stupid book covers

sometimes i fuck around with book cover ideas that are mostly stupid, or sometimes serious, or to augment a joke, or not-quite-a-joke, in a group DM, but usually they don't end up being used for anything. this post is a collection of some of the covers, because i think they're kind of interesting.

1. sometimes cavin sends silly selfies to me or in a group DM and i turn them into fake book covers. this one is from a selfie cavin sent me when he was working security at a health clinic during peak covid. i think his hair looks cool in this picture:

 

 

2. this one happened in two stages. the first was sebastian castillo riffing on twitter about the cover for his book not i, how he liked the real cover, but joked that he wished it had included a picture of him doing skateboard tricks in front of the guggenheim museum (which was on fire) or something like that. i made a quick photoshop thing to that effect with sebastian's face and replied to the tweet with it, which got word west to follow me on twitter, i think. then i joked with some people in a group DM about repurposing my old longer 'normal' stories to make Tao Lin the protagonist of each one and self publishing it (replete with unauthorized melville house logo) - hence the synopsis referencing actual stories i've written for this fake cover. i liked the idea of it being confusing about who wrote the book / what the book actually was. but altogether it seemed like an overly weird thing to try to publish in any capacity, but i still think the cover looks cool. i also like the idea of calling stories "touchdowns":

3. this is me putting a joke mike made into a book cover. i like jokes like this, about convoluted ideas followed by "and Other Stories." i like the font on it. i would probably pick this book up if i saw it at a book store. edit: mike actually wrote a story based on this, and it was published on xray. i have been trying to encourage mike to write a collection/novel based on this character/setting and he seems to be working on it to some capacity:

4. i struggled for a while coming up with a cover for chainsaw blurbs & other blurbs. i'm happy with the one we landed on (giacomo was very supporting/encouraging), but this was one of the later contenders. i like the weird emptiness of the back image:

 

5. i briefly toyed with the idea of making a sort of imprint under back patio for a chapbook run with thematically similar covers - public domain drawings about death/skeletons and bold colors. i think cavin will be doing something similar, a bundle of 'mini books' in 2021, unrelated to this idea. i think i was dissuaded by the general purposelessness of publishing books and lack of plan after making some covers. unsure about the font, but in general i think they look cool:

 

6. this is an idea i pitched to jenn at xray when talking about Bobby DiGiorno Will Fucking Die, which seems likely to be published as part of a small novel(la) series by xray. it is based on the cover of the sellout. turns out that even though jenn asked about my thoughts on a cover, they already have a cover scheme idea, so this won't be the cover, but i really like how it looks and would like to make a book that looks like this, either for myself or someone else, at some point:

i enjoy making book covers, although personally i think i would like to have a book with hand-drawn art/text sometime. i feel less compelled by plain, digital design on book covers.

toads and mice

i sometimes feel curious about and nostalgic for stuff from my time in high school 'being in a band,' being a part of a no-name indie band and playing with/seeing other no-name bands, putting music on the internet, etc. At the time, putting music on the internet felt very 'big and important' but relative to today was trivially small and unimpactful on the world, and today, it is for the most part no longer on the internet. this topic is related to my general interest in how things on the internet decay over time - technology changes, websites close, accounts disappear - and it impacts art disproportionately, i think. some of the decay is intentional, e.g. from deleting personal social media accounts, while a lot of it is unintentional, just the result of capitalism churning through 'useless things' to make room for new ways to generate revenue, and often 'art' is a 'useless thing' and so disappears quickly.

 i'm thinking specifically about my experience watching the only music-hosting websites i used to post my own music and my band's music slowly fail and disappear over the last ~15 years. these include 1) jones music, which was an independent music streaming/sharing platform created/hosted by jones soda, 2) purevolume dot com, which allowed artists to upload something like 3-4 songs at a time for others to stream, and 3) myspace, which more people are familiar with, so i won't really talk about it much, but which was the first widely successful social media platform for musicians.

as a young teenager, i created mostly electronic ('techno') music using a free copy of Fruity LOOPS. i then discovered more kinds of music and moved onto making different kinds of music alone or with others: noise assemblage music using Fruity LOOPS and microsoft sound recorder, an improvisational noise band recorded onto cassette tape with real instruments, and later 'indie rock' using Audacity and live instruments, both as part of a band and alone, although my friends and i also engaged in several variously-serious recording projects using computer or cassette tape, including several 'fake bands' which we would put on myspace and attempt to hoax people with, as well as one-off, more 'serious' recordings by some more peripheral friends, which we would contribute to, etc. aside from whatever is sitting on my old laptop's hard drive, all of this music is now gone from the internet, probably gone forever.

