Well Buk

Well Buk

Things aren’t going so well

Almost ready to pull some of your books down from the shelf

Well Buk

Things aren’t going so well

And here I am writing a poem

The more things change…

Bullshit, you’d say

And you’d be right

Buk, I’m sitting here in a house I might not be able to continue to afford

(You’d laugh, O you’d laugh!)

I’m thinking of that late spring night in Spokane

In that shitty apartment with the shitty roommate

I was drinking Boone’s Farm, strawberry I think

And the shitty roommate told me to turn on the radio

He’d entered my name in a drawing because he’d already entered himself earlier

So I did

And the DJ said my name

I’d won $50 without doing anything

Mentally I was already converting that $50 to Boone’s and Lucky Strikes

When the DJ said as a winner I was now entered in a grand prize drawing

Big deal, I thought

But damned if I didn’t win that grand prize a few days later

A thousand bucks

Used it to get out of Spokane and start this life

Went from Boone’s Farm to wine with corks and gave up the smokes eventually

You woulda laughed, o you woulda laughed!

Well Buk I quit writing for a few years there but started up again

Stories this time, rarely poems

Been doing it for over a decade now

Nothing like what I wrote in those Spokane days

When the ghosts in my haunted head were much more interesting

And I could feel the vastness of the stars

I still feel that vastness, sometimes

The Grim Reaper touch isn’t that far away, probably

Which is why I think it was probably dumb to give up the smokes

Win some, lose some I guess

But I tell you Buk

Spokane was some fucked-up shit for sure

Yet I miss the realness of it

Everything seems so vague now

Guess that’s what they call maturity

I miss the lover’s touch and the fire of mind

Don’t really miss the Boone’s Farm, though, or the shitty roommate

Call it a draw, then

This is an old man poem, Buk

A looking-back poem

I thought I was an old man then

I guess we all feel old, all the time

I wrote a story last month, Buk

Pretty decent one I thought

Got all ready to submit it

And realized it didn’t have a happy ending and the kid didn’t live

So there’s no market for it

That’s how it is now, Buk

Happy endings are good

Weird endings are ok

Bleak endings don’t have a market

The kid in Cujo would make it today

And no one reads poetry

Shit Buk, maybe I’m not doing so well

But I’m still writing

This poem is in longhand, even (like those old Spokane days)

My handwriting is terrible but at least I don’t have the shakes

I curbed my excesses, Buk

Decided I wanted to live after all

So I can’t complain

But I tell ya, Buk

I really miss the smokes.

--4/25/16

looking at the latter-day Stephen King bibliography

I am a Constant Reader. I have been since that fateful day in fifth grade when I descended into the dark basement of the town library where all the fiction was shelved and selected a hardback book from the dusty shelves, the jacket of which with its bold letters and screaming, open-mouthed skull simply looked to me like the greatest thing ever. The novel was Christine, and that afternoon I took it home and read it in one sitting (actually one lying down) on my grandparents couch. From that day onward Stephen King was one of my favorite writers, and any other writers who hold that title have been in my life a shorter period. From that first reading of Christine to finishing a re-read of Everything’s Eventual last night, King has been a constant (heh) presence in my literary life. I read every new book as it comes out, re-read at least one novel a year, and re-read some of his short stories several times a year. Yeah, I’m a Constant Reader.

For some completely random reason, while driving to work this morning I started thinking about King’s latter-day output. If you like King, your favorite works (most likely encountered in your youth) were probably written in the 70s or 80s. Maybe you stopped following him in the 90s (I honestly did for a while, though I continued to re-read the older works.) Maybe you came back to him in the 00s, or maybe you didn’t. His books are still everywhere, but certainly not as ubiquitous as they were in the 80s. While the last ten years have seen King acknowledged as one of the greats (regardless of genre) and his books quite often get favorable reviews now, I have a feeling that, in some ways, the actual works are flying a bit under the radar. Or put another way: what is a King book in 2016? A tale well told, certainly, but do you compare everything with the towering achievements earlier in his career? Do you come to it as comfort food, so familiar with his tics that you don’t even notice if he experiments, pushes himself as a writer? Is he too prolific?

