If you want to get in on all the fun, order the book from Invisible City, sign up for the Facebook event, and be sure to download the MP3 tour (available soon) onto your portable audio player or smartphone.  Start the tour on October 15th at the Powell Street turntable and join us at the after-party in the Cable Car Museum on Nob Hill.

Then, that evening, be sure to join us in Clarion Alley for Invisible City’s “Tour of All Tours” reading as part of Litcrawl.

I hope to see you there!

[There's Nothing in My Car for You to Steal]

There’s nothing in my car for you to steal;
Seriously, you won’t like the country music
On those CDs; even if you took all
Of them, they’d hardly be worth very much.
They’ve all been downloaded illegally.
That suit coat’s not worth more than five dollars,
And even if you did like Waylon and Willie
I doubt you’d find much to like in the others.
Sunday, on finding on the seat the brick
You’d used to smash the passenger’s side glass,
(It beneath the contents of my glove box),
What most impressed me was the violence
That sent those shards across the car,
Shards seen now in sunlight, just where they are.

They handled Kafka admirably. An earlier conversation about surrealism and Andre Breton’s “Free Union” helped. In general, I’ve been blown away by the quality of the discussion. Does the mother in Tillie Olsen’s “I Stand Here Ironing” fail her daughter at the end of the story? This from a student, initiating the discussion.

On Monday, after we finished Grace Paley’s “Samuel,” the silence in the room testified to the impression it made on my students. Ditto Louise Erdrich’s “The Red Convertible,” which I read to them on Friday. Actually, I’d forgotten Henry kills himself at the end of the story. Nevertheless, my TA, who leads a supplementary evening discussion, reported my students raved about the story. Their enthusiasm seems all the more remarkable considering it deals with PTSD, though as it turns out, this doens’t fall outside the realm of their experience. In class, one girl said Erdrich’s story reminded her of friends’ siblings who had returned to Iraq for second and third tours because they couldn’t adjust to being home. Some of them never made it back, she said.

On her own, another girl found Junot Diaz’s “How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie,” which I hadn’t assigned. In class, she dutifully reported one of the stories in the book contained “the f-word.” In the name of demystifying the Diaz story, I’m considering assigning it. Though I’m less certain about Joyce Carol Oates’ “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” I’ll probably read it to them, anyway. It’s an important story, and I think it will resonate with them, particularly on account of the mother-daughter relationship that drives the story.

Quite apart from the texts I assign in the anthologies, I find myself amused by the idea of what we would cover if I were actually to teach them about trying to live as a writer. At one point, I’d decided to take the class to Goodwill in order to facilitate a writing exercise. I was only half-kidding when I joked with a colleague it might also be useful to visit Goodwill because that’s where they’ll be shopping if they pursue careers in the humanities.

Inevitably, teaching creative writing, one feels a certain pressure to reveal something of himself—a pressure best ignored, most likely. One of the program directors likes to tease me that I live in my car. Over the last six months, she’s spoken to or corresponded with me in San Francisco, Fayetteville, Santa Fe, Oakland, and New Orleans. Over the last year and a half, I haven’t spent more than four months in one place. While on the one hand, teaching here, for the first time in ages, I feel like I’m doing exactly what I’m supposed to be doing, on the other hand, unlike most of the other people who teach here, who have full-time positions at the university, I’ll pull up stakes in less than two weeks, still not knowing exactly how I’m going to pay my rent the rest of the summer.

Some of  my married friends—especially the ones with children—tell me I’m living their dreams. Like so many members of my generation, I find myself alienated from both urban and rural America, the former because it’s prohibitively expensive, the latter because nine years of higher education and my avowed secular humanism (which I don’t completely subscribe to, anyway) don’t always play well with the common folk. All of which is to say, it gets tough out here. Then again, I complain too much, and if I’ll spend the rest of the summer slowly sinking into debt, I’m doing what I love doing.