it wasn't important music. if i listened to it now, i'm sure it would be worse than i remembered. but i'm mostly interested, right now, in the experience of seeing what felt like a 'safe'/permanent way to share music online slowly die out. i did not have access to any of the old email accounts used to open the original accounts and so had no way of preventing them from being removed, if that's what happened, like with xanga, for example, which removed all accounts that had been inactive for 5+ years some time around 2013. this is a common thing i think people my age are experiencing/will experience, from old email accounts to online games like neopets to old blogs and now even old accounts on instagram, etc. but i want to focus on music, here, if that's ok.

my first experience losing my own music was with jones music, which, for some reason, seemed to selectively lose music - my main account, which i remember adding several songs to, ended up only having 1-2 songs left, while other accounts didn't seem to lose songs. i remember something about only seeing one of my songs because someone had added it to a playlist, which is maybe why it was preserved for a while, but then this too was removed. the website has since disappeared entirely, i think, and i feel sort of insane now googling it, seeing only websites for Norah Jones or bands called The Jones or something like that. at the time it felt like a semi-popular, frequently used platform, but now it's gone. i think i original discovered the jones music website through adult swim forums, probably around 2003, something like that. anyway, it seems gone now and hard to research.

[update] i have since done more googling. the website was called MyJonesMusic dot com. i found an article on business wire on the announcement of its launch, and the url for my jones music is now some sort of vaguely spammy splash page about coronavirus and sleep apnea. my jones music was launched in 2004. i'm unsure when it closed officially. i have fond memories of drinking jones soda as a preteen/teenager, specifically the cream soda and fufu berry flavors, buying them form United Dairy Farmers, and collecting some of the bottles because of the pictures on the label. the jones soda wikipedia page does not mention my jones music at all.

purevolume is a site that i remember started as very small and then growing into a more legitimate platform - i remember being excited to see the mountain goats creating a profile, for example. you could add up to 3-4 songs that would play in a little flash music player. there was no 'social' component to purevolume - it was simply a repository for music, and i think a small number of pictures and maybe video. i had several accounts for my various recording projects, and most local bands used it as well. i remember sometime maybe 8 years ago the flash player stopped consistently working, and the internet moved away from flash. i believe most new browsers become incompatible with that version of flash, and then the website never mitigated this, and then it kind of completely fell apart. looking now, purevolume has deleted all music profiles and is now functioning as a sort of arts and culture news hub/blog. the purevolume wikipedia page mentions that it both "was" and "is" a website, which is funny to me.

myspace was, i think, the first major social media network, although it was, i think, preceded by friendster, which i know nothing about. i made my account i think in 2003 at the behest of my sister, who was in college. everyone in my social circle abandoned myspace in favor of facebook around 2007-2008, which means it was popular basically during the 4 years i was in high school, which feels 'lucky' to me, in that i got to experience/benefit from a sort of consistent, singular social media experience throughout high school. myspace was for both individuals as well as companies and bands; it was like purevolume in that artists/bands could have an account with something like 4 songs uploaded into a site-internal media player, but it included direct messaging and blogging/commenting capabilities, and individual users could use a band's uploaded music as a sort of background, autoplaying song on their personal myspace page. i remember using myspace to interact with bands both as a fan (eg messaging Architecture in Helsinki) and as someone 'in a band', coordinating gigs, sharing fliers, and generally making connections. for example, i remember my bandmate Zack had become friends with various independent musicians through myspace, including Hop Along, Queen Ansleis, which is now the vaguely-critically-acclaimed indie band Hop Along. my band was named after one of their songs. i also remember making internet friends with other musicians who used myspace as a place to host passion recording projects, including some girls in a band called something like Land! Sea! Escape! many people used myspace to host images, sort of like a proto-mood board function, and musicians often had great collections of images; i remember that band had very good, evocative images of themselves hunched over keyboards in a messy bedroom, for example. myspace has haphazardly phased out the musical artist hosting component of the site as well as i think every other component. i think for a brief time those were the only profiles left intact, although, like with purevolume, the flash-based media player stopped working. looking now, this seems to be the case - my old profiles still exist and songs are listed, but the media player doesn't seem to function.

the original purpose of this post, though, was to sort of leave a record of some things that have been forgotten by the internet. the above is all introduction. i want to talk about the band Toads and Mice.

Toads and Mice was a band from the dayton, ohio metro area (i think they lived in kettering, but i'm unsure now), active from something like 2004 to 2011, extrapolating from their official discography, which consists of EP (a 3-song, self-released cd-r EP from 2005), Toads and Mice (a full-length CD put out by Squids Eye Records in 2007), and Dark Party (a self-released, full-length digital/vinyl LP in 2010).

the band was, i think, mainly a song-writing conduit for Dustin Rose, who played guitar and sang. Toads and Mice, in all the incarnations i'm aware of, also included a bassist name Bradley and a drummer named Brandon. i remember seeing pictures on MySpace of the band from before i saw them live, and they had a second guitarist with short hair whose name i don't know, but by the time i got to know them, this guy had been replaced by a guitarist named Matt. by the release of Dark Party, Matt was no longer in the band; the discogs and bandcamp pages for Toads and Mice list them as a three-piece group.

