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The Mysteries of Animal Industries

1/27/2011

This semester I’ve been assigned to teach in an ancient building called “Animal Industries.” The name sounds creepy, and the building is in fact very creepy, and several students have told me it’s haunted. (No doubt we’ll be doing some creative writing ghost hunting here before long). But, you know, despite (or maybe because of) its creepiness, this building is also really, really cool. We’re in the second week of classes now, and I’m very happy with our location.

Look! My classroom has windows—and a clock!

Interesting, creepy, and mysterious detailing in the hallways….

Across the way, the new Liberal Arts building is under construction....

And of course you know the new building will be terribly sterile and bland, part of the ongoing devolution of the American Soul….Give me Animal Industries any day!

UPDATE 03/18/2017

I now teach in the new building, LAAH. It is in fact kind of bland, but interesting in its blandness. Animal Industries is under renovation. Hope it maintains its beauty and its ghost....

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Soundtrack Sunday: "Riff-Raff"

1/23/2011

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Driving a cab is a hard way to make a living. You work ten to twelve hours a day, driving, driving, fighting traffic and the elements, and the people you pick up often treat you very poorly indeed—a few measly dollars spent on the fare can be enough to bring out the inner despot and tyrant in many normally polite and well-behaved individuals.

When I was working on my MA I was in a cw class and wrote a cab driving story about a driver whose life is bad and gets worse. It was supposed to be…tragic, I guess. It was supposed to be sad! But when I first read it aloud, people—laughed. My audience thought it was funny! And every time I’ve performed this story since then, people laugh. I'm not really sure I want to understand the response—but of course at any rate it’s beyond my control. Once you write or tell a story, it’s not yours anymore: it belongs to the reader, the listener.

At any rate, “Riff-Raff” is set in a hard world….

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Soundtrack Sunday: "GUTS :( "

1/16/2011

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This is one of my favorite stories to perform—the narrative is pretty strong and the rising level of ridiculosity always seems to keep the audience hanging in there. “Guts :( ” [and my blogging platform can’t handle the strikethrough on GUTS or the little frowny-face that follows] is another story about a city in a time of change and dislocation. Wes Leonard is the humor columnist for the Austin newspaper, and he is assigned to go cover a chitlins cookoff. But he's tired of writing about colorful and folksy community events, and he doesn’t want to go—he’d rather spend the afternoon in a bar getting drunk.

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...colorful and folksy was getting harder and harder to find: the city had changed, was changing. There were big-assed skyscrapers downtown now, and tech millionaires cruising around in Maserattis, and waves of immigrants from California and Mexico—and everywhere else on the planet, seemingly—had changed the texture of the town. Colorful and folksy, real colorful and folksy, was getting hard to find. Wes tried a few times to write about the new city he was seeing all around him—he wrote about the gentrification of the east side, about inappropriately huge mansions in old neighborhoods, about traffic and traffic and traffic, about air and water pollution, about the loss of friendly old bars and restaurants, and the snootiness of new bars and restaurants—he wrote columns about the new city, and nobody liked them. They were downers. They sounded like the carpings of a cranky old man. Nobody wanted to read that. People wanted colorful and folksy—at least from him, they wanted colorful and folksy. He went back to recycling old topics. In the end all it got him was a gig as the celebrity judge at the Greater Southwest Chitlins Cookoff and Jamboree.

*

An obvious choice for music here is “My City Was Gone,” by the Pretenders. Though perhaps it’s too obvious. And over the years the song has been co-opted and appropriated for evil purposes. Also it’s about Ohio. How about:

My first visit to Austin was in August, 1978. I was coming down from Minnesota on I-35, and after I crossed the Red River, I veered off and hit US 281 at Jacksboro and headed on south. When I got past Johnson City I struck east on US 90, and came into Austin in the late afternoon, and just past the Y in Oak Hill I fumbled around looking for a radio station and found KLBJ-FM—ha! I KLBJ! That was pretty funny, I thought, and I had much to learn about Austin and Lyndon Johnson—and then Genya Ravan and Lou Reed came surging out of the speakers, brassy and sexy and exciting. It's not the kind of song that that most people might think of when they're considering Austin, but for me it capured a moment. A new place! New possibilities!

What was I doing in Texas? Exploring. Seeing what was there. There was a lot to see—something new every day. A lot to explore. Four years later, The Clash came to Austin for a pair of concerts and filmed a video for “Rock the Casbah.”

The RF4Cs at 2:34 figure in a story we’ll come to later, “The Speed of Sound.” At 3:08 you can see—me—off to the side of the screen. I was trying to stay out of the camera range, and of course now I wish I’d been up front jumping around. At 2:04, you can see the characters running west on Sixth Street toward the Alamo Hotel, a place that figures in my novel, That Demon Life, and whose bar, the Alamo Lounge, was no doubt a favorite hangout of Wes Leonard. But that’s all in the past. “GUTS :( ” is a story that takes place in the present, and it's Wes’s doom is to live unhappily in that present while writing about traces of the golden past.

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Soundtrack Sunday: Brindled Pit Bull

1/2/2011

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I like to think there’s a soundtrack to my work—songs that are playing somewhere in my head as I write and are inferred in the text—and what I’m going to try to do over the next few weeks is post some possible soundtracks to my writing, music for further listening. I’ll begin with my story collection, Long Time Ago Good, and then move along into That Demon Life.

“Brindled Pit Bull”

Long Time Ago Good is a collection of stories set mostly in Austin, a city I lived in for 25 or so years, stories written as a way to help me understand where I was and why I was there. “Brindled Pit Bull” is the opening story in the collection, and what’s it about? Loss and awakening, I suppose. Marla is a high-tech worker in Austin who gets laid off her job. She begins thinking that the Austin she lives in is perhaps not what she thought it was….
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Later, going home in the free cabs, taking long trips to their homes in the far Southwest or far Northwest sides of town, everyone would be laughing and making calls on their cell phones, gossiping about work, telling each other how wonderful Austin was, with restaurants and Sixth Street and music and all the cool people at work, but how weird and crude and out of it the rest of Texas was—Texas they had seen only from car windows as they drove in from San Diego or wherever, or gazed down on from a mile up in the air as they flew in from Seattle or Boston—and the cab would speed by neighborhoods where the locals lived, the ones they saw on the TV news for winning chili cook-offs, or going on killing sprees, or getting in car wrecks, all those would-be cowboys sitting in the night in their camped little houses drinking beer and cleaning their guns and admiring their Confederate flags while their girlfriends snorted crank and their kids rolled around squalling in dirty diapers—a whole class of left-behind losers that no one would ever take seriously. The cab driver if he was cool would laugh along with them, knowing he was getting a good fare and a good tip, and it had all been such childlike, endless fun, one long party, it was never going to stop, the jobs would get better and better, and pay more and more and more—but, no, now it had ended. It had stopped.
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The story is also about desire and recognition, about someone who finally breaks through to see the world truly—though, since Marla is a very flawed person, her honest vision of the world might very well be incorrect.

So, for listening: “Everything is Broken,” a Bob Dylan song performed by R. L. Burnside.

Also a bonus track: “She’s Got” by True Believers. The Troobs were my favorite Austin band of all time, and you might want to imagine their music running through both my Austin books—because it is—the sound of Austin as it exists in my imagination, the city I knew and know….

The sound is really bad on this video, but I think the power of the band still comes through. I’ll probably be posting more of their work as the soundtrack project rumbles along. In the meantime you’ll probably want to track down their album….

Hard Road, by True Believers

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A Reading List for Creative Writing

1/1/2011

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When, a way long time ago, I put together my dissertation reading list, I focused on the main area of writing that interested me: the relationship between the writer and his or her region. My list was in three parts: Theories of Place, where the relationship was explicitly discussed; Regional Literatures, where the relationship was performed; and 20th Century American Memoir and Travel Narrative, where the relationship is usually performed or discussed. Few of the books are about “Creative Writing” per se, at least as it is often taught and theorized, yet all of them combine to give a picture of what I think is important in writing.

Then, a few weeks ago, a couple of grad students asked me for recommendations on writings about creative writing. My dissertation list wasn't quite what they were looking for. So I had to give it some thought....For me, creative writing breaks down into four rather broad areas:

Where It Comes From: How place influences writing and the writer.
What It Means: a more traditional critical look at writing and the production of writing.
What Produces It: looking at the “creative” part of creative writing.
How It’s Done: Looking at craft, usually from the point of view of the writer

So, here are a few books toward a creative writing reading list:

       Where It Comes From

Turchi, Peter. Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer
Taun, Yu-Fi. Space and Place
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space
Lippard, Lucy. The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society.
Jackson, John Brinckerhoff. Discovering the Vernacular Landscape
Clay, Grady. Real Places

       What It Means

Booth, Wayne. The Rhetoric of Fiction
Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novel
Weing, Siegfried. The German Novella: Two Centuries of Criticism
McGurl, Mark. The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing
Lucaks, Georg. The Theory of the Novel and The Historical Novel
Wood, James. How Fiction Works

       What Produces It

Pirsig, Robert. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Madsen, Patricia Ryan. Improv Wisdom
Richardson, Robert. First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process
Flaherty, Alice. The Midnight Disease
Pinker, Steven. The Stuff of Thought
Andreasen, Nancy. The Creative Brain: The Science of Genius

       How it’s Done

Butler, Robert Olen. From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction
Addonizio, Kim. Ordinary Genius
O’Connor, Flannery. Mystery and Manners
Shelnut, Eve. The Writing Room
Hills, Rust. Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular

Of course, this is just a list. Many, many other fine, interesting books could be on it. You could really read forever--and maybe you should.

___
Photo: "The End of the Road: 1964," from the Shorpy Photo Archives. http://www.shorpy.com/node/1003?size=_original

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Ordinary Horrors

The Mysteries of Animal Industries

Soundtrack Sunday: "Riff-Raff"

Soundtrack Sunday: "GUTS :( "

Soundtrack Sunday: Brindled Pit Bull

A Reading List for Creative Writing

Lowell Mick White

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