The other night, I sat up for several hours talking to two colleagues who work for Teach for America. Their experience hasn’t done much to improve my opinion of the organization, though not having worked for it myself, I’m speaking out of turn. Nevertheless, we agreed what happens here, at the camp where we’re teaching for the summer, is the way education ought to be. Outside the classroom, TAs and RAs closely monitor students, whose time is highly structured. In less than a week, I’ve seen many of mine come out of their shells. The other night, students played a version of speed dating called “Hurry Friend,” in which each of the boys had two minutes to introduce himself to each of the girls. Considering how frightened I was to talk to girls at that age, considering how poorly I understand dating rituals at 35, I’m envious of this program’s attention to their experience not just as scholars, but as human beings.

I don’t think Tillie Olsen felt the mother fails her daughter in “I Stand Here Ironing.” In discussing the frankly autobiographical story, Olsen—a working mother who raised four children on her own—said she felt no guilt about not always being there for her own children; after all, she had to work. And yet throughout the story, the mother sounds defensive, and the way Olsen’s narrator presents her rationale for not returning the school counselor’s call, it’s hard not to read it ironically, or if not ironically, at least with an acute sense of how it acknowledges the inevitability of certain kinds of failure, the failures that are endemic to living: “Let her be. So all that is in her will not bloom—but in how many does it? There is still enough left to live by.”

I look at the faces of my seventh and eighth grade girls, and I wonder at the compromises some of them will have to make—have made, perhaps—and I hope they don’t have to make too many. And yet maybe Olsen’s right: maybe those quiet failures don’t amount to tragedy so much as they do to the business of living—inevitable, and yet no less hard to bear because they happen whether we will them or not, in spite of the fact we keep doing the best we can do.

On my way to Oakland in April, I spent the night in Needles, California, where I’d also stayed when I moved to Arkansas three and a half years ago. Then, when I visited Needles, I checked my email at the public library. This time, I went back to the library, so I could print a few pages I needed from my flash drive. When I asked where I could get a cup of coffee, the women behind the reference desk suggested Denny’s, laughing when they informed me there were no locally owned coffee shops in Needles.

In my lifetime, floodlit truck stops and national fast food chains have come to characterize the American landscape so completely that chains like Stuckey’s or Waffle House seem local by virtue of their regional particularity. Like American corporations overseas, these chains provide a few token (usually minimum wage or lower-level management) jobs, but instead of nurturing the local economy, they siphon money out of it, helping to destroy it.

This month, driving east again, en route to a job teaching summer school in Natchitoches, I make a left where highway 60 joins highway 84 in Fort Sumner, New Mexico. I pass a few art galleries in downtown Fort Sumner; here, as in many larger American cities, an artistic renaissance seems to have nurtured a commercial one, albeit a minor renaissance in Fort Sumner’s case. Every fourth or fifth building looks occupied. In between, I pass rows of abandoned storefronts, the vacant commercial space that has come to typify small American towns. From here, it only gets worse. Passing into Texas, I drive through clusters of derelict buildings. Half the houses along the highway have collapsed; several are burnt out husks. Occasionally, I see a few ranch style houses with pickup trucks in the driveways; after all, people do live here. Perversely, in each town, a sign points the way to the post office.

Even in the larger towns along this part of highway 84, barber shops, convenience stores, and restaurants have closed. Several times, I pass service stations that have been converted into thrift stores. For the most part, the few locally owned businesses cater to the Hispanic population, a demographic most corporations have yet to tap. The industry seems to consist of large scale ranching and agribusiness (cotton, I’ve since learned), and yet many of the ranches look to have fallen on hard times, too. Considering how contemptuous many Bay Area people are of Bakersfield and Sacramento, I wonder what they would make of the billboard with the ten commandments I passed a few hours ago, on the other side of the Texas state line. In an ironic illustration of the forces that drive so much of the far right’s rhetoric, it stands directly above an abandoned house with a lot full of scrapped cars.

