That was a “tip” one of my regulars (What a guy! Guess he didn’t realize that cash would have gone a long way seeing as I was paying my way through college on tips) gave me when I was a bartender. I’d like to add a tip, never trust that a flight originating from the midwest in the middle of the summer is going to take off on time, OR, better yet, never fly an airline whose mechanics are about to go on strike, and, finally, never trust a travel agent who sends you from New Hampshhire to Atlanta via Detriot.

Was I insane? WHY did I let her book that flight for me? Well, it turns out that it was the only one I could get on Sunday because America is on the move and in the air. And even though it took me seven hours for what could be a 2 hour direct flight, I AM SO GLAD TO BE HOME!!!

And let’s hear it for all of the nice folks I met along the way–the guy who had only been home for six hours in the past two weeks that I met at the bar in Chili’s; Florence, the retired community development professor from Seattle, who used my cell phone to call her nephew (her first time on a cell phone); and the environmental activist guy with the great sense of humor on the plane from Detriot to Atlanta. Hope you all made it safe and sound to your homes, etc.

You would like to think that the love the young women (and men) experience in Alicia Erian’s collection The Brutal Language of Love is not normal–that people don’t really treat each other that way–but it is, they do.

My favorite story in the collection, “Still Life with Plaster,” shows most perfectly how this angry dance keeps marching on, as it gives us a glimpse of Patty and her family and how they love each other and hate each other. This story gives us a reason for maybe why so many of the other people in the other stories allow themselves to be treated the way they do–because of the brutal language of love, where love and hate become synonymous:

I punched Cliff but he just sat there, watching the three of them cry and yell and carry on. They hated each other and lied to each other, and it was probably all Grandpa’s fault. I thought they were very complicated, very smart people, and I wondered if I would ever make anyone mad enough to attack me. So far the only people who hated me were the kids at school, who I didn’t even like. I vowed to find someone I could fight with–someone with a Class 4 license like Dalton’s, who lived in the country and didn’t mind the smell of his own shit. Together we would struggle and tussle and lie, and when it was all over, we would sit down and watch TV while the dog tested our patience from the doorway.

Here’s a link to Erian’s When Animals Attack–a story from the collection, which first appeared in The Barcelona Review.

A couple of things of note before I sign off until Thursday… Happy Birthday to my friends: Beverly Jackson on Sunday and Katrina Denza on Tuesday.

And Happy Anniversary to my beloved. It will be our third anniversary (that’s us on the steps of the church on our wedding day)on Wednesday, but it feels as though only three seconds has passed.

Lisa Glatt’s collection entitled The Apple’s Bruise reads very quickly because the stories are less about plot and more about characterization. This is not to say they aren’t well plotted, rather the characters are so engrossing, so flawed, that they become the story.

The thing that connects these stories, these characters is that tender, shameful part inside of them, that damaged fruit, that bruise–and once they learn to embrace their shame that they begin to grow. Nowhere is this more perfectly explained than in the first story of the collection “Dirty Hannah Gets Hit by a Car”:

And instead of rising from that bench, shouting out or telling the lunch monitor, Hannah’s eyes shot around the room, hoping that no one else witnessed her surprise and humilitation. She picked up the apple from her napkin and without looking at it, took a big, violent bite, juice cascading down both sides of her mouth. She bit right into the apple’s bruise and chewed and chewed, pretending she loved it, pretending that soft brown spot was the very thing she was hungry for, the very thing she craved.

I remember when I first started working on the internet one of the catch phrases was, “content is king”, meaning without content, data, there wouldn’t be so much drive to be online (except for porn, that is) and it seems that phrase is now truer than ever–Web Publishers Eye Your Wallet:

The only thing slowing down the move away from free content is the sorry state of micro-transactional software. Once all the bugs are worked out, the free internet gateway in which publications generate revenue from ads will slowly morph into another, more-lucrative business model: gated content.

Of course, this argument (that eventually all content will be pay-to-read) is not a new one but it seems that now that there are more and more of us hooked to the web as our source of information, that having us pay for it can’t be far behind. It’s the whole pusher giving you your first bag for free analogy.

