Dear Gary Lacinski, Dear Gary Lacinski,
Advertising Account Executive
Village Voice Media
36 Cooper Square l New York, New York 10003

Thank you very much for your quick turn-around in responding to my
latest press release concerning The St. Mark's Bookshop Reading
Series. The breakdown of your advertising rates was very informative.
Thanks, too, for implying that I could get a drop on the Best of New
York Issue, coming October 21st. If the free reading series I host
around the corner from your offices ever turns a profit, I may very
well think about comparing your rates to a weekly events paper that
anyone in the neighborhood actually reads.

I suppose you're up-to-speed on the news that print media is dying
out, so I applaud your initiative. You're actually attempting to
capitalize on news subjects rather than lazily moping around, waiting
for advertisers to show up. Most of the other weekly papers covering
events in New York--Time Out, The New Yorker, both of which have
rolled over for us time and again--are quite backwards, compared to
you. They report what's happening in New York out of courtesy, in the
misguided notion that people want to read news instead of page after
page of advertisements disguised as news.

In fact, you've inspired me. Perhaps we should work out rates for
our front vestibule, where your paper sits untouched throughout the
week. That real estate is valuable, after all.

Nice MySpace page, by the way. It's gratifying to learn that your
interests run the gamut from "Money" to "Cash$" to "Beautiful
Expensive gorgeous Things!!!!!"

Get out of my neighborhood.

Sincerely,
Greg Purcell
St. Mark's Bookshop  ¶ 9:48 AM 0 Comments

  Good News and Bad News This is so wonderful it makes me sad to report it's going to wind up in a commercial for Axe in about six months:

  ¶ 4:15 PM 0 Comments

  Guida and Johnston, 9-24-09 Just put the first reading of a three-week marathon of readings to bed. Jim Guida and Devin Johnston were fantastic! Guida's a self-styled aphorist, a bright Australian, and, if the reaction of the female-heavy crowd is to be believed, something of a heartbreaker. There was some hooting. His wit encompasses the following:

"There's a ladder of social esteem which we begin as nonentities, and end by actually winning people's indifference."

"Too many novels boil down to either tourism or real estate."

"It's the gift of a certain type of person to detect tactlessness in anything."

"Awkwardness is collaborative."
--
Johnston is the editor of Flood Editions and a supporter of The Danny's Reading Series when it was in its infancy. So good to see him again, and to hear him read from Creaturely, his new book of essays on the alienness of the natural world:

"Metaphor lies in wait, the world's hidden scaffolding; yet the living bird adapts and evades fixed associations."
--
Next week! It's a reading for The Best of Fence. Got something of a dream team for this one: Alice Bradley, Macgregor Card, Jibade-Khalil Huffman, Jennifer L. Knox, and Paul Killebrew  ¶ 3:40 PM 0 Comments

  First draft done Just finished my first complete science fiction story draft in over a year. I feel a bit hollowed out.

The difficulty of writing a first draft of poetry is holding a line through to a meaningful connection among words. It's a sustained pressure; I want to say it's like sprinting, but let's go farther afield. We'll say it's like, if you haven't done strength training in advance, you'll never be ready for the bizarre vocation of shutting overstuffed suitcases. But once the suitcase is stuffed and the clasp locks, and you determine there are no shirtsleeves poking out, then there's nothing more to be done. You either deliver the bag to its rightful owner (God, a friend, a magazine, a woman), store it away to be rifled through later, or chuck it. That's what writing poetry is like. What is becoming, in poetry, very quickly became; taking a rotten line or two out, you see how the whole project unstacks. I hate to say it's easy. More like, it's easier to disown. There's a fun to it.

My limited experience tells me that writing fiction, especially science fiction, one begins with an engineering trick. Which is a euphemism for a lie one has to work very hard on. It's as if one had to build a bridge starting in the middle of a river, and know whether or not it'll cross the river only after it's finished. With prose, there's just so much of it. It's in bulk. There's a fun to this, too, but it's lonelier and more possessive.

What a weird, niggardly, selfish practice.  ¶ 10:09 AM 0 Comments

  Paff der Zauberdrachen For Mary Travers, of course:

  ¶ 11:28 PM 0 Comments

  Whodini was a steel drivin' man   ¶ 5:44 AM 0 Comments

  For Joe Wilson My swift, inclinatory solution to Rep. Joe Wilson's problems: let the Republican strongholds secede, given that they don't really want to be Americans, anyway (1,2, 3). Give asylum to anyone on that side who can still read and spell their names and who wants such benefits of civilization as flush toilets, paved roads and health care coverage. We get their disproportionately large federal spending back, to spend on communism. Then, we express remorse in a couple of years that their "countries" have devolved into Road Warrior cannibalism.  ¶ 8:02 AM 0 Comments

  Weird Weird to see yourself on the national news. The segment on the bookstore starts at -7:18...

Employers Continue to Cut Jobs


  ¶ 2:38 PM 0 Comments

  One More Comparison

A few more notes I'd like to make re: DS9.

1) When the Battlestar Galactica reboot was around, it was often praised for being an "adult" version of science fiction. Edward James Olmos's contract stipulated that there were to be no "weird" aliens on the show, in order to keep the drama at what he called a human level.

2) I imagine he must have been clicking through cable television and caught a glimpse of Deep Space Nine and shuddered in horror. I'll admit that some of the makeup design on DS9 makes even a hardened geek like myself snort in derision.

2a)(Though the truth is, the weirder it got, more pleasure I had in the snorting).

3) Olmos's point was this: "human" drama equals batshit religious ecstasy combined with militarized fear and paranoia. "Alien nerd" drama equals heterogeneity and democratic governance.

4) Rebuttal: at least the dudes with suitcase handles for noses on DS9 never went crying and drooling all over themselves in spastic paroxysms of "human" drama, show after show, like Adama did. That was the most embarrassing thing I've ever seen on television. Nor was "All Along the Watchtower" ever referenced.

5) A single episode of DS9 would have touched on all the themes of Battlestar Galactica and moved on, finding the characters hopelessly backward -- "human" in Olmos's formulation. BG was a stupider show than people give it credit for.  ¶ 8:28 AM 3 Comments