Maybe a hundred miles down the road, another billboard advertises Littlefield, Texas as the birthplace of Waylon Jennings. Twenty minutes later, driving into Lubbock, which the sudden plethora of chain restaurants and stores suggests is considerably more prosperous than its surroundings, I’m considering the two facts I know about Lubbock, namely, it has more churches per capita than any city in America, and it’s Buddy Holly’s birthplace. If Holly and Jennings are both products of their environment, their music, like most American popular music, reflects their desire to escape that environment. 50 years after they first recorded, contemporary country sells us a dream of that vanishing small town in its heyday, and yet the same politicians who hearken back to “small town values,” who share a demographic with contemporary country, almost invariably serve the interests of the large corporations sucking the lifeblood out of those towns.

As Americans, we embody contradictory impulses. On the one hand, the vast majority of our literature (film, too) tells us we’re supposed to escape the confines of that stultifying small town. On the other hand, while the right has monopolized the business of small town myth-making, the left has a similarly problematic relationship with America’s past. Moderate Democrats cater to the largely imaginary “small business owner,” while progressives posit a utopia that owes as much to a vision of America’s agrarian past as it does to one of any conceivable future. Right or left, we look backward as much as we do forward, and the conflict between competing visions of our past and what that vision means for our future plays itself out in our popular music, especially in that most vilified genre, country.

Though I’ve often thought of them as being part of different generations—though I’d certainly thought of them as appealing to different demographics—Buddy Holly and Waylon Jennings were close friends. Jennings played bass for Holly’s band, Holly played guitar on some of Jennings’ first recordings, and Jennings was one of the last people to talk to Holly before Holly boarded that plane. (After giving up his seat to the Big Bopper, Jennings even teased Holly about the plane crashing.) Both musicians drew heavily on the tradition of west Texas country music, and Holly was a star performer in his high school band. By contrast, Jennings got booted from his school band, instead cutting his teeth as a DJ and a member of various rockabilly bands in the Lubbock area.

Today, because it’s home to Texas Tech University, Lubbock remains a hub. And yet if Lubbock has survived the slow collapse of the economy in West Texas, the surrounding towns seem to be sliding toward oblivion. Perhaps anti-immigrant groups are right when they express their fear of the United States “becoming” Mexico. The same American corporations who outsource manufacturing jobs treat places like West Texas like they treat Mexico, siphoning resources out of the region, putting nothing back except for a few token jobs, which prop up what’s left of a foundering economy.

]]> http://www.flatearthcollective.com/2011/05/31/buddy-holly-waylon-jennings-and-lubbock-texas/feed/ 0 http://www.flatearthcollective.com/2011/05/28/donna-laemmlen-at-slice-magazine/ http://www.flatearthcollective.com/2011/05/28/donna-laemmlen-at-slice-magazine/#comments Sat, 28 May 2011 23:31:53 +0000 Jim Nelson http://www.flatearthcollective.com/?p=2121 Skeptician-in-Residence and featured Flat Earth Collective reader Donna Laemmlen’s story “Be There Soon” was recently published by Slice Magazine out of Brooklyn.  Congratulations Donna!

Thursday, June 16
7PM – 9PM
Bird & Beckett Books and Records
653 Chenery St. (near Glen Park BART)
San Francisco

I’m also pleased to pass on that Confrontation published my short store “Inside the Footnote” in their Spring 2011 issue.  A PDF of the entire issue is available on their web site.

Carll opened with “The Letter,” a gospel-inflected acoustic paean to life on the road from this year’s KMAG YOYO, before the band joined him for “Faulkner Street,” from 2008′s Trouble in Mind. Though it took his sidemen a few songs to warm up, they switched ably between country, country rock, and folky ballads. Guitarist Scott Davis goosed uptempo numbers like “KMAG YOYO” and “Stomp and Holler” into rave-ups. Before playing the former, Carll jokingly predicted the song–a self-consciously Dylanesque tale of a soldier in Afghanistan experiencing a morphine-induced hallucination after being hit by an IED–would be “burning up the country charts in no time.”

