling me my Burn Notice books have a political agenda they don't like, which to me is like saying, "The popcorn I'm eating has a political agenda I don't like." Yesterday, for instance, I received this email:
I'm sick and tired of how you portray Republicans in your Burn Notice books. I've read all five of them and each time there's some evil thing you ascribe to Republicans. I won't read another of your Burn Notice books and I'm going to write a letter of complaint to Matt Nix and my cable service.
I didn't have the heart to tell the person that I wouldn't be writing anymore Burn Notice books (nor point out that after having read 5 of them, he was probably just as guilty for the way he felt as I was for, presumably, writing them). Nor did I have the heart to tell him that writing, you know, Comcast, wasn't going to really help him out, either. However, since I had some free time yesterday, I wrote the gentleman back with a question:
I'm sorry to hear that. But I'm curious: what exactly are the evil things I've ascribed to Republicans in my latest book?
A few hours later, the gentleman responded with a list, all from my current book The Bad Beat:
1. You said that if Republicans were still in office Brent [a character in the book] would be water boarded.
2. You wrote that a slimey guy had Republican hair.
3. You said that Dick Cheney surrounded himself with dumb people who'd take the fall for him.
4. You said people who shop at Wal-Mart are Republicans.
Your liberal bias is showing, Mr. Goldberg.
I thought it was nice he called me Mr. Goldberg, it should be noted. Most of the people who write the letters to me just call me asshole. But anyway...I looked at the list and couldn't remember any of those sections, apart from the guy with Republican hair, because I knew someone would write me a letter about that. But let's be honest: Republican politicians have a certain haircut. To wit:
So, with that as an established, shall we say look, it seemed like a nice description. I went and looked up the other bits and sure enough I'd written something along those basic lines in the book, so I wrote back the gentleman with a few more questions:
That's a very succinct list of liberal biases. So, just so I'm clear: Did people get waterboarded during the last Republican administration? I seem to recall it was a thing. Particularly, say, people with terrorist ties? [The section in question is about someone who has information the government might want, not to give out any spoilers.] Are you of the belief that Dick Cheney surrounded himself with smart people who took the fall for him? Are you aware that Wal-Mart is, well, kinda known for giving a lot of money to conservative causes? So, with all that being said, I'm not sure how I've cast Republicans in an evil light. I'm just relating topical anecdotes. I mean...all the bad guys are ex-KGB in this book. So by your reasoning, as a commie liberal, they'd have come off much better for my writng them.
The response came just a few minutes later. It was to the point, I'll say that:
I keep forgetting the things I keep forgetting, which is probably something I should be concerned about, if only I could remember. At any rate, I've slowly but surely been cobbling together a few new items here on ye olde blog (though, it should be noted, I haven't really been cobbling together that many actual blog posts, likely because I tend to do a lot of my heavy conversational lifting on Twitter and Facebook these days, so feel free to friend me, follow me, stalk me, and send me hate mail in those places, too). I'd like to, therefore, draw your attention to the following items over on my sidebar that you may find entertaining:
2. New and exciting soul baring essays...or as soul baring as one can get in the Wall Street Journal. Also, since I tend to get a bunch of emails about this one when people stumble on it, there's a link to an essay I wrote in Las Vegas CityLife when The Wire concluded, where I called it the Great American Novel. People write me a lot to tell me it was a TV show and that I'm a fucking idiot. Which is nice.
3. An absolute shit-load of interviews. So, if you're looking for one about MFA programs, I recommend this one. If you're looking for one about the stories in Other Resort Cities for your term papers, I recommend this one. If you're looking for one where I, uhm, answer a question about, uh, what Buddha would make of my writing, then, by all means, read this one. And here's a pretty extensive one about Burn Notice.
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