Now, while on the one hand, I’m sad that so much of the news I read may no longer be free, on the ohter hand, I’m excited for what this might mean for writers (both journalists and creative writers) in regards to what they get paid for their words (many of the freelance contracts one gets for writing pay one flat rate for the rights of the story, allowing the publisher to put it both in print and online). I wonder, if pay-for-content becomes a model for news publishers, what this will mean for literary ezines?

A new issue of FRiGG is live. Please go on and read it. Prepare to be wowed.

I wasn’t sure how I was going to feel about Laura Moriarty’s debut novel, The Center of Everything, when I began reading it. The cover and inside pages were slathered with praise. This sort of adulation always leaves me on edge and wondering whether the book is really worthy, as I hate being told by marketeers how to think about something or how I should feel about it. And yet, in this case, I would have to say that the adulation was correct, and maybe even not as high-praise as it should be.

Told from the POV of Evelyn Bucknow in Kerrville, Kansas, who ages from 10 to 18 as the story progresses, the narrative navigates through the Reagan years in America, including the beginning awareness of AIDs, the demonization of welfare moms (of which Evelyn’s mother is one), Nancy Reagan’s “Just say NO to drugs” campaign, an Evangelical backlash against teaching evolution in schools, an increase of poverty and decrease of federal aid, teenage pregnancy, the Iran-Contra scandal, etc. etc. And what we see is that these times are not so very different as the ones we live in now. But this book is about more than politics and social status, it is also about coming of age, falling in love, learning to forgive.

As Evelyn witnesses the changes in the world around her, her center branches out from her mother, to Kansas, to Jesus, to the Earth, to the Universe and back again as she learns that inequity is not written in stone, that we can overcome our hardships, and that we can believe in more than one thing and still love those who think the answers are black or white:

He had stood on a chair one day and moved the little Earth in his classroom around the electric sun, his hand clutching the bottom like he was changing a lightbulb. He kept it tilted on its axis, so we could see how sometimes, depending on where the Earth was in its orbit, the light and heat fo the sun would shine more brightly on the Northern Hemisphere, and then later, more on the Southern. If the Earth weren’t tilted like this, he said, there wouldn’t be seasons. He made the earth straight up and down and moved it around the sun to show us what this would look like, the band of light around the equator unchanging as he moved around the room. But this way, he said, tilting it back, everybody gets some light.

This is not simply a story told of a child growing up in the Midwest in the 80s, it goes deeper than that as Moriarty weaves metaphor and allusion so subtly that they might be missed to show us how it feels to be this child, the one wanting, on the outside. And with that we are brought back to a place where we might have been that one watching as the boy she loves falls in love with her best friend, the pretty girl:

Travis rolls his eyes, unwrapping his hamburger. He offers us his french fries, and I notice, the way you notice that you might be coming down with a sore throat but maybe not, that he keeps looking at Deena.

And it is also the story of a how Evelyn comes to love her mother again, despite her faults. How she witnesses her mother’s rebirth as she teaches her son, Evelyn’s little brother, how to communicate:

There is ice cream and chocolate syrup on the carpet, and it will be difficult to clean. But I say nothing. I know this is amazing, what I am seeing before me. It is just a small thing, him feeding himself, just a little something he has learned, something she has taught him.

But if she could teach him this, then there is no telling what else is there, wrapped up inside him like a present, and outside of him as well.

More than just the story, what I admired about this book was Moriarty’s skill as a writer. I was quite taken not only with her ability to deliver a flawless child narrator but also to add so much physicality to the text, writing movement so that it is completely visible. There were just a few bumps along the road of this book (maybe where the editing could have been stronger, cutting out such phrases as “wave of nausea”–come on, people! Can we not let “wave of nausea” and bile rising in throats go??? Is there not something fresher we can use to describe wanting to throw up???) but on the whole I found this book incredibly strong. In fact, this book touched so many of my personal hotspots that I found it hard to break away from it in the end.

Next Tuesday, July 26th, my pal Alia Yunis is taking part in a reading as part of her PEN fellowship. So, if you are in or around LA, please take the time to check it out.