Toads and Mice was preceded by (or run in parallel with) dustin's solo recording project, i think called something like Dustin Documents, and followed by the band Drose, which consisted of Dustin and two other people in columbus, ohio. dustin documents was a 'typical' non-promotable passion project which i feel was common on MySpace/Purevolume/other music websites from before soundcloud/bandcamp, and at some point i think i emailed dustin and he sent me several albums of this music, which ranges from drone synthy music with moaning vocals to experimental kind of indie rock and soundscapes, with few, if i remember correctly, typically-structured songs (i no longer have these emails, but my old laptop should have the music). Drose is a dark, industrial kind of drone/noise thing that seemed to have been slightly popular in Europe, and a european label last year put out a special collector's omnibus edition thing of Drose's 2012-2016 music.

i was in a band from the dayton, ohio metro area from 2005-2008, and thus attended multiple (maybe 7+) Toads and Mice performances and performed with them i think 2-3 times, had casual conversations with one or more members a few times, but otherwise knew nothing about them. one time we performed together was at a large christian rec center/coffee shop in a town i don't remember the name of, and the last time was at the cd release concert for Toads and Mice. i remember being thankful and humbled to be chosen to open for them for their cd release show, and i think this performance was coincidentally my band's best performance, and the only one that was blogged about (looking this up now, the original blog post i was thinking of doesn't exist anymore. i remember it had a good review of us, something about someone spilling beer because of being impressed, but the post is gone now). i remember seeing Toads and Mice perform at other venues whose names i forget now, including the basement of a photography studio in my home town and a few bars in Dayton. we may have performed with them a third time. i left for college in 2008, and never saw them perform as a 3-piece in support of Dark Party, although i did on several occasions see them perform a few of the songs that would end up on the album. 

i have a memory of attending one of their shows with some of my bandmates, just to see them and not perform with them, and Zack had snuck in a flask of whiskey and got really drunk (we were ~17/18), left the bar in between bands, and was 'kicked out'/blocked from returning by the bouncer before Toads and Mice were set to perform. i remember feeling frustrated/disappointed, and while Zack and some others left to do other things, i stayed and watched the performance.

every Toads and Mice performance i attended included a hippie-looking guy dancing very wildly/forcefully/annoyingly in the front row. sometimes people liked him and sometimes they didn't. i also remember it became a 'thing' at their shows to try to be the person standing closest to Dustin during the song "Undress", which involved him shaking a tambourine during the verse, and he never brought a stand or hook for the tambourine, so he would thrust it into the hands of the closest audience member during the chorus (many venues where my band and Toads and Mice performed did not have stages, but rather an open floor where everyone stood together). i remember appreciating this as a gimmick. i remember spending a lot of time trying to come up with gimmicks for live performances, sometimes successfully, i think because of my and my bandmates' mutual enthusiasm for The Unicorns, an indie band that had been famous for stage gimmicks, e.g. costumes and stage antics. many bands we played with leveraged different types of gimmicks. my favorite gimmick, aside from the Toads and Mice tambourine, was when this band One Cool Kid would perform 1-2 songs, then pause to switch instruments, e.g. the guitarist would transition to drums, etc., but the drummer for songs 3+ was left-handed, requiring completely reordering the drumkit between songs 2 and 3, which took something like 4+ minutes, it felt, which is a long time for a 30-40 minute performance slot. they also had christmas lights on their drums/amps and never talked to anyone, which were all good gimmicks, in my opinion. Toads and Mice otherwise had no/few gimmicks, although they had unintentional quirks. for example, their drummer is/was a very large man, tall and wide, and he was an incredibly proficient and physical drummer, and would end up completely drenched in sweat every performance, so he always took off his pants to reveal gym shorts prior to performing, and he would drink water from a gallon jug. i remember being incredibly attracted to Brandon in a non-sexual sense, because of his skillful drumming and passion and his full beard. their second guitarist, matt, was comically incongruous with the rest of the 'working class'-seeming bandmembers, and wore his hair in an emo swoop, wore pretentious band tshirts and tight-fitting jackets, and 'unnecessarily' played a Zakk Wild-branded signature Gibson Les Paul guitar. i remember audience members would often heckle him by shouting "matt wylde" when he was tuning his guitar. i believe he was the youngest member of the band and probably left to go to college.

the music of Toads and Mice evolved dramatically from their inception to their dissolution. the three songs on the EP range from slow and sad ("Men with Guns") to bright and dancey ("Africa"), with clean, bright guitars; "Africa" was a crowd-favorite during live performances. their self-titled CD continues this, with some more repetitive, minimal, math-rock-type songs with hooks and moments of catharsis, although some songs use an understated distortion, and the final track is a sort of dark, droney, creepy thing. Dark Party is stripped-down, dark, angry, confusing, and distorted; each song sounds like it was recorded live with no guitar or studio effects, and the song titles and lyrical content are strange and provocative, with songs like "Troll Dick" and "Dick Cheese" and "Dark Meat"and lyrics like "people make me / make my / my dick / fall off" and "i saw we kill him / he's over." i remember watching a short documentary/promotional video about the release of Dark Party, seeing them perform in a small, cramped stage in a bar to a small crowd [update: i have found the video - i admire how uninteresting the interview portion is]. you can still buy copies of the limited-edition record. i do not think people liked the record, but it has ended up being one of my favorite records, listening to it now 10 years later.