I’m not going to pretend to answer these questions, most of which are subjective and don’t have a real answer anyway. What I want to do is look at the last 11 years of his work and shoot the shit about it. See, you can do all kind of rigorous academic analysis on King if you want but that just seems so at odds with what his work is and what it represents to me as a reader. Fortunately, I’m incapable of that kind of writing. (This will become obvious.) This post is just going to be me rambling on about the works covering 2005-2015. I’d guess I’d have a lot to say about some of ‘em and not a lot about others. I chose 11 years as a cutoff because The Dark Tower series “ended” (The Wind through the Keyhole aside) in 2004 with the publication of the seventh book and it seemed to me that, with that millstone finally off from around his neck, King felt free to once again just write whatever he wanted. Also, I didn’t want to have to discuss The Dark Tower series. As a Constant Reader, I certainly have opinions, but any discussion of said monolith would be as long as the series itself and not as fun. This is supposed to be fun—we are just having a couple of beers, there’s some background noise in the bar, and neither the fate of the world nor our academic careers hang in balance. Anyway, here we go.

The Colorado Kid (2005)

What an odd title to start with! This book is a slight (184 pages) crime novel published exclusively in paperback by Hard Case Crime, a great little publisher that specializes in hardboiled noir crime fiction by overlooked/forgotten pulp writers as well as a smattering of newer authors. It probably reads less like King than almost any other novel of his I’ve read. This must be one of the great things about being successful on the level he is: you can do a project like this without worrying about any repercussions, financial or critical. And you can use your name to bring attention to a worthy, less mainstream publisher.

But does the book work? Slight is the word I keep coming back to. King is generally incapable of poor characterization and that is what carries the book. The plot is thin and secondary. I can’t say that the pace is brisk despite the novel’s brevity. I think it is really for hardcore Constant Readers only, or for those curious to see King write in a different genre. It is the polar opposite of The Dark Tower and if anything proves that King is capable of going outside the box and leveraging new tools.

taking stock

Too many projects or not enough? Until this year, my routine has been to focus on one story through two drafts or until it was clear to me it wasn't working, then on to the next story. I rarely worked on multiple pieces at once, though I was and still am not averse to jotting down occasional notes/lines. If they speak to me strongly enough, they'll hang around until I get to them.

Having decided to submit some of my work this year, the whole process has changed. First, I do not believe any of my work is near publishable after two drafts. So anything I think I might want to submit needs intensive rewriting. Which is necessary and fine, but it also means I'm working on stories I've already told and the new ones still want to be heard. So I've tried to carve some time for those as well. The net result is I've probably written more on a pure volume scale than at any time since I drafted my last (terrible!) novel a decade ago. 

Every day I question the value of my work. I've had one story in circulation since February; three rejections and that's fine. (I will be the most shocked person in the world if anything I write gets accepted somewhere.) The more important question is what am I learning from the process; am I becoming a better writer? One would hope so. I don't mind submitting my work and I don't mind going through the oftentimes hell of rewrites. It's the time spent looking for markets that I find exhausting. Most of the markets I've found are way out of my league, and the more appropriate ones are overloaded. But I go after the appropriate ones anyway. I imagine building a list over time will alleviate the problem somewhat. 

The new stuff I've worked on this year, perhaps as a result of revisiting my old stuff, is not like any of my prior work. The bulk of it, for starters, doesn't even really fit in the weird/horror category where most of my stories live. Perhaps it will as it mutates (heh) but I don't think so. This writing seems to be serving two functions for me: a)helping me creatively deal with a life that has been, truthfully, rather difficult for a while and looks to continue to be for the near future and b)bringing me back to the joy I got out of writing before feeling like it had to have a purpose beyond simply creating. 

