12 Days of Miserable Christmas Songs: "Sister Winter" by Sufjan Stevens

Breeds of Misery: Lovelorn revery, clinical depression, seasonal affective disorder

Best/Worst Verse: "All my friends, I've returned to sister winter. All my friends, I apologize, apologize..."

Of all of Sufjan Stevens' extensive Christmastime EP songology - now enclosed in two lovingly and intimately presented box sets (which you can find here and here; you're welcome) - this is perhaps my favorite offering. It's beautiful, evocative, and intensely sad. I've always thought it almost read like an immaculately conceived suicide letter. At the very least it's a reminder, as we feast on the joys of the holiday, that Winter Is Coming. As Stevens says in his liner notes to the second box set: "This is the true horror-show catharsis of Christmas: the existential emptiness that perseveres in the heart of modern man as he recklessly pursues his search for happiness and comes up empty handed."

12 Days of Miserable Christmas Songs: "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer" by Elmo & Patsy

Breeds of Misery: Matricide, bereavement, hero debasement

Best/Worst Verse: "When we found her Christmas morning at the scene of the attack, she had hoof prints on her forehead and incriminating claws (Claus) marks on her back."

OK, perhaps too obvious. But man, what a horrific situation for a humorous holiday novelty song. And it gets even darker if those are Claus marks, not claws marks, on her back. (Apparently, someone created a direct-to-video animated adaptation in 2000, which I have not seen but seems to blend the song with It's A Wonderful Life and (SPOILER ALERT) brings back Grandma at the end. Cowards.)

12 Days of Miserable Christmas Songs: "Loser Makes Good" by Everclear

Breeds of Misery: Addiction, self-pity, getting old, existential despair

Best/Worst Verse: "You say it's Christmas Eve? That don't mean nothing to me. Just another fucked up day, just another waste of time."

I first heard this song, about a 35-year-old heroin addict, when it came out in 1993. I was in college and somehow empathized with lines like "You smartass college fuck, act like you think you're tough. I was just like you, more proud than you could know. You think you pity me? Yeah, I'll kick your ass if you pity me." (I think I especially loved that they were playing primarily to college-town audiences.) I probably over-idolized Art Alexakis's street cred as a recovering addict, and envisioned myself romantically as either him or Jim Carroll by the time I was 35. What a disappointment I've been.

12 Days of Miserable Christmas Songs

On a whim, I've decided to do "12 Days of Miserable Christmas Songs" - you know, those tunes that exult in the loneliness, heartache, and selfishness characteristic of our most maudlin American holiday. I'll be posting one a day starting on 12/13, and go through to Christmas Eve. Viva, Les Miserables! (Yes, that's Franish, or Spench.)

Marshall Berman on Baudelaire, boulevards, and urban protest

I'm currently obsessively reading All That Is Solid Melts into Air, underlining seemingly half the book while nodding in agreement. I love this passage that I just read, from his essay on Baudelaire, "Modernism in the Streets: The Mire of the Macadam":

"[Baudelaire] finds to his amazement that the aura of artistic purity and sanctity is only incidental, not essential to art, and that poetry can thrive just as well, and maybe even better, on the other side of the boulevard, in those low, 'unpoetic' places...One of the paradoxes of modernity, as Baudelaire sees it here, is that its poets will become more deeply and authentically poetic by becoming more like ordinary men...The 'bad poet' in this world is the poet who hopes to keep his purity intact by keeping it off the streets, free from the risks of traffic. Baudelaire wants works of art that will be born in the midst of the traffic, that will spring from its anarchic energy, from the incessant danger and terror of being there, from the precarious pride and exhilaration of the man who has survived so far...His mouvements brusques, those sudden leaps and swerves so crucial for everyday survival in the city streets, turn out to be sources of creative power as well. In the century to come, these moves will become paradigmatic gestures of modernist art and thought."

The "century to come" is now past, but this spirit still drives me and thousands of other urban writers, artists, filmmakers, musicians, and thinkers. But then Berman goes further, envisioning the present-day uprisings in Hong Kong, Ferguson and my beloved NYC while recounting the many people on the streets of the Twentieth Century:

"[F]rom Baudelaire's time to our own - the boulevard will be abruptly transformed into the stage for a new primal modern scene. This will not be the sort of scene that Napoleon or Haussmann [or Robert Moses or Rudy Guiliani or various police departments would like to see, but nonetheless one that their mode of urbanism will have helped to make.

