Hoopla, Laurie Anderson, and Libraries

What I meant to say was, "Libraries have changed everything for me, this year."

Today was the last day of the Traverse City Film Festival, which means that, next week, life is going to return to some manageable semblance of Summer Normal. Because of the endless magnanimity of my manager, Tim--who is wise and all-knowing, and suffers the thousand hurts of life managing the madhouse with the quiet dignity of lesser saints--I managed to get a night off, and am celebrating by drinking a glass of Chateau Pomeys Moulis en Medoc, writing this journal, and baking iced tea buns for tea tomorrow.

The wine is a lovely Bordeaux that puts me in mind of the blackberry brambles I scrabbled in my childhood, tart and ripe and dark. I'd meant to drink it with my parents, while they were up visiting from Mississippi, but they "had to drive," and "really, Max, we worry about how much you're drinking these days," and "oh god put down the axe," and that sort of thing. So I drank it without them. Serves them right.

Speaking of work, I met the coolest librarian at work the other day.

Her hair was gray, cut almost as short as Bird's is. She had the sort of face that's been carved by a life alternately laughing and squinting at books and screens, and she had on a black Laurie Anderson t-shirt with the sleeves cut off (it was a monochromatic print of the cover of Big Science, which is probably Anderson's best album).

I told her I liked her shirt, noting that you really don't see many Laurie Anderson shirts around, and that Big Science had been my introduction to her.

"Yeah, well," she said, "I wore my other one out, and we're doing this thing at the library--'Libraries Rock' is the theme--so I went and tracked down another one."

"You're a librarian?" I asked. (I think that's what I said. It may have been, oh fuck you're a librarian too how do you manage to walk around without being mobbed for autographs and proposals of marriage being so obviously fucking amazingly cool as you are? Or something of that sort. It's hard to remember. Maybe I blacked out.)

And she said she was, and we talked about how libraries were, indeed, cool, and about Laurie Anderson, and I brought her food and booze, as is my current lot in life, and she left.

And I thought about libraries.

Many of my favorite places are libraries. The best is the Peter White Library, in Marquette, though the Olson Library in the college nearby was where I spent most of my time, and did most of my writing, while I was in college. The incomparably beautiful Carnegie library, in Ishpeming, where my Grandma Linda worked as a librarian for many, many years, and which was immortalized in Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder.

(Remember the scene when Jimmy Stewart and Arthur O'Connell find the "irresistible impulse" loophole at the same time? They're in the Carnegie Library; Stewart is standing directly above the front desk where my Grandmother worked. It still looks almost exactly as it did in 1959.

There are other family stories from back when that movie crew came to town. Paul Biegler's house in the movie is a stone's throw from my Grandmother's house, and still just as it was. There's stories about drinking at the Congress with the film crew, and who danced with who, and which of my relatives bought which stars a drink. There is also the one about my wild great-grandfather punching out Jimmy Stewart's hair and makeup man, but that's probably for another time.)

I've done lots of writing in libraries. They're quiet, polite places, generally staffed by wise, polite people, and I love them. The way they smell, the easy way I can pluck a book off the shelf and fall into it until the sun has set, and I'm asked (wisely, politely) to go home.

But, for the most part, I haven't really used libraries, in the booklending sense, until this year. I wish I had been. It's incredible.

Did you know you can just go in there, and ask them for any book, any book at all, and they will hand it to you, and you can take it home, slip into your favorite robe, make a mug of cocoa, and read the fucking thing at your leisure? For free? As often as you like?

I've read my way through several of the high-espionage Smiley novels of John le Carré, and three of Agatha Christie's Miss Marple books. I've gone through five books on bees and beekeeping. I'm a slow reader. This given me months and months of enjoyment and education, and it hasn't cost me one red cent.

(Well. Tax money, I suppose, but I'd rather my taxes pay for public access to mystery novels than new bombs to kill innocent people overseas with any day of the week. If I could give all my tax money to libraries, I honestly might.)

All of which leads me to Hoopla.

Hoopla is an app that you can download on you phone, computer, tablet, and/or smart TV. It's a digital content provider where you can download e-books, audiobooks, digital comics, movies, music, and television shows.

And the best part is that you can do all this only in conjunction with your local library.

You register with your library card. That's it. You're off to the races. As I understand it, each local library gets to set the number of "borrows" available to patrons each month. TADL allows users in this region eight borrows, and for me, that's been plenty. Then again, I exclusively use Hoopla for audiobooks, and I've been listening to a lot of Charles Dickens just lately (the last recording of Bleak House I listened to clocked in at around 40 hours: quite a bit of entertainment for a single "borrow"). Some of my family find eight borrows to be a little limiting, but they mostly seem to be using it to stream television shows that they can't watch on Netflix--Hoopla counts each episode as a borrow, and so they can only watch eight episodes a month: practically nothing for a modern, seasoned Binger.