as a teenager, i was incredibly excited about/interested in the band. i felt really drawn to their music, their live performance, and their technical skills. they were the first band i listened to that played with minimalism and restraint and emphasized a tight performance, which had a big impact on me. watching the video of the Dark Party release, for example, i am still impressed by the ease with which dustin sings with eyes closed while perfectly playing a complex, intricate guitar melody. the only local band that excited as much around this time was when i saw Jet Kid Committee (who i think 'broke up'/formed new bands almost immediately after), but for different reasons. i remember listening to Toads and Mice's 3-song EP on repeat during short ~1-2 hour roadtrips, for example, coming home from staying in columbus to record music with my band one weekend, without getting bored. i also remember playing Toads and Mice during a road trip with my father, and him telling me that he thought it was boring, and asking to turn it off (this also happened with other music, which i think is funny). i learned about the band Battles from them, from a myspace post once, i think of the music video for "Atlas," to maybe frame this discussion in terms of mid-00's mathrock, which was semi-popular for a year or two.

Toads and Mice had released a recorded version of "Undress" with all four members on their MySpace page, although they later rerecorded it for Dark Party. a few songs were never officially released, including a song that was originally titled "Goro" but which was later renamed to something like "Little Baby Trash Can", which i remember asking Dustin about after some performance, and he said it was because they used a whiteboard in the rehearsal space to map out the understated but relatively complex song structure, and they 'ran out of letters', or something, and arbitrarily started drawing a trash can to represent one of the sections, and then a smaller trashcan to represent a separate, shortened repetition of that section, or something. they performed this song and "Undress" for some short-lived dayton in-studio/interview video program on the internet, which i think was called something inane like "Dayton Rocks" and no longer exists on the internet. then there was the song from the cd release party, and possibly others i can't remember or never saw live.

in 2010, when i was in spain, i spent a lot of time on the 4chan music board, downloading free music and wasting time while depressed/tired. at some point there was a brief discussion about dayton bands because i posted a link to Toads and Mice, and i think Bryan Baker of the bands Jet Kid Committee/Grizzzzy Bear/Astrofang was posting, and someone else mentioned that they had several live recordings of Toads and Mice, and sent me mediafire links for ~4 full Toads and Mice concerts. i never followed up with talking to any of these people and never saw dayton bands talked about on /mu/ after that. i listened to each concert recording maybe once, as they were pretty similar. this was the year that Dark Party came out, and i ordered an autographed copy of the record and a tshirt (the tshirt was printed wrong, at an angle, and looked bad). i still have the record, and just relistened to it a few times, which was sort of the genesis of this post.

something that interests me is that, while different, the three studio Toads and Mice releases are all united by a dark undercurrent in Dustin's lyrics, vocal delivery, and, in live performances, shy/uncomfortable/haunted demeanor. i often think about what can only be understood, to me, as a self-destructive anti-performance inherent to the setlist for their CD release party, as the first song they performed was a then (and now) unrecorded and thus unfamiliar-to-the-audience, slow, long, and bleak song. it felt like a challenge to the audience or a dismissal of the celebration we were presumably taking part in. while a lot of Toads and Mice's music pre-Dark Party had what felt like a happy simplicity to it, i think it was, all, inherently dark, in unique and varying ways, which made/makes the band and their music stand out to me, although the move to make the music itself reflect this darkness - embracing dissonance, aggression, distortion, and more confusing song structures - turned people off and probably contributed to the dissolution of the band. someone on a forum post about music from Dayton describes Dark Party as "dark, minimalist jazz-metal, if ever such a thing existed"

there are two videos of the band performing live on youtube (and three videos of my band performing live on youtube). i found them trying to confirm things i had remember about how the looked when they performed. in these videos, the drummer does not have a beard, which i'm surprised to see. according to a comment by the drummer's personal youtube account on the second video, the unreleased song i mentioned is called "I am a Rider." i also noticed that the drummer's crash cymbal is set relatively high, which may be an homage to/reference to/imitation of the drummer from Battles. his personal youtube account has ~4 videos of baby chickens and a video of someone laughing. dustin rose's personal youtube account has ~10 videos, one of which is him giving himself a mullet and then 'spazzing out' in a silly manner.

doing some more googling, i learned that their drummer Brandon was in an emo band called Simply Waiting, which he left in 2004 'to join Toads and Mice'. i found a couple songs on SoundClick - it sounds vaguely like The Mars Volta, but less interesting. i also learned that the Toads and Mice bassist Bradley was/is a freelance graphic designer, who had used a specially designed package for the Dark Party vinyl release in his portfolio.