I'll be honest: at least once I day I want to burn everything I've written. At least once I day I hate my mind and myself. At least once a day I want to run away from everything. It's easier to shine if you're standing in a dimmer light, no? I figure the doubt about the validity of the work just comes with territory. I know I'm not all that talented. And maybe that's why I pushed myself to submit work this year--not for validation (seriously, the validation has to first come from yourself--everything is else is frosting on the cake), but to ensure I'm still growing as a writer. It is not a craft you master: it's a craft you continually learn, and if you plug your ears...well, your deafness will be reflected in the work.

So I plug away, like every writer ever. I'm not much given to illusions, and these days I'm not much given to dreams. But I've got these stories I'd like to tell...

the lines on the wall look like a peregrine falcon diving after its prey (II)

A continuation of Messy Room, re-titled and growing. Writing free of pressure, writing because writing is what I do. Most of this has been composed by hand late in the evening.

Lying in bed he felt the pain in his back. A stiff shot of hurt that originated in the middle of his spine and rose to encompass all the space beneath his shoulders, like a painting of a phoenix rising. It never hurt during the day, when he was upright. Sitting was fine, standing was fine. Lying down was what flicked the pain switch from Off to On. Maybe he stretched too hard at the office when he leaned back in his chair and raised his hands over his head, a practice he did multiple times a day unconsciously. Maybe his bones were rotting. When it hurt like this he imagined steel replacing his bones. Like a Giger creation but minus the interlocking vaginas and penises. The steel would be cold. Not even the muscle, blood and viscera surrounding could warm it. The cold would replace the back pain with a deeper ache. His movements would stiffen, not that they were fluid now. Unlike bone, steel was unyielding. If he strained hard enough his skin would stretch and tear apart, like tight plastic wrap penetrated and dragged by a fork. Envisioning this helped him go to sleep before his wife came to bed, though he of course knew the pain was originating in muscle, not bone. Most mornings when he awoke he could barely move and tears mixed with the sleep in his eyes and made it impossible to see. A hot shower erased the pain and cleared his eyes. Paying the water bill was never a problem.

The boxes, now those scared him. There were so many cluttering his living room now. Mostly from Amazon or other online retailers, though there were a few from the local grocery store as well. All of the boxes were empty. When they arrived they had contained things he thought he needed. Sometimes this remained true but often he found he didn’t need anything in the boxes after all. He threw these unneeded things away or donated them to friends and charities. The boxes remained. He couldn’t bring himself to recycle them or even break them down so they’d lay flat and he’d have more room. They were all over the place, in front of the windows, blocking out the sun. They were a fire hazard. They scared him, yes, but he took no action. It wasn’t actually the boxes that scared him. It was their emptiness. A container that no longer contained anything. He thought of putting something in them, utilizing them for storage. This solution would not work, however, as he owned nothing that needed storing. So they remained, neatly stacked, waiting. He largely abandoned his living room, choosing to spend most of his time in the bedroom, bathroom or kitchen, which remained free of boxes for the time being. He was also waiting.

In the breakroom at work there are paper cups with inspirational quotes and poorly drawn portraits of the person to whom the quote is attributed, clearly done on a computer by someone with minimal design skills. These cups are supposed to inspire he and his co-workers to innovate and change their mindset and other buzzword topics which ultimately translate to a directive to make the shareholders more money. One of his coworkers defaces a cup every day by adding to the quotation or crossing it out and changing it altogether. The most popular of these defaced cups features Gandhi. His quote is crossed out and replaced with a quote from Conan the Barbarian who, when asked what is best in life, replies “To crush your enemies -- See them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women!” It was marginally more inspiring than the Gandhi quote but he still did his job the same way every day and collected a paycheck every two weeks as the cups choked up landfills even though they were supposedly compostable. The night janitorial staff threw them all into the same bag which went into the trash dumpster. Except for the defaced cups, which sat in a line on the breakroom counter for almost a month before disappearing. It was thought that a SLT (Senior Leadership Team) member saw them and ordered their removal, but no one knew for sure. The poorly drawn quotation cups remained, and it was gradually realized they would never go away.