Steve Almond was there and he gave me a small, self-published book comprised of one section of very short essays about writing and one section of short-short stories, micro-fiction. His book is called This Won’t Take But A Minute, Honey and it has two covers and you have to turn it upside down when changing between the fiction and the essays. One cover, the essays, is a nurse gripping a large hypodermic as if it were a knife, while the cover for the fiction displays the legs and hand of a woman holding a whip. I haven’t read the stories yet.  The essays are almost all less than a page with titles like, “Metaphors Almost Always Suck” and “Fuck Style, Tell The Truth” and “Excessive Emotional Involvement is the Whole Point.” I’ve been paging through, between reading The Savage Detectives, which is clearly going to take a very long time. In other words I have two books, a book full of writing and a book about writing. Still, I like Steve Almond, maybe too much, and it’s comforting to hear his voice. I have excellent taste in father figures and male role models. I’m attracted to kind men who donate their time to good causes, and brutal, inconsistent women, often needlessly cruel and selfish or full of love that they yank like a rug or that switches without warning into a mindless and violent rage. I’m not talking about the women who are friends. I have very good taste in friends. And I’m sure that some Freudian could make sense of my attraction bordering on desire for the men who resemble my mother and the women who resemble my father, but they’d be making something up. Telling stories. And there are better stories than those.

I’m on an Amtrak, there’s a wood and the trees are naked and the ground covered in orange leaves. Then the wood becomes dense and, from high enough, all those trees probably resemble a lake, but on the ground, passing quickly, occasionally I can glimpse a house. And the sky is grey, winter grey, with no threat of rain. Outside the weather is cold and steady, at least based on the colors from inside this cabin.

And I was thinking last night about celebrity, and how you’re only famous to people that have heard of you, and how the majority of people will never care no matter how well known you become. The door to the green room said, “Artists Only” and I didn’t like that. I was thinking about celebrity as Rhett Miller from the Old 97s took the stage. He spoke for five minutes about how he really just wanted to impress AC Newman, who was also in attendance. And then he sang songs and his voice was so beautiful, especially when he was joined by the band and took off his guitar and crooned David Bowie’s Five Years. I thought, That man is a rockstar. His hair was almost feathered, the top of his shirt was slightly open, just enough to be accessible. He wore his clothes in a way that said, “I love you” and also “if you have a knife plunge it in,” (but only metaphorically). And AC Newman, whose band The New Pornographers is one of my favorite, was not really a rock star. Not in comparison. But it’s all intertwined and nobody was overshadowing anybody. I also had this thought, That we were grown men (there were no women on the bill) in our thirties and late thirties and forties, but we were behaving like children. Not bad children, but there we were. We had held onto our youth and it was best not to delude ourselves about what that meant. Some of us might even be re-patterning our youth into something less fierce, less dark, more forgiving, more sexual, like a redrawn comic (I only say that because of an image I have of a tight red skirt made of plastic or latex drawn by R. Crumb). And also, it was New York, so that accounts for a lot. In New York there’s always something to do so it’s just as easy not to do anything. But everyone, everywhere, is in awe of someone.

The pretty waitress complimented my reading and I traded her a copy of my book for a sloppy joe.

Today is a day spent mostly on a train, which is very relaxing. You can’t get online and there’s nothing to do but read and write and stare out the window contemplating the scenery. Now a row of log cabins, now a road with no cars, now a field waiting for the season to return.

I saw my agent in the subway this morning. I was on my way to Boston and he was on his way somewhere closer. He was reassuring me about something, probably the future. It was then I realized I didn’t need to be reassured. I was basically satisfied (if just for a moment). I liked my editor (of course, I wouldn’t say if I didn’t, I know the bastard reads these notes), I was proud of my book, I was giving readings in people’s living rooms, readings which felt, when things were going right, like an extension of the book itself.

And it’s right as I’m writing this that the train passes another field, an unlikely field in New England in the fall, that is so green it’s like a goddam wool Gap sweater. Green like flourescence, or algae, or a fucking frog.

**

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Last night I gave a reading at bookstore in Hudson with Daniel Nester and Nick Flynn. Actually, we read to each other and the bookstore owner and three friend’s of Daniel’s and also one of Daniel’s old students who happened to be walking by. Daniel grabbed the student and said something like, “So, you’re here for the reading.” The student said he wasn’t. That it all sounded very interesting but he was on his way to get something to eat. Daniel pointed out, correctly, that he could get something to eat and bring it back to the bookstore, which is also a bar. We would wait.

Then, we drove to Catskill, where we were also supposed to read. Nick called it the crack capital of America, but I thought it looked nice. But then, South Central also looks nice when you’re just passing through, all those low, colorful houses. It doesn’t resemble anything like a war zone. That was the great thing about Cabrini Green and the Robert Taylor homes in Chicago. You could see it, rising from the ground, daring you to walk inside. There was a density of population in those buildings that was undeniable, that spilled out into the court yards with its arms crossed and stood on the slabs of cement leading to the heavy doors. You knew intuitively the elevators didn’t work in those buildings. Though if you looked closer the people out front often seemed to be having a good time. But there was danger in those buildings, maybe not every day, but often enough. That the thing about violence, if you lived in a building where someone got shot a few times a year you would have a hard time sleeping, and the lack of sleep would take its toll, even if the majority of the time you were just hanging around. And you took one look at those buildings- the Taylor homes on the other side of the 94 staring bitterly across the highway, which was like a river (a man-made river built intentionally) separating them from Bridgeport, the South Side Irish, and Comisky Park, and the people that have run Chicago for decades, and the bars there where they didn’t serve black people. Imagine, a bar on the south side of Chicago that didn’t serve black people? It’s like opening a Klan office on the first floor of the NAACP headquarters.

Anyway, we were in Catskill, which is in the “lower Catskills” and there was a fundraiser for a new lo-fi radio station. They’d gotten a grant from the government, most likely the Department of Homeland Security, but they had to come up with some matching funds. There was a poet who did a kind of bebop thing while his daughter plucked away on a strange, tightly wound instrument (I think they call it “flux poetry” but I’m not sure). The poem he read had a certain rhythm and rhyme to it, but it reminded me a little bit of Earth Day one year in Grant Park when I was homeless and I got on a bus full of hippies and traded some of my acid for some of their vegetarian chili and one of the hippy girls, who was probably ten years older than me, but I was only fourteen, said something about taking me home and giving me a place to sleep for a while. But she didn’t. A lot of people failed to bring me home that year.

At the fundraiser there was also a video installation and all sorts of music. Sparrow was there doing his performance poetry. There were two separate rooms with two stages going at once. It was really a happening. A fantastic blend of art and performance. For some reason I was the last reader scheduled. I didn’t introduce my book except to say it was a memoir and that I was reading something new every time so if they didn’t like what I read they shouldn’t worry about it. Then I read a part toward the end where I’m dating three women and the trial is coming to a close and I’m talking about murder and I’m also describing S&M in heavy detail. And there is a line where the woman who has tied me up becomes my mother and my mother wraps her hand around my penis. Even as I was reading I was wondering what I would do when I reached that line. But I knew I had to look up, meet their eyes. Put it on them.

After, close to midnight, we found a place where we could get a large mushroom and anchovy pizza and a yoo-hoo chocolate drink. Which is how I ended up here on a farm thinking I could really get into this. Reading Bolano still (forever?). Thinking about the infrarealists and their manifesto. How Bolano committed to traveling (at least through his twenties, which, frankly, is nothing) and how Bolano kept losing teeth as he traveled. Like breadcrumbs, he said, so he could find his way home. And I think I don’t want to go home. I want to stay in this farm house. I could get some real writing done. But this is a life of leisure. Who would pay for it? I don’t want to fix the house up or deal with the mouse problem. But that’s writing anyway. You make your money here and there and what it pays for is stretches of time where you don’t work and the lower your expenses the longer the stretches of time. So you have to either marry well or stay childless and alone. Or you have to come from money, which is basically unforgivable, unless you go out of your way to marry a poor writer, preferably a poet.

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The reading had been written up in all the local newspapers but that turns out not to mean anything to anyone, unless you’re in New York, where it matters for a different reason, where a literary event can become a place to be. The only people in attendance were members of the poetry group that was sponsoring me, and they had been at war with the bookstore owner for some time.