Below are the details:

Los Angeles Public Library and PEN Center USA present
“Readings by the Emerging Voices Rosenthal Fellows”
Tuesday July 26th, 7 p.m.
Mark Taper Auditorium, Downtown Central Library
630 West 5th Street, Los Angeles
Free Admission
Reservations Highly Recommended

The Los Angeles Public Library and PEN Center USA present an evening of readings by the Emerging Voices Rosenthal Fellows, the participants in PEN’s renowned program of literary mentorship, Wednesday, July 26th, at 7 p.m. in the Mark Taper Auditorium of the Downtown Central Library at 630 West 5th Street. Hosted by acclaimed novelist LESLIE SHWARTZ, the program will feature novelists CYNTHIA BOND, JAWANZA DUMISANI, QEVIN OJI, and ALIA YUNIS, and non-fiction authors ROBBIE FRANDSEN and LAN TRAN. Admission is free. Parking is $7 in the library garage at 524 S. Flower St. Call (213) 365-8500 for more information.

Now in its tenth year, Emerging Voices is an eight-month program involving one-on-one sessions with mentors, workshops with established writers and editors, classes in the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program, literary readings, meetings with local writers and literary professionals and teaching residencies in Los Angeles community centers or libraries. Writers are recommended by community-based arts organizations or apply at large. This year’s mentors and instructors are CHRIS ABANI, JENOYNE ADAMS, MARIA AMPARO ESCANDON, ELLEN SLEZAK, CARLA LAZZARESCHI, KEVIN STARR, and LESLIE SCHWARTZ. Other authors and literary professionals who volunteered their time to the program were Betsy Amster, Kate Gale, Donna Hilbert, Judith Searle, Teena Apeles, Andrea Richards, John Rechy, Hope Edelman, Noel Alumit.

Host Leslie Schwartz is the author of two novels, Jumping the Green and Angels Crest. She teaches writing at UCLA Extension and privately through her company West Coast Writers Workshops. She has been an Emerging Voices mentor for the last three years and is also the reporter for the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses in New York City.

Since Emerging Voices’ inception in 1996, past program participants have gone on to receive book deals with major publishers (Henry Holt, Simon and Schuster, MacAdam Cage), produce a national bestseller (Jenoyne Adams’ Resurrecting Mingus) and an award-winning novel (Noël Alumit’s Letters to Montgomery Clift), receive notable fellowships and grants (Sundance Creative Writing Fellowships, Durfee Foundation Artist Award, La Napoule Residency, among others), and see their work published in numerous literary magazines, journals, anthologies and national newspapers. Emerging Voices is made possible in part by grants and donations from the Rosenthal Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, UCLA Extension Writers’ Program, the Library Foundation of Los Angeles, The Entertainment Industry Foundation and individual PEN members.

PEN Center USA, founded in 1943, is part of an international organization of professional writers created in 1921 to defend freedom of expression and foster a vital literary community worldwide. PEN USA sponsors a wide range of ongoing programs and participates in human rights campaigns on behalf of censored and imprisoned writers.

The Los Angeles Public Library serves the largest population in the nation with its Central Library, 67 branch libraries and four bookmobiles.

I love the writing of George Singleton. Love it. His stories are honest, humorous, and often heartbreaking. He does not disappoint with his story John Cheever, Rest in Peace in the Spring 2005 issue of The Georgia Review. Here’s a snippet to wet your whistle:

Owe’s parents named him Owen, but some kind of snafu at Graywood Regional Memorial caused the birth certificate to come back “Owe Posey.” His parents saw it as a sign and never fought the defect. Throughout his life, upon introducing himself, people thought he couldn’t finish a sentence beyond pronoun and verb. Owe would say, “I’m Owe,” and they’d expect him to continue—“I’mo go into town for a while,” or “I’mo buy me a flyswatter and put some entomologists out of business,” or “I’mo get me a beer—you want one?”

Ooooooh. I just found an excellent tool: cliché finder.

Hurrah!:

Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, the creative talent behind cult comedy hit “The Office,” have come up with another winner in their brilliant new six-part series “Extras.”

Read a great interview with Miranda July in the Summer 2005 issue of BOMB in which she says:

The same day I got into the Sundance Film Festival I also got an email from the head programmer and it just said “Macaroni.” And at first I just laughed and then suddenly began sobbing. Granted, I was editing 24-7 and completely sleep-deprived, but it seemed in that moment that I had broken through and gotten the only thing I’ve ever really wanted: unequivocal proof that the message was received.