squids eye records has long since ceased to exist and as far as i can tell most of the bands from that time period have broken up with their members moving to various other cities. i read an interview with someone adjacent to the label, who summarized this, and offered little else about what happened to anyone.

i'm connected with dustin rose on linkedin, somehow. it says he lives in san fransisco now and is a mechanical engineer in the automotive industry. i considered reaching out to email over email for an interview, but felt maybe that would detract from the idea of this blog post.

ok, i believe this is the most comprehensive write-up about the band Toads and Mice on the internet. i hope someone finds it interesting.

brief book reviews

here are the 4 books i most recently read and my thoughts:

Wallop by Nathaniel Kennon Perkins (House of Vlad): i generally like the books brian alan ellis puts out on house of vlad and bought this one without having read any excerpts. the story takes place over a few days where our protagonist learns that his girlfriend is pregnant and then goes hitchhiking to see some of his punk rock friends in kansas city. there's a lot of emphasis on the scuzzy, heart-of-gold, alcoholic coke-addict life lived by the protagonist and his punk rock friends. i thought the writing was relatively compelling - i never felt bored, aside from a couple paragraphs of straight-forward exposition, which i was surprised to see. it's a very short, quick read, but relatively uneventful. i enjoyed reading it but felt it could have been longer. it is written in such a way that things feel like they might happen, but i think it's designed to focus on the protagonist ruminating on the idea of potentially being a father in contrast with his current life of getting drunk and sleeping on couches and kind of almost cheating on his girlfriend and stuff, as opposed to there being a 'plot'. there is an emphasis on everyone being, ultimately, a good person, in a general, baseline way, and there aren't really any conflicts, mean people, overly-bad decisions, or changes in opinion/character growth, etc. For example, I got the sense that the ruminations on fatherhood during the trip were meant to be set against the ambiguity of whether or not the girlfriend would have an abortion, but it never actually felt ambiguous about whether she would ultimately have an abortion or not. I think maybe, based on the recurring refrain of the protagonist asking people for "their abortion stories" which were all very short/uneventful, that the book, as "an abortion story", is similarly short/uneventful by design. If that's the case, I think it's clever. I felt most interested in the descriptions of hitchhiking and people drinking cheap beer and fancy cold brew.

A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness by Kathy Fish, Amy L. Clark, Elizabeth Ellen, and Claudia Smith (Rose Metal Press): bought this primarily to read the elizabeth ellen section and learn about kathy fish's writing, who is someone i've known about sort of peripherally online because of her status as like an important figure in flash fiction (teaching workshops, getting into Best American Non-Required Reading because of her story in the jellyfish review) and loose association with bud smith (i think he published one or more of her books via unknown press), but who i had never read aside from the BANRR story, which was about school shootings. anyway, this is 4 chapbooks that were submitted for some kind of publishing contest and then put together into one book. the kathy fish stories come first. they mostly center on family life and femininity, or the experience of being a girl/woman, with emphasis on pregnancy, motherhood, 'that weird aunt', unwelcome relationships with men, etc. They also almost all are written in 3rd person and have what i feel to be a kind of typical 'flash fiction' pacing and twist, which isn't very compelling to me, currently, based on my exposure to/focus on flash fiction in the past few years. i think my favorites are the more inexplicable ones, e.g. one about being delivered a baby instead of a vintage radio. next is amy l. clark, who i had never heard of. these stories are similar to the kathy fish ones in terms of themes and topics but i think are generally less interesting and more clunky, with garden pathing, unintentional pronoun ambiguity, that kind of stuff. they are also more 'angsty'/anti-authoritarian and i think more autofictional (due to certain recurring topics/ideas). i felt a strong desire to skip the last few stories but didn't, ended up generally enjoying them, i think, as a departure from the kathy fish stories. next is elizabeth ellen's collection, which i realized, maybe 2 stories in, have all been (re?)published in Fast Machine and so i had read them all already. felt largely disappointed in myself for having not done any research into the contents of ee's various printed collections prior to purchasing this book. last is claudia smith's stories, which i think are the most unique of the collection, although there is still an emphasis on domestic/relationship stories, there is greater ambiguity and strangeness throughout the stories which i appreciated in the context of the rest of the collection. i never felt like these were attempting to be 'clever' in the way a lot of flash fiction, i think, tries to do, but were more evocative, which appeals to me more, in terms of style/approach, although i felt that it was a disservice to her to include her collection last, because i felt like the similar topics made it hard for me to appreciate their uniqueness; by the middle of her collection i felt tired of reading flash fiction about relationships.