When the reading was done we retreated to the pizzeria across the street for cheese pizza, wine, beer, and sprite. Then we went back to my host’s house and talked for awhile. Her husband is a fascinating man who makes his own bows and arrows to go hunting. He described waiting in a tree for his prey, a hawk landing in the branch next to him. He edits a magazine and, on the side, downloads patents and designs for antique guns which he makes copies of and sells on eBay. Everything he said was interesting.

The conversation in the living room revolved around a poetry anthology, sponsorship, and the bookstore owner. I wasn’t worried about the bookstore owner; I sold my books. But these were important conflicts in the Connecticut poetry world. The poets decided while still in the pizzeria they would no longer hold their events in the cafe next to the bookstore. It had gone too far. The bookstore owner was killing literature. It reminded me of Bolano.

Well, everything reminds me of Bolano now. I’m 200 pages into The Savage Detectives, following Nazi Literature in the Americas and 2666. It’s hard to imagine anything else. What’s at stake with Bolano’s poets? Everything. And the way these poets in Connecticut talked about the bookstore owner it was like the final battle between good and evil. Of course, I wanted them to win. I was given a history of the readings series, fifteen years, the longest running series in the state. In 1997 they hosted the National Poetry Slam Championships, a defining moment in the slam movement, attended, unhappily, by Marc Smith from Chicago, the creator of the original poetry slam. Recently, one of the poets had committed suicide. The Connecticut poets had wanted to distribute his books free of charge, but the bookstore owner had stopped them. How had she stopped them? The same way Lupe’s pimp laid siege in The Savage Detectives, by parking his camaro outside Quim Font’s house and waiting. It was surreal, actually, that a group of people could be stopped by one mean old lady, that it required meetings to decide how to fight back. In other words, surreal, but real. Matters of very large consequence. A small matter that loomed large over an entire region’s literary identity and the area’s next great writer, who would undoubtably pass through this group in one form or another.

Here’s something Bolano said in a talk called Literature + illness = illness:

While we search for the antidote or the medicine to cure us, the new, that which can only be found in the unknown, we must continue to turn to sex, books, and travel, even knowing they will lead us into the abyss, which, as it happens, is the only place we can find the cure.

I read that and I think about Bolano and my quixotic journey back and forth across America funded by the difference between the wholesale price of my book and the reduced price I sell it for in people’s homes, and things start to make sense. It makes sense even that I went home with a woman the other night in New York, a young, beautiful writer who looked like she came from the ocean and could quote passages of my work back to me. She stood near the table following my event, forcing people to purchase my books. I had never met someone who loved my work so much. She said she was writing a paper about me and had planned to attend every reading I gave in New York, but that proved impossible so she approached me and later we took a cab to her apartment in Brooklyn where she lived with her two children, whom she had left upstairs with the neighbor.

She asked me what I wanted and why I came home with her. I said I didn’t know, and she had asked me to. Then we fell asleep. Then I woke up and we called a car service to take me back to my friend’s in Manhattan. There was some other world where I spent the rest of my life with the mermaid and her children, but that world is not this world. Still…

Something else from The Savage Detectives:

You can woo a girl with a poem, but you can’t hold on to her with a poem. Not even with a poetry movement.

The point is, this was just one girl, but that will probably never happen again. And I left without ever meeting her children, though I saw their drawings scattered on the living room floor. And Bolano wrote about the medicine of travel and the abyss but in fact his travels were over by the time he was my age. He was married and there were children and so he locked himself in a room and wrote all day. In other words, he had taken all he could take from the abyss and was living under death sentence from a liver disease. He was worried not about life but about what he would leave behind, the work and also the money for his family.

I’m not quite done with the abyss, though I approach with a familiarity that makes it easier, and a purpose, even if it’s meaningless, to sell a dozen books every night to a group of strangers. Driving north from Connecticut to Hudson the streets are cold and wet and full of leaves. And it’s quite beautiful, the grey fog on top of the mountains to the west and the farmhouses and green hills. But it’s not as beautiful as San Francisco.

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