The Outlet: the Blog of Electric Literature

Group Writing Advice from J. Robert Lennon

When I was in high school, I tried to collaborate on a novel with two of my friends, Jack and JJ. I can’t remember how it started—probably we were bored at lunch and one of us had an unused spiral notebook—but this project would become not only the first sustained (in both time and length) piece of fiction I attempted, but also the first serious artistic collaboration.

Okay—not serious. The novel was, in fact, ridiculous in the extreme—a Douglas-Adams-style bit of sci-fi slapstick featuring our own fictional avatars engaged in picaresque adventures with a rotating cast of extemporaneously generated fools and rogues, many of in possession of tentacles, or silicon for brains. We took turns, passing the notebook around between classes, or biking it over to each other’s houses on the weekend, and nothing we wrote was really any good. What was serious was the intensity of our efforts—for the better part of a year, work on the novel became far more important than school, than girls, than even our Dungeons & Dragons group. And you could tell it was serious because, when we started fucking with each other, we got really, really angry.

The Facebook Book

My new book, For My Next Illusion I Will Use Wings, will be published in print in Hebrew in a couple of months. But at the beginning of January 2012 I decided to try something new, and published a free digital copy of it on… Facebook.

The idea of publishing an entire new collection of very short stories on Facebook was, in part, an experiment to see how literature can become more social. The digital format has enormous advantages for the reader; but most of the time digital formats still try to imitate the experience of reading a book in print (paging, bookmarks, virtual bookshelf, etc). I wanted to see if it could be different: how literature could evolve if the reader can see who of his friends likes the same stories, who is sharing the stories he shared with others, how does the book endure with readers’ comments on every page, visible to all.

JAMES KIRKWOOD: mythical…but maybe not murderer

The story of James Kirkwood demonstrates how easily and inexplicably the acclaimed can fall off the critical radar.

In 1975, he had two shows playing on Broadway, while his latest novel Good Times/Bad Times saw reviewers comparing him to Saul Bellow and Joseph Heller. One of those shows – A Chorus Line – won him a Pulitzer Prize for his co-writing contribution. Yet the reaction of most people today to the mention of Kirkwood’s name would be a crinkled brow. Almost none of his works remain in print.

Kirkwood became my favourite writer in the 1980s. I was enchanted by the vulnerability and effervescence of novels like Good Times/Bad Times, P.S. Your Cat Is Dead! and Some Kind of Hero, and even more by the fact that neither of those qualities ruled out streetwise grittiness in his prose. Yet though he was my favourite writer, he for a long time remained a myth to me. His books were not in print in my native UK and for an impoverished young man were only obtainable by scouring second-hand shops, a veritable tilling-for-gold process that produced indescribable joy on the rare occasions when an out-of-print or imported paperback turned up. In those pre-internet days, I could discover nothing about Kirkwood beyond what was conveyed on book flyleaves and covers. The first time I ever saw his name mentioned in a British newspaper was in a list of AIDS fatalities. Needless to say, I hadn’t known he was dead.

DIRTY! DIRTY! DIRTY! A High Speed Book Tour (part VII)

Dave Insurgent of Reagan Youth, circa 1984

Editor’s Note: Mike Edison has been out on the road promoting his new book, Dirty! Dirty! Dirty! – Of Playboys, Pigs, and Penthouse Paupers, an American Tale of Sex and Wonder, on what has been a book tour like no other, perpetrating a mix of literary mayhem and music in bookstores, pizza parlors, dive bars, and art museums, and will be sharing his tour diary and road tales here in this exclusive blog. For more info on DDD and all things Edison, please visit www.mikeedison.com. Click here for the full tour diary.

Nov 16, SAN FRANCISCO
KING OF THE HIPPIES

In 1984, a San Francisco police officer told me I should leave town and never come back. Seriously. Leave town, and never come back. I guess he didn’t like me very much.

Which was fine, believe me, the feeling was mutual. It was like this: I was in town with the Rock Against Reagan/Rock Against Racism Tour, driving and being the general facilitator for New York matinee thrash idols Reagan Youth. Singer Dave Insurgent (nee Rubenstein) was one of my best pals and he insisted I come on the tour and open their shows with the world’s most obnoxious comedy act, a Borscht-Belt Comedian as Satan-in-a-madras-jacket character that would tell one-liners about invading Nicarauga, a real sore point for lefties back then. Invaribly I would catch a hail of bottles and death threats before Dave and the band came on to deliver their message of peace and anarchy: Liberate yourelf, don’t be a reactionary, think for yourself, and get a fucking sense of humor.

DIRTY! DIRTY! DIRTY! A High Speed Book Tour (part VI)

Nov. 10, New York City
Punk Rock, Dirty Blues, and the Dark Side of Professional Wrestling: A Real Beat Happening

With the Midwest fading like headlights in our rear view mirror, Mickey Finn, The World’s Greatest Piano Player, and I are ready to take on the home town crowd in New York City.

The venue is none other than Manitoba’s Bar on Ave B and 7^th Street, the scene of many of my favorite outrages. Once upon a time, I had a band called the New York Sheiks. It was a kind of a punk rock blues and dirty boogie band, a free wheeling experiment in gospel, glam and rock’n’roll terrorism, and back around the end of the century we played at this bar every Thursday for about three months getting ready to record our first record.