Shelters, shacks, and Shanties by Daniel Carter Beard (Public Domain/Breakout Productions): this book is from 1912 and is about how to build various kinds of shelters, primarily out of fresh cut timber, scrap wood (e.g. barrels) and earth/sod. it ranges from how to bundle pine boughs for bedding to planning/constructing multistory log cabins with an emphasis on 'scouting' and small temporary shelters for camping, although includes some sort of anthropological/architectural studies of different types of semi-permanent structures built by e.g. italian immigrant railroad workers and different native american tribes. jessica read a book recently about outdoor play for children and this book was referenced a few times, so i got a used and random copy off of thriftbooks. it's often very gender normative (it is addressed to/about boys/boy scouts) and racist against native americans, as one would expect for a book about camping from 1912, but the racism is, in my opinion, only in a couple short passages, which is much less than i expected. i found the personal narratives, which were scant, pretty engaging, particularly a short passage about traveling through the wilds north of quebec city with a native american chief and a short passage shittalking other authors who ripped off his illustrations for derivative books. the majority of the book consists of actual instructions for cutting, measuring, etc. for the various structures, but there are interesting sketches and drawings on every other page or so and discussions of where certain kinds of structures were popularized/used/etc. I feel like i have internalized some basics on constructing shelters, e.g. how to layer shingles/boughs to prevent leaks, how to square angles, and how to construct basic components, and i enjoyed the experience of daydreaming about building them, and thinking about how i probably never will build any of them. there are passages emphasizing conservationism, only cutting trees in unpopulated and densely wooded areas, etc. which i feel like are now impossible to encounter, in the sense that i don't think, in north america, maybe, that there are any densely wooded areas where it would not be illegal to cut down some trees as part of making your own camp. in this sense i enjoyed the book as an artifact of the past. there are also funny passages (e.g. one where he shittalks a guy who wrote him a letter to complain that one shelter required too much physical effort, whereas young boys had written letters praising how fun the shelter was to build) and strange/antiquated turns of phrasing i was unfamiliar with.

Ninety-Nine Stories of God by Joy Williams (Tin House):  this is a very short book of 99 vignettes - some are only a sentence, some are a couple (small) pages. i read it over 3 sessions before bed. i like how 'loose' she defines the qualifier "of God" in that many stories don't, in my opinion, have a very clear emphasis on God, but rather cover things like coincidence, life/death/love, and nature, which i think is the 'point', this idea of God being whatever God is, everywhere, whatever. and there are several stories where God is a character, interacting with animals and people in a non-God way, which was funny - it felt like at times joy simply wrote a very short story and then changed the character's name to God so it would fit in the collection, and these were, i think, my favorite stories, for example the one about God adopting a tortoise. so there are some like the above, and some of the stories are like little parables, and some are short 'news reports' (unsure if any of them are true), so there is a variety of the type of story throughout. it never felt repetitive. the ones i enjoyed most were the ones that felt autofictional or repurposed for the collection, which emphasize small details, the range of human quirk, and the strangeness of conversation. the prose/style reminds me of The Voice Imitator by thomas bernhard, and is a style i've seen recently in some stuff online, eg jordan castro's recent shorties on muumuu house and the recent sebastian castillo story on new york tyrant, which i can only really explain as a sort of semi-whimsical reporter voice, a sort of affectless affect, undynamic sentences, passive voice and clunky relative clauses for exposition/background. the idea, in my head, is that this approach foregrounds the story or idea and less the prose, but in reality i end up paying attention to the prose, i think, and i don't like it, really. i'm sure there is a term for this and some other more well-known books that do it which i haven't read. i think it's effective at times but reading it, and thinking about other short fiction that does it, has made me rethink instances where i've done it in some unpublished work, i think because of the novelty of it, and i felt briefly embarassed/disappointed in myself, and committed to rewriting those stories.

 

i'm still reading The Sellout, slowly. it's hard for me to focus, i think, when reading the sort of maximalist approach to jokes/references within long digressions, and i get tired when reading it, especially at night. i'm also taking my time with On the Mountain and i plan on starting a frederick barthelme novel next. i forget which though. i want to read another joy williams novel, i think, form the 80s.

charity barn poems

 a month or two ago i raised money for bail funds by offering to write a barn poem for every $5 someone else donated. they were, on average, written with the person in mind, based on things i know about them, or things we have talked about before. i had to write ~75 barn poems. i am sharing seven of them here:

 

Barn Poem for Cavin B. Gonzalez 1

we slathered up a pig in nacho cheese instead of mud

we had to open the windows in the barn

well, we didn’t have to

but it was starting to smell pretty bad

worse than usual

a cheesy, piggy funk

i mean, it wasn’t that bad, tbh

could have been worse

i expected much worse

you can barely smell it now

so, uh, are you still interested?

please buy this barn

Barn Poem for Alec Sugar 2

we follow the sludgy doom riffs out of town

louder and louder

the weed stink also louder

(is that why they call it ‘loud’? i don’t know anything about weed. except the smell, i know that)

the drums rumbling through our bones

the riffs – sheets of viscous rain

(i don’t like similes in poems

so i rewrote that line to be a metaphor^^)

the growl, the lick

the doom tongue lapping us up

oh yeah, babbyy

maybe we’re high already

we hold hands until we don’t

it felt nice but i don’t need to talk about it if you don’t

you still ask where it could be coming from

like yo don’t know, but we both know

we’ve been to that barn before

and we’ll be there soon

and we’ll come back again

ok. it’s a promise. pinky swear.