But I've been thinking about that, lately. I remember a time, not too awfully long ago, when you could only watch one episode of your favorite show at a time. And then you had to wait a week before it'd come round again--unless, god forbid, the show was between seasons, in which case you'd go months without knowing what was going to happen next. If you really, really loved a series, you'd buy the DVDs, and watch them again; if a series was just okay, you'd probably drop it and get on with your life.

I remember a time before Netflix. I feel like I went outside more, back then. And read more. And wrote more.

Bird and I had a long talk while we walked Trinity earlier today, about cancelling our Netflix account. It seems, just lately, that we've established a new routine: I get home from work, we watch a couple episodes of some show, we go to bed. Every night. For weeks, now. Formulaic shows, too. Nothing mind-blowing.

Nothing I would write in on my calendar. Nothing I'd bother with at all, probably, if I didn't have fifty episodes lined up and ready to go.

A hundred and sixty dollars a year, and mostly what I do there is scroll through hundreds of things I kind of only half want to watch maybe someday but what do you want to watch...

...until it's too late to watch anything, and we just go to bed.

That's why I like Hoopla. I'm using my local library. I'm listening to books I've wanted to read for years, but never got around to: The Curse of Lono, by Hunter S. Thompson, and The Ball and the Cross, by G.K. Chesterton, and Joe Hill's NOS4A2, read by Kate Mulgrew, which was far and away the best reading performance I've ever heard.

I'm listening through the complete H.P. Lovecraft.

The complete C.S. Lewis.

All the Sherlock Holmes stories.

Hundreds and hundreds of hours, and hundreds of thousands of pages of books and stories I always said I'd get around to one day, and am getting around to now, for free, through my local library. And for the first time in a long time, I'm finding I'd rather be reading than mouth-breathing into a pint of ice cream on my couch, staring blankly at half a season of Frasier for the fiftieth night in a row.

But I sense that I am wandering dangerously. The point is, if you like to read, or if you like odd, obscure, hard-to-find music, and you like your local library, check out Hoopla.

The point may also be that breaking the cycle of mindlessly binge-watching television can improve your life, and that maybe all those wise, polite grown-ups who told us to turn off the TV and go read a book when we were young might have known something, or seen something coming, that we didn't.

So. There. Libraries. Laurie Anderson. Hoopla. Just like I said I would.

Here. Let me leave you with some English Iced Tea Buns, which came out much bigger than I thought they would:

View fullsize

Not too bad, and pastel, to boot.

Somedays, What Dreams Don't Come

Sometimes, the fingers cannot form the shape of the thing in your head: there's too much Tired in the sluice and the trickle of image and imagination comes rusted and sludge.

Which is a nice way of saying: "I'm a little burnt out, and am taking a day."

I'm in the office, which is, these days, a mostly bare room with a beautiful view of leaves and the trees they are attached to and the birds and squirrels that live and play there, and the barren waste of a construction site beyond. The wasteland comes in flits and snatches through the leaves, but it is there, disturbing as a nearly-forgotten memory of loss lurking just beneath the surface of the mind. A sliver of sorrow.

Life, for me, just lately, is Writing a Novel. I don't know how far along into it I am, as far as word count goes, since I'm writing it in notebooks and on my typewriter and in separate MS Word documents broken by section or chapter. A hodge-podge of sheets that grows like mold to my left, on the edge of my desk.

The fact that I'm Writing a Novel is, in large part, the reason that it appears to everyone else like I'm Doing Nothing. I've been talking with Bird a lot about this lately; about the directions I've wandered along over the last couple of years. Mostly, my friends know me as Their Friend Who Podcasts, or Their Friend Who Makes Music (or, Their Friend Who Makes Noise and Calls It Music). But before any of that, all the way back to before I could read, I was a writer. In my dreams of what my life will be one day, and what I want it to be now, I'm a writer. That's all. It's what I care about, and what I'm passionate about, and what makes me most happy in the world, and I've wandered a long, long way away from it lately, filling the scant time I have with projects in other media. It's cost me some command of my words, and a fluency and fluidity at the keyboard that I once had, and am struggling to recapture, now.

That said, I'm not going to stop the other stuff. I'm not sure how I'll fit it all in, Chat-Man and Robin and Measuring Flicks and the like, but I can't stop those conversations: they're too much fun, and I learn too much about conversations and art and people, and I've made too many friends too closely, in front of the microphones, to ever stop sitting down in front of them, I think.

I don't know how I'll manage it, but I'm going to try.