"As we reread the old histories, memoirs and novels, or regard the old photos or newsreels, or stir our own fugitive memories of 1968, we will see whole classes and masses move into the street together. We will be able to discern two phases in their activity. At first the people stop and overturn the vehicles in their path, and set the horses free: here they are avenging themselves on the traffic by decomposing it into its inert original elements. Next they incorporate the wreckage they have created into their rising barricades: they are recombining the isolated, inanimate elements into vital new artistic and political forms. For one luminous moment, the multitude of solitudes that make up the modern city come together into a new kind of encounter, to make a people."

What I'm thankful for

Tonight, boarding the F train with my stepdad on our way back from Thanksgiving dinner in Jersey with family, I walked into a wall of stench. Specifically, piss. Like, the kind of stink you carry with you, lingering in your nostrils even while you write about it two hours later.

We'd hopped onto this particular car after seeing a row of open seats, and quickly saw the reason they were open: a homeless man, slumped over his seat with an open container of food someone had given him, probably leftovers from someone's Thanksgiving dinner. It looked like potatoes and cabbage, and he was eating it with his fingers, slurping and smacking his lips, never looking up even as more than one person slipped dollar bills into the hand he wasn't eating with.

I wasn't one of these people. I don't know if I resented the intense smell or just thought my assistance would be overkill, but I just looked at him - ok, I stared at him, and thought about sitting on the F train two days earlier with my five-year-old daughter, when a man with no legs wheeled into our car shaking a soup can. I gave this man my pocket change, and he said, "Thanks man, God bless you an' your girl on these holidays." I said, "Take care, man."

As he was wheeling away, my daughter asked, "What happened to his legs?" I said, "I don't know."

She asked, "Why did you have to give him money?" I said, "I didn't have to."

"Then why did you?" she asked. "I don't know," I replied, "Maybe because he looked like he needed it?"

"How come some people aren't giving him money?" "Everyone can choose."

"When he gets done," she concluded, "I think he'll have a lot of money." "Or," I added, "just enough for today."

When I was a freshman in junior college, I didn't have any money. My tuition was paid by a Pell grant and a small athletic scholarship, none of which ended up in my pockets. Because of this, and/or because I didn't really think personal hygiene applied to one's feet, I only washed my socks once each semester that year. Did I mention my scholarship was for running track? My socks might not have been able to walk themselves, but they became so hard and crusty that I had to work my feet into them each time I woke up or went to practice. You can imagine how they smelled, though the full effect on my teammates eluded me until I was dressing in the locker room at Southwest Missouri State (now just Missouri State) and heard two of my teammates chatting a couple of rows away.

"What's that smell?" one of them asked.

"I dunno," the other replied, then laughed, "Must be Proctor."

"I haven't figured out what it is about that guy that smells so bad. Piss? Yep, that's it. He smells like cat piss. Makes me dread the van rides home from meets."

I remember these things almost nostalgically. These two guys are my friends now, especially since I agreed to throw my socks in their laundry from then on. One or both of them might even see the link to this on my social media and remember those foul rides home with me, like I'm remembering them with a homeless man's aroma running through my brain and my daughter's questions running through my head.

For these and more reasons, this Thanksgiving I'm thankful for clean socks, feet to put them on, and a pot to piss in.

Dad for All Seasons: The Stuffing Matrix

"There’s a strange alchemy at work in taking something as boring as old bread, letting it go stale, then remoistening it, adding some leaves, cloves, stalks, and bulbs, and turning it into something indescribably filling, savory, and thoroughly Thanksgiving. Much to my adult surprise, cracking the code on the basic ingredients and their interplay doesn’t absolve the mystery, it only deepens it. If you’re not already in on it, here’s the matrix."

Read the rest here!

H.L. Mencken, on this year's midterm election cycle

Actually, he was writing on the 1920 Presidential election, but it's nice to see some things never change (they only get bigger, more expensive, and more entrenched in our legal system):

In other lands, at worst, there are at least intelligible issues, coherent ideas, salient personalities. Somebody says something, and somebody replies....Here, having perfected democracy, we lift the whole combat to symbolism, to transcendentalism, to metaphysics. Here we load a palpably tin cannon with blank cartridges loaded with talcum powder, and so let fly. Here one may howl over the show without any uneasy reminder that this is serious, and that some one may be hurt. I hold that this elevation of politics to the plane of undiluted comedy is peculiarly American, that nowhere else on this disreputable ball has the art of the sham-battle been developed to such fineness.

Alright, show's over, folks. Let's all breathe a sigh of relief, pat ourselves on the back for voting, complain or gloat on social media, and let our elected officials breathe their own sigh of relief. They've done their job; now they get to rest for 4-6 years.

Microfiction! / ¡Minificción!

I recently presented a critical piece called "The List and the Story of Our Lives: Essaying History in Short Form" at the VIII Congreso Internacional de Minificción/International Conference on Microfiction, hosted by the Department of Hispanic Studies at the University of Kentucky. A few thoughts, in list form:

• I was a little intimidated being one of only two people presenting in English to an audience of primarily Spanish speakers, but a little "Perdon, lo siento, mi Espanol es no bien" goes a long way in breaking the ice.
• My presentation went well, I think. The other person scheduled to present after me didn't make it, so after my reading I had a vigorous Q&A session about defining truth in nonfiction, the relationship of the essay to academic composition, whether nonfiction is by nature autobiographical ("Perhaps not, but it's definitely all personal" was my response), and other fun stuff I love to run my mouth about.
• I noticed that most of the native English speakers at my presentation were UK students; I think perhaps they were instructed by their professors to attend at least one session, and they saw mine was one of the few whose title was in English. To paraphrase Robin Hemley, I felt like the McDonald's of the micro-writing world.
• The most valuable thing I from the conference had nothing to do with my own presentation, though. Even though I only understood roughly 1/10 of the presentations I attended, I felt myself being sublimated to a tradition I hadn't even realized was my own.
• Speaking of which, much of the work I developed for the conference will soon be forthcoming in additions to my List and the Story work. I'm still figured how to integrate it, but I should have a new batch of micro-essays to add to it by the new year. Details to come.
• Even though I did my undergraduate and MA work in Kentucky at Murray State, this was the first extended visit I've made to Lexington. Great town, and my hotel was even next door to Rupp for Big Blue Madness! That's a lot of blue.

Some words on Galway Kinnell, in memorium

1.      His “First Song” was the first poem I ever memorized. I've never lived in Illinois, but I'm sure I was one of the boys for whom "the song woke/His heart to the darkness and the sadness of joy."

2.     Andrew Bird’s musical adaptation of it is ethereal, stunning, and one of most beautiful things I’ve ever heard. I’m listening to it right now, on repeat.

3.     I moved to New York City in 2000 partially because Kinnell lived here.

4.     I met him once, on the same day I met Bill Murray:

On the day I was fired from my final job in public relations, I went to a poetry reading. Galway Kinnell and Bill Murray were headlining a “Poets’ Walk” across the Brooklyn Bridge that ended on a pier across from the River Walk Café, yet another place where I could not afford to eat. When Kinnell was introduced, a promoter of the event predicted poetry would soon eclipse advertising as the primary source of our national symbology. As Kinnell was reading, a grey shroud completely engulfed the Manhattan skyline, and a darkness swept across the East River toward us. “Rain!” someone shouted, but the whole crowd was drenched before anyone had time to duck for cover. That was the end of that reading.

From "My Aughts"

5.     He might have been a great man, or an average one. The stories vary.

6.     He died Tuesday, at the age of 86. I shall miss him, though he’d reached the evanescent age where I’d forgotten that he was still alive.

My essay "The Question of Influence," in the new issue of The Normal School!

"Through my first 17 years I had three names; two mothers, one of whom died when I was young; and a multitude of fathers. I left home then, and started anew. The words I read became my family, my tradition, my primary influence. My family now is a set of literary tropes, no more real to me than John Proctor in The Crucible or the Talking Asshole in Burroughs’ Naked Lunch. It’s no coincidence that my name shares space with the American canon. They both made me."

Buy the issue online here, or pick it up at your favorite (hopefully independent) bookstore!

New post on A Child Grows: An Autumn Road Trip Playlist

"One thing about that 'crisp' inland weather—it ripens those apples, pumpkins, and other harvest crops we so associate with autumn, the time of year most associated, for children and adults with souls, with picking stuff (besides our noses). And apple and/or pumpkin picking is an eminently worthy excuse to drive, rent a Zipcar, or catch a train out of town, whether out to Long Island, over to Jersey, up the Hudson, or even further in any direction. And so it is in honor of the harvest that I present the Autumn Road Trip Playlist."

Read the rest here!

Overheard at Roots Cafe

Conversation between owner and barista Amanda and one of my favorite patrons, a 71-year-old man who looks vaguely like William Burroughs, walks awkwardly with a cane, and reads the Daily News here every morning:

AMANDA: It’s great seein’ ya. How’d the doctor appointment go?

FAVORITE PATRON: He told me I’m gonna die, but he didn’t say when.

AMANDA: Ha! I’m so glad to hear you’re doing great.

FAVORITE PATRON: You know, there are three ages: Young, Middle-Age, and “You’re Doing Great.”

New post on A Child Grows: The Back-to-School Blues

"I just dropped Checkers off at her second full day of kindergarten, and Crazy Eights is in her second day of playschool phase-in. The school where I teach is now in its third week, and my mother-in-law is staying with us this week to help with the adjustment. For the first time, I have a full school day’s worth of writing time, and I can’t for the life of me think of what to write. I’ve got the back-to-school blues."