Barn Poem for Chris Dankland 1

took my metal detector back out to the desert

dug up old barns

barn after barn after barn

stacked them in a loose pile as the sun beat down

i sweat through my clothes digging up barns

i drank all of my water digging up barns

my mind was empty

my arms were sore

the barns all grimaced against the dunes –

an ever-growing pile of skulls

no, wait, they were barns

i got heat stroke but

i’m pretty sure they were barns

Barn Poem for Chris Dankland 2

competitive barn racing –

illegal in most states

often violent, brutal

a showcase of the limits of our humanity

what’s that movie about the, like, the rolly derby kinda sport

like on roller blades but people die

there was that scene where the protagonist begrudgingly snaps some dude’s neck on a railing or something

fuck what was that movie?

anyway, competitive barn racing is a lot like that

people carry knives, usually, for example

and there is often very little racing

it’s mostly a knife thing

Barn Poem for Todd Snider 29

mark linkous performed under the name sparklehorse

he somehow had a major record deal

he did heroin and passed out on tour once

pinned his legs underneath his torso

something about when that happens and you move your legs finally

there’s a release of some built-up mineral, or something

it can kill you

it didn’t kill him

but he couldn’t use his legs for a while

he went on tour in a wheel chair

he recorded a sad album

well, all his albums after that were sad, to be fair

but that one, good morning, spider

he recorded that one in a barn apparently

i just looked it up

maybe i knew that, maybe that’s why i started writing about him

once he sang about an apple bed

which was a term he’d made up to refer to a moss-covered rock

one he knew in childhood

he wanted to go back to that apple bed

he also sang about horses

a horse, a horse / my kingdom for a horse

that’s a shakespeare reference

and it’s the first line on his first song on his first album

he also had his heart broken

probably many times, but there was a last time

after that time, he went into a public park with a rifle and shot himself in the chest

imagine that – a rifle

on the song about the apple bed he has a drum sample that sounds like a distant gunshot

i used to get teary-eyed when i heard it

this was in the context of his death – he had already died by the time i first heard the song

the last lines on the last song of his first album are yes your hair smells like sunshine today / gasoline horses will take us away and probably the last line he ever recorded, on his 2009 collaborative ep with Fennesz, is goodnight, sweetheart

 

Barn Poem for Donald Ryan 1

the most luxurious barn life

hammocks and heat

one of those rainforest showers

and only the choicest of hays

hell yeah

this kicks ass

Barn Poem for Todd Snider 2

how many barns

until we no longer need the word

until that’s all there is

the barn as background

as foreground

past, present, future

nothing but barn

and we can just move on

brief book reviews

here are the 3 books i most recently read and my thoughts:

Imaginary Museums by Nicolette Polek (Soft Skull): i like soft skull and i like short fiction and i like it when stories embed surreality into everyday stuff, or something, so from having read excerpts, and from knowing it's on soft skull, i was excited to read this one. i also like the cover. it's a small collection and i read it over the course of 3-4 'sessions'. some stories are about a half a page, some are maybe 5-6 pages. it's divided into sections that i didn't really take into consideration when reading, except for the Slovak section. however, many of the stories require knowing what the title of the story is to 'get' the story, i think, so maybe this applies to the sections as well. in the 'slovak sceneries', for example, most of the stories emphasize a sort of homage to the 'strangeness' of Eastern European countries in terms of a rich history merging with the modern day as a sort of aesthetic that has been taught to me through American culture and which i think i briefly experienced while visiting Hungary, for example. my personal anecdote is seeing that the airport shuttles in budapest used real leather straps instead of that mute synthetic grey material. so the stories in this section, i feel, focus on that, the old world/new world intersection, eg: a duo of falconers being asked to settle an old family dispute about a green ferrari (or some other fancy sports car). this also helps sort of solidify the kafkaesque feel of the rest of the stories, especially the one about the guy whose clothes get stolen. there's an emphasis on office life, purposelessness, shame/fear, anxiety, etc. Like kafka, nicolette is good at, in my opinion, presenting these strange situations/imagery/events without obvious 'morals' or symbolism, although some of the stories felt like they did have this (like the one about dancing), which surprised me on reading them, because of the rest of the stories seemingly lacking them, which i preferred. i might, also, just be too dumb to understand them, and maybe they are all, secretly (to me) like this. stylistically, she has a tendency to write similes that feel strange and evocative, and i get the sense that she keeps a notebook of interesting images/objects to include when fleshing out a scene, for example, a pink tennis ball, and orange stuck with cloves, and a third thing i forget now all lined up, each of which are/were unique and mysterious. i tasked myself with making up a simile like hers to demonstrate my thoughts on her similes in a twitter DM and i ended up writing "Taylor opened the window and watched three birds alight from a wire. She thought they seemed temporary, like a glass ball, or kindness." After proofreading my previous book review post, this thing that I wrote feels like it could have been from either a Joy Williams story or a Nicolette Polek story, which i think is good, thinking about it. overall i enjoyed this collection a lot and would like to read a novel or collection of longer stories. having this feeling (an interest in longer stories) also made me self-conscious about my own (recent) emphasis on making a collection of very short stories. i think i like the story "Imaginary Museums" the most.

 The Collected Works of Scott McClanahan Volume 1 (Lazy Fascist): i've really enjoyed what i've read by scott mcclanahan. i think i started with crapalachia and then hill william and then maybe the sarah book. something like that. then i read stories v! which was pretty good but surprisingly short, as a collection. this collected works is scott's first two story collections, and it's short, which means those collections must have been each very very short. i liked these stories. they're very much in line with everything else i've read by him. aside from the topical similarities, like life in west virginia, interesting/strange characters, poverty, family, etc., there are themes of naiviety and trying to be a good person. i noticed a lot of stories end similarly with a breaking of the fourth wall which i imagine works well in a live reading setting, which is something i read about - scott being a great live reader - but in the collection as written it lost its impact and sort of felt like 'a thing' he did to just end stories, but was still regardless unique and 'bold,' in an unironic, earnest way, in spite of it being sort of artificial. not sure if i'm making sense. i enjoyed how some of the stories flowed together in order, requiring, more or less, than you read the book in order, which is interesting, to me, from a sequencing/'defining what a story is' perspective. this is something that scott does in later works like hill william, which i remember feeling was sort of like a story collection, but sort of like a novel. i feel intimidated by how 'famous' and respected scott mcclanahan is in indie lit and thus don't feel compelled to analyze/comment much on the stories other than that, in fear of looking like an idiot. this edition comes with an intro by blake butler (which seemed like a nonsequiter and i skipped) and an afterword by sam pink, which feels 'rare', and was enjoyable - i felt like he offered a good analysis of scott's style and approach. i do not remember the names of any of the stories. i think it's interesting that the names don't seem important for the stories. i think my favorite was the one about stealing someone's pizza. it made me laugh a few times.

The War on X-Mas by Alan Good (Death of Print/Malarkey Books): alan's a nice guy i know on the internet who tweets about politics a lot and runs a podcast where he interviews authors, including me, once, and he runs/works on various websites/book press things via Malarkey books and others. this book is basically a self-released book which i bought from alan directly. i've enjoyed alan's writing online, on e.g. the neutral spaces blog and back patio, but wasn't sure what this book would be like. it's a story collection, with the last 3 stories revolving around the same character(s), which felt strange, sort of like alan had considered writing an interlinked story collection about this guy but only finished a few stories, or had retrofitted some of the stories to use the same characters, or something. it made me think in terms of what a story collection is, and made me question myself as to why i thought it was strange. overall the stories are similar: very dark satire of contemporary american culture/politics. the satire is often very, very dark, most 'not humorous' and instead simply depressing/bleak/over the top, for example, one story is about an ad exec who orchestrates a terrorist bombing to fulfill a tourism ad campaign contract. but i think in a lot of ways the satire is 'effective' in laying out the issues it wants to explore, which includes classism, gentrification, american-branded country music-style conservatism, small town ignorance, and american gig-economy capitalism. aside from the last three stories, alan's protagonists are incredibly shitty, vulgar, mean, and horny. but many are also poor, working class, depressed, and trapped. plot-wise, i was surprised at the amount of sex, sex jokes, profanity, etc., and how frequently sex, or sexual (mis)adventures play an integral role in the plot of the story. since alan starts the book off with a table listing the number of rejections from magazines he got for each story, i was primed to think of the experience of submitting/reviewing/accepting/rejecting these stories, and felt, by the end, that there is some non-zero chance that alan could be blacklisted by various online magazines because of the unexpectedly extreme sex/violence/sexual violence, based on how the current online lit mag discourse is shaping up. i think the stories are fine, but it was something i thought about, because i didn't expect him to write these kinds of stories going in, and they're so thematically similar to each other, and at times very intense. writing-wise i think alan's voice is effective at what he's trying to do. i think he is prone to digression, and in most stories some sections/subplots felt underworked, with some plot points feeling rushed/arbitrary, while others felt extraneous. sometimes the digressions, which mostly revolve around cultural/political criticism, would be long enough to make me forget what he had digressed from, and i'd have to turn back the page to recenter the plot, in my head.

i'm currently reading:
The Sellout by Paul Beatty
On the Mountain by Thomas Bernhard
Wallop by Nathaniel Kennon Perkins
A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness by Kathy Fish, Amy L. Clark, Elizabeth Ellen, and Claudia Smith