I meant to write about Hoopla, though, and libraries. Sorry. Got off-track. I've noticed, when I sit down to write these, that I often apologize or make excuses for not doing things. For not journaling more regularly, or for not putting out podcasts, or for not generating enough content. And lately, I've felt less and less comfortable with the discomfort of that space, and yearned to get back to the singular struggle of putting words on a page. Of making up stories and writing them down. Crafting poems. Imagining film scripts. Putting words in word balloons and in the mouths of people who Enter Stage Left in my head, words that matter and mean things to me and make me think about what I think and wonder at what sorts of things I wonder at.

David McCullough said, "Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly."

Then he added, "That's why it's so hard."

And I wonder if that's why I've been so tired, lately, so muddle-headed and foggy and filled with lassitude. I've spent my life thinking on paper. It's where I explore my head and my heart, and it is so hard.

This past month, working in earnest again on this novel, refocusing my energy on making up things and people and conversations, imagining murders and sex and conspiracies and nightmares that end only when you close your eyes and sleep, and putting it all down on paper... It's been great. I wake up happy, looking forward to working on the book. I go to sleep content, having worked on the book, and (mostly) knowing what happens next, and thinking about how best to get it down the next morning.

I'm not sure what the point of all this is. Maybe to generate content, though I hope not. I hope what I'm doing now is saying hello, and telling people who haven't seen or heard from me in awhile what I've been up to, and that I'm alright. Happy as a clam. A bit tired (it's the week of the Traverse City Film Festival, as I write this, which brings its own bags of shit along with it, mostly in the form of bad driving, public drunkenness and violence--I called the police yesterday, walking home from work, because I saw a woman assaulted in an alley: she got away after a few seconds, and made it to the main thoroughfare of the city, where there were lots of people, and where she was safe, but I still called to report it, and describe the man who attacked her. Summer in Traverse City is not all sunshine and cherry pits. It brings a lot of people with it, and not all of them are happy, kind, and considerate. Most are, but not all.)

All that said, I'm cutting the first two August episodes of Measuring Flicks tomorrow morning, along with a Patreon-exclusive two-parter: Karl and Danielle (gifted thespian, wunderkind theater tech, and Karl's girlfriend) came over and, over the course of a full day, much tequila was drunk, many charcoal-grilled chicken tacos were consumed, and both versions of House of Wax (the one where Vincent Price is amazing, and the one where Paris Hilton ends up dead) were watched and discussed in boisterous, happy round-table fashion. It was such fun.

And that's what life has been like for me, for the past month or so: fun. Mostly good. Mostly happy. Mostly productive.

(P.S. - I meant to write about Laurie Anderson's stunning new album with Kronos Quartet, Landfall, and to list all the reasons you should go listen to it, and about libraries, and G.K. Chesterton, and Warren Ellis, and Hoopla, and Murder, She Wrote and Miss Marple and Shetland and all sorts of other things, but I wrote a bunch of other stuff instead, and so am leaving this postscript to remind myself to get back to these subjects next time round. I hope you'll indulge me.)

The Illusion of Control (Or: Wait. He Did WHAT?)

Life is good, in the not-quite-northern bit of Michigan.

The past few days have been a brutal fug of heat and humidity that turned me into a half-melted, grumbling, shambling puddle of sweat without no sense of humor and the shortest of all possible fuses, but heatwave aside, things have been, on the whole, pretty great.

My short story "My Father's Life, Furnished in Stars," was published in the June issue of InterGalactic Medicine Show. (Accompanied by a positively gorgeous illustration by Scott Altmann, which you can see HERE. I don't know which is more delightfully eerie: that the son, in his time-travel suit looks a bit like me, or that the old man in the bed looks like my dad, as he might look as an old, old man.) I don't think there's a way to buy the single issue, and the website only allows a preview of the stories in it, but if you have $15 lying around, the subscription is well worth it, if not for my story, then for Aimee Ogden's "A World Without," and K.D. Julicher's "Burnover," and the fact that a subscription gives you digital access to every back issue of the magazine ever published. Kindle. Nook. Computer. All are welcome, here in this miraculous digital age.

And a spike in subscriptions might make me look good. *wink wink*

Okay. I'm done banging the drum. Let me tell you about the strange and terrifying thing that just happened to me, instead:

I've been working on a novel for the past month or so, in fits and starts, in snippets and snatches, and when I can. More, lately, as I made a bet with a friend about whether or not I could finish the book by the end of this year, and have no intention of putting myself through the rigorous hell that losing that bet would demand.

I was working toward the end of a chapter today. Just writing, putting words after words as they came to me, with a pretty good sense of where things were going, and what was going to happen next. This is often how writing works for me: I can see the general shape of where I am, and where things are headed. I know who characters are, and what they might do in a variety of situations, and why.

The scene I was working on was a sort of quiet, charming interstitial. A scene between strangenesses and horror--a quiet moment, between two characters I knew and liked very much.