DIRTY! DIRTY! DIRTY! A High Speed Book Tour (part V)

Edison the Drop Out punks it up at ye olde college event board

Nov 6, University of Chicago
“Like Pouring Chocolate Sauce on Cocaine”

I love doing gigs at colleges. It makes me feel somewhat legit — after all, I dropped out of a couple of very good ones and despite writing a few books and working as a journalist I am still outside looking in, especially when it comes to my family. I broke my mother’s heart twice, the first time when I dropped out of NYU film school, and then after I traded up to Columbia, I went off the reservation after just a semester.

DIRTY! DIRTY! DIRTY! A High Speed Book Tour (part IV)

The Greatest Honor Ever Bestowed on a Writer, Ever.

Nov 5, Chicago
Return of the Fighting Cock, or, Hey Patti Smith, Eat My Shorts!
The World’s Greatest Piano Player’s relationship with The Car is beginning to worry me. It isn’t right. It is…. Well, unnatural. He has begun to fetishize its German engineering to the point of some man-meets-machine post-apocalyptic sexuality that I am not sure I am comfortable with. If we are parked outside of a bookstore, he feels he has to visit The Car. Not check on it, VISIT it. Late at night when it is parked for the evening and we are drinking, he gets wistful about it. He talks to his girlfriend in New York every day but I notice he is careful not to mention The Car. Then again, even the punters are impressed by our ride. How many times have we heard in the last three days, “Hey, whose BMW is this?” and of course no one believes us when we say it is ours. Writers do not tour in Beemers. For most of us a more appropriate vehicle would be a hearse.

DIRTY! DIRTY! DIRTY! A High Speed Book Tour (part III)

THe Bee-yoo-tee-ful Fisher Michigan gets DIRTY!

Jew vs. Hillbilly: the Day the Pornographer Came to Town
Nov 4, Pt. Huron, MI

Looks like Labatt’s Blue is going to be the Shower Beer of the Week. No problem, works for me. It’s a light lager with a little more taste than Budweiser, my preferred beer to drink while loitering under a life-giving blast of hot water and going through the semi-ritual process of Cleaning the Jew.

So it’s not exactly a micva, me drinking beer in the shower, but I do draw a lot of power from it. The thing about the beer is it has to be ice cold, and nothing fancy. I’m not in there sipping a pint of handcrafted IPA; I am enjoying the medicinal, spa-like effects of a cold beverage in me and super hot water on me, plus the regular cycle of wash, rinse, repeat, etc – it is not only a crucial hangover killer (even if you have to really gag back the Bud on some days), but the panacea for any sort of early morning blues, not to mention the best way to recharge the batteries, or simply relax, after a long day. Sometimes I like to linger and have a few while I listen to an entire Beethoven symphony, or a few sides of Led Zeppelin, which always sounds better in a small, tiled room. (In fact I have actually constructed a playlist for better shower drinking, reprinted below.)

OCCUPY WALL ST.: We’re Getting On and the Zero Emission Book Project

Lucky, prior to Waiting for Godot by the 99% Theater Company

At 11:00AM On Friday, October 14^th, I sat in the back of a casting room in Manhattan, listening to actors audition for a film called Family Games, which I co-wrote, and which four days before had officially entered preproduction. Earlier that morning, Mayor Bloomberg had attempted to evict the Occupy Wall St. protesters from Liberty Square in the financial district, on the pretext that the grounds had become unsanitary. Brookfield Properties, which technically owns the plaza, planned to clear the demonstrators and their tents so the park could be “decontaminated.” Occupy Wall Street’s counter-action was simple: if Brookfield Properties was arriving at 7AM, an OWS cleaning crew would work all night to make sure there wasn’t a mark on the granite, or a shred of paper outside a trashcan; the 99%, so they hoped, wouldn’t get displaced on a technicality.

I had planned to attend the clean-up before auditions, but instead I went to a coffee shop and worked on a script re-write. I don’t think I realized how heavily my inaction was weighing on my conscience until one of the actors scheduled to read for us came in looking as if he hadn’t slept. “Sorry if I seem a little exhausted,” he said. “I was up all night sweeping Liberty Square.” I glanced down at his headshot and résumé. He’d just finished a play on Broadway.

Having, out of guilt, avoided the news all morning, I asked him if they’d staved off eviction. “We sure as hell did,” he said. “3,000 people turned up 6AM for a standoff with the city. Bloomberg couldn’t do a thing about it. We had the place sparkling by sunrise.”

Riding with Jesus Part XV: a badbadbad tour blog

Editor’s Note: Jesús Ángel Garcia, author of Badbadbad, is blogging his book tour. This is his fifteenth installment.

On Midwest Strangeness (Part II)

After Iowa City and Indianapolis, the tour headed south for a noir weekend in Missouri. Jesus Lives! large in Mark Twain’s mythic playground for do-gooders and good-for-nothings, just as He does in Indy, Atlanta, Nashville and Virginia Beach. Hell, maybe Sarah Palin is right: the United States is the Promised Land for True Believers, who won’t have to fight for a seat in the skybox come Rapture. I always forget how the middle states are blood-red. Not my fault, not by choice anyway. I’m genetically predisposed to not knowing where I am at all times. Geographically challenged, my father calls it. Good thing Missourians value family alongside beefsteak, popcorn and praise. I felt well taken care of here.