Other highlights included a solo rendition of “Another Like You,” a song Carll recorded as a duet with Cary Ann Hearst on KMAG YOYO. On stage at Slim’s, introducing the tongue-in-cheek tale of a drunken one night stand between a conservative and a liberal, Carll described his characters as person who watches Fox News and a person who watches MSNBC. When nobody in the audience responded, Carll declared that in the Bay Area, obviously nobody gave a shit about either news outlet. Fair enough.

“Another Like You” showcases Carll’s humor, as well as a gift for characterization. “I heard you say Afghanistan / Is safer than a mini-van,” the man drawls, while the woman retorts, “Were you hitting on the stripper / ‘Cause you can’t afford to tip her / Or maybe just afraid of being alone?” “Don’t you ever shut your mouth?” she asks him, when he accuses her of having slept with half the South. The conservative woman who sleeps around testifies to Carll’s regional particularity, while the characterization of the man as a broke, frustrated Dylan fan must involve at least a degree of self-revelation.

Like an entire generation of songwriters before him–including Hubbard and Earle–Carll finds himself in the odd position of stealing back what Bob Dylan stole from country music, with both the advantage and the disadvantage of being entrenched in a regionalism Dylan only affected. If anything, “KMAG YOYO” (a military acronym for, “Kiss my ass, guys, you’re on your own”) plays like an homage to “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” with the important distinction that its character, unlike Dylan’s “kid,” has actually ended up in the military. On “A Lover Like You,” from Trouble in Mind, the conceit and the delivery both recall early Dylan: “I came here for quiet, I ended up in a zoo / I could never be friends with a lover like you.”

Thanks to several generations of Dylan-influenced singer-songwriters, the road-weary troubadour has become something of a trope. At Slim’s, during “Hard Out Here,” Carll delivered a monologue about how much he actually enjoys his job, thanking the audience for spending their hard earned 15 dollars at the door instead of on “a 12-pack and some porn.” “I drink too much,” he sang, the first line of “Willing to Love Again,” a ne’er do well’s apologia to the woman who won’t leave him, before he started laughing, joking he might as well have stopped writing the song with that line.

It’s nice to see Carll doesn’t take his persona too seriously. As perhaps befits a suburban Houstonite with a BA in History, he romanticizes hard living, sometimes more than he should. On “Bottle in My Hand,” a better Steve Earle song than Steve Earle’s written in a while, Carll sings, “Ain’t got no home, just lucky I guess.” “Drunken Poet’s Dream,” which Carll co-wrote with Ray Wylie Hubbard, begins, “I got a woman, she’s wild as Rome / She likes to lie naked and be gazed upon.” On “Hard Out Here,” he plays that same persona for a laugh: “And everybody’s talking ’bout the shape I’m in / They say, Boy you ain’t a poet, just a drunk with a pen.” If the humor undercuts the sentimentality, so does Carll’s ability to turn a phrase, as on “Wish I Hadn’t Stayed So Long,” from 2005′s Little Rock, which tells the tale of a struggling Nashville musician: “I can hear that country music from the window of the bus / Do they do it for the money? Do they do it for the love?”

Make no mistake: there’s nothing “alt” about Carll’s take on country music. For all Dylan’s influence, the lyrics remain literal, the songs firmly grounded in traditional structures. If anything, Carll finds himself in the odd position of being on the margins of one of the largest marketing demographics in the US, a market he can’t tap without pandering to mainstream country audiences. His drawl and his Texas roots place him on the margins of the rock market, and he’s made fewer concessions to the demands of that market than kindred spirits Steve Earle or Lucinda Williams, both of whom slur their drawls ever more thickly while the former tends toward folkie eclecticism, the latter toward artfully produced pop.

At the show, a good friend characterized Carll as the Mitch Hedburg of country music, which seems apropos. If he’s going to be remembered, though, he’s going to be remembered for his songs. At 34, after four albums, he’s amassed an enviable catalogue. Saturday’s show suggested he’s having a good time, and that he might have the wit and the wisdom to add to it, especially considering his funniest songs often seem his wisest.