And then it wasn't. Just like that. I was writing, and, all of a sudden, in the space between words, I knew what was going to happen--what had to happen--in the next moment, and it was not at all what I thought it would be. It was terrifying. Here I am, God at his keyboard, walking around my little made-up people and putting words into their mouths, dreams into their hearts...

...and suddenly one of them does something I didn't expect him to--didn't want him to. I stopped typing, tried to find the words to put the story back on the path I'd seen in my head only moments before. Before one of the people I'd made up made up his mind and the whole story shifted beneath my feet.

Bizarrely, I couldn't do it. I knew what was going to happen next, and it wasn't at all what I wanted to happen next, and there wasn't a damn thing I could do about it: this character's decision was simply the next bit of the story, and it didn't matter that it didn't fit with my tidy notes on how this scene would close, and what it would lead to, and so on, and so forth. If I didn't like it, well, too fucking bad, chum.

Even more bizarrely, the story still worked. It worked better. As soon as I knew what he was going to do, I knew also why he was going to do it, and what the implications were going to be, and how the moment would resonate with the rest of the story, and it all worked.

So I wrote what happened next. I have to go to work now, but that's alright: I know where things are going, and I can go there when I wake up tomorrow.

Unless I don't know. But, as a thrilling little moment at my keyboard today taught me, that's fine, too. The book knows where its going. I just need to sit down and go with it, until it's done.

---

(By the way: if you haven't listened to CocoRosie, particularly their phenomenally, fiercely powerful album Grey Oceans, you should. Really. Every time I come back to this band, I'm stunned by how unlike anybody else they are. They're incredible. Start with "Lemonade." Go everywhere from there.

My Father's Life, Furnished in Stars (or, I SOLD A STORY!)

I’m sitting on the loveseat in a room in disarray. A few feet away, Bird is stretched out on the couch, buried beneath blankets and dogs, reading on her Kindle. The light of the lamp is dim, and there’s shit piled all over everywhere: the house is a liminal place right now, a space between communal and a single couple (our roommates are moving out). I’m listening to Jimi Hendrix, Live at the Miami Pop Festival, and cannot remember the last time I heard a guitar so fuzzy and sweet and fine (unless it was yesterday, listening to Valleys of Neptune). Despite a few grumpy chirrups between Bird and I tonight (my fault), I am deliriously happy.

I sold a story earlier this month, to Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show. It’s science fiction; it’s called My Father’s Life, Furnished In Stars, and it’s about a lot of things: my father, for instance and unsurprisingly, and about me, and family, and time travel, and the cost of creating something. My Father’s Life is about dreams, and the cost of dreams, and what comes, both good and ill, of dreaming.

It’s my first pro sale. A couple of my stories have appeared in anthologies and zines, but to sell one to the Slicks? As the philosopher Billy Joe Armstrong once said:

I’m so fucking happy I could cry.

Scott Roberts, inimitable, beloved, suave, dangerous editor of IGMS, tells me that my story will be in issue #63, which will be out in mid-June. (Check out the magazine and keep an eye out HERE.)

I’ve got a few more stories out right now: an End-of-the-World Story (which is also secretly a Ghost Story), and a Hardboiled Crime novelette that I wrote in Maine.

And I’m writing.

Right now (not this moment, but you know what I mean), I’m writing a weird story about a husband and a wife, that smells suspiciously like an R.A. Lafferty homage, and which I’m enjoying immensely. I’m writing longhand again, in a hard black notebook I got ages ago, somewhere. Because I just finished The Dark Half by Stephen King, in which a writer’s evil pseudonym writes with black pencils, I’m writing with a Ticonderoga black.

I don’t write in pencil. I’m a fountain pen addict, normally, or racing across the keys to get at the dangerous broads and flashing razors and faces fountaining blood and the romance in the smoke...but I like the scratch. I like the feeling that the lines and the words are impermanent, susceptible to a little rubber or the careless, smudging thumb. The words feel less sacred, somehow, and come with less weight on their backs.

Not to jinx myself, but I think perhaps ‘twas the pencil, broke a late block.

The sale, the writing, the sending things out and looking for avenues down which to proceed: the last few months have done wonders bucking me up. It feels like, just maybe, I haven’t been wasting my time all these years after all.

(I’m telling you. Hendrix. Live at the Miami Pop Festival. You’ve never heard “Red House” like this before. The amps are practically begging to die beneath the weight of the feeling coming from this man’s fingers.)

The dogs are rustling and my knees and back are begging me to get up and move around, so for now, au revoir. Who knows? Maybe I’ll have even more soon.

Until I have more, I have exactly enough.

--Max Peterson

from the Miami Pop Festival on his couch

MEASURING FLICKS from the Depths of Detox

Here I sit, muddle-headed with my second day of the Keto flu, coming off a three-year jag of hard, dirty, unrepentant sