Entries Tagged 'Uncategorized' ↓

My good friend David Naimon, who is a member of my writing group, had a piece published in Zyzzyva this month. It’s his first fiction in print and it’s a great and very funny story. 

You can read an excerpt of The Golem of Orla Shalom, or subscribe to Zyzzyva here.

It’s so cool (and inspiring and satisfying and pride-filling and validating) to see something go through the writing group process and then make it into the larger world to see. Our group is called the Super Dangerous Writers, incidentally, since there was already a group in Portland called the Dangerous Writers, and because the group thought that my suggestion of calling it the Extra Super Duper Dangerous Writers was a bit too wordy. 

I received my copy of Zyzzyva yesterday and I love the cover – especially the back:

David doesn’t have a blog per se, but does blog on Walker Tracker.

Congratulations David!

The Willamette Week had a very nice article about me today. I spent a couple of Fridays ago riding around with WWeek journalist Tony Piff, retracing some of the Couch journey that takes place in Oregon. 

What’s not in the article however, among the projects of mine mentioned, are my collaborators. 

Gumball Poetry: Laura Moulton was the editor and co-creator. We also had several interns that became editors over the course of their involvement: Libbey White, Krista Hanson, Emily Ford. And there were hundreds who gathered at each issue launch to stuff capsules and many others who helped along the way.

Operation Peachblow (run by the Black Magic Insurance Agency): Andy Hockersmith and Laura Moulton did the first one with me, and we believed we were creating something new – a game that laid over the top of reality, that made a player feel as if the whole city had been rigged – this was in early 2000. OPBII, OPBIII and OPBIV were created by Dave Cain, Thane Stumbaugh, Prashant Gandhi and myself. OPBV, which took place on the show floor of Book Expo America was just done by me and was also a publicity stunt for Couch.

Project Hamad was a collaboration between David Naimon, Laura Moulton and myself.

The web component of Message in a Bottle was coded for me by Noah Magram. Incidentally, since Gumball Poetry is shut, the web component is all that remains of Message in a Bottle. I think of it as the world’s slowest, random bulletin board.

Laura Moulton was the psychic behind The Psychic Book Project, until that too became automated. Even psychics get laid off in this economy! She was also the co-creator of SuvLuv.

If I missed somebody here, let me know.

Many of these projects are in states of semi-decay. I apologize for not closing them out in a more official capacity, sometimes the energy burns for just so long until you discover another avenue of interest. Have you heard of Couch? That’s fresh.

Happy Halloween! I’m off to walk some of the distance that Thom, Tree and Erik did in Couch this morning with a wweek.com journalist. We’ll wave when we hit S. America.

In the meantime, here’s a quick quiz:

Which one of the following characters is planning evil, evil things to do to her fellow household members?

“For those of you who have remained resolute in your belief that things will turn around eventually, I urge you to close your eyes, take shallow rapid breaths, and begin freaking out immediately,” Bush added. “At this point, anyone who isn’t scared to death needs to wake the fuck up—because we’re screwed here.”

The president then picked up the telephone from his desk and hurled it through the Oval Office window.

Sometimes adwords writes me the most beautiful poetry.

Flirts is the name of the hotel lounge at the Holiday Inn near the airport in Portland, OR. We were there for the PNBA conference. The bar had a disco ball, many mirrors, bright lighting, and, oh, I don’t know, the feel of the end of the line, the end of any road taken that wasn’t the right road to have taken in the first place.

And Willy Vlautin of the band Richmond Fontaine was there, charged with being on the stage in this place. I wish I had a photo – the only one I took was of the software-broken juke box, which seemed to fit in perfectly with the 30 years-ago run-down future the bar seemed to promise. When I walked in Willy was hunched over his guitar, and his guitar held open a copy of his own book, Northline, and he was singing the dialogue from it.  I have to say – this still sounds like a bad idea, sounds like something that would turn out strained and faked. But it wasn’t – it was really great. Like Jeff Tweedy and Raymond Carver had merged into one. Afterwards we talked and he was a hell of a nice guy, and it turns out that Laura and he buy their chicken feed from the same store. So, you know, we’re practically related.