Read the rest here!

Notes on watching the Royals play at Yankee Stadium

I went to see my long-suffering-but-perhaps-finally-good Royals with my wife last night at Yankee Stadium. Royals win! Besides that, a few other observations:

• The game played out like a pretty standard Royals game this year - low-scoring (one point), light hitting (3 singles), immaculate starting pitching, and shutdown closing. Of all the ways a team can consistently win (and lose) games, this is perhaps the most ulcer-inducing.
• I thought I'd be the only Royals fan there, but was pleasantly surprised to find myself in a section filled roughly half baby blue and pinstripes. I guess I wasn't the only one who'd deliberately gotten seats above the Royals bullpen.
• Speaking of the bullpen...I was looking forward to seeing our gauntlet of one-inning wonders in action, but with Shields pitching an 8 1/3-inning gem, they spent most of the game like this:

• Things did get interesting in the ninth, though, when Derek Jeter finally got a hit, a weak bloop single that sent the stadium into a frenzy and ended Shields' night. I read something earlier this week about this season turning into less of a pennant race and more of a Jeter farewell party for Yankees fans; everything I saw tonight confirmed that. Every time a "Let's Go Yankees-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap" started to break out, it inevitably morphed into "Derek Jeter-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap."
• I did sit behind two true blue Yankees fans, who at one point in the ninth, when the Yanks were staging the nearest resemblance to a comeback after Jeter's single, shouted back at our whole section, "Five years ago, there wouldn't be one person sittin' in this place!" Two guys sitting next to me replied, "Yeah, and they were getting ready to win a World Series five years ago." I don't think I've ever seen a purer distillation of the good fan/bad fan dichotomy. I made sure to fist-bump one of the guys in front of me after the game, and give the stink-eye to the guys sitting next to me.
• My wife also added to that conversation, asking, "Did this stadium even exist five years ago?" A good question: after looking it up, I'm surprised to find that it's now been six years since the new digs opened. 
• I'm now 41 years old; I was 12 the last year the Royals were in the playoffs. I'm cautiously optimistic.

New post on A Child Grows: A Dozen Songs for Summer

"Few things get me more excited about summer than listening to summertime music. I actually have an iTunes playlist containing over 500 tunes that fit qualify as Summertime Music, the most child-friendly of which I’ve been subtly putting on in the background as Checkers and Crazy Eights are playing. They are super-excited about summer, so it must be working. Here are a dozen that have been getting heavy rotation in our place lately."

Listen to them here!

New Post on A Child Grows: Take Your Kids Crabbing!

"You may or may not know, but the shores of our boroughs and the surrounding area are teeming with millions of eight-legged crustaceans whose most active season is summer. I’m talking about blue crabs, who are probably just as plentiful below the surface of the Hudson as humans are on its shores. You don’t need a license to catch and eat them, and crabbing is a family activity that kids of pretty much any age can get into.What’s more, these critters are not only delectable but fun and relatively easy to catch, making for an off-center family trip your kids might just talk about ad nauseam throughout the winter. Here’s what you need to know to get started."

Read the rest here!

My micro-essay "The Love Song of Kumquat J. Farthing" in the new Austin Review!

"Some words just sound dirty. So when my brother Justin showed me an email he'd received from Mr. Kumquat J. Farthing, I naturally assumed he'd been using my business computer to look at porn."

So begins this little essay, in this beautiful little journal. Buy it either in print or Kindle format here!

New Post on A Child Grows: Urban Foraging!

"I recently discovered at the Horticultural Society of New York’s exhibit of composer/forager John Cage’s folios for his 1972 Mushroom Book that Cage once had to have his stomach pumped after misidentifying a hellebore for skunk cabbage and accidentally poisoning an entire dinner party. Which brings me to the number one fear of many would-be foragers: having to get your (or worse, your child’s) stomach pumped after mistaking a hellebore for skunk cabbage, or eupatorium for garlic mustard, or pokeweed in its poisonous stage for pokeweed in its edible stage, or…you get the picture. This is why it’s important for a beginner to find a good guidebook, or even better a seasoned veteran to guide you in identifying species, as well as making sure you’re practicing sustainably and within city code."

Read more here!

New Post on A Child Grows - 2014: The Year of Composting

"We now have more options than ever for ethically disposing of our organic trash. But this embarrassment of riches poses its own problems—with all these options, it would be easy for urban parents new to the organics recycling game to shake their heads and give up. My few years of composting hardly make me an expert on the subject, but I would like, at the very least, to provide a beginner’s list of ways to recycle and repurpose our scraps."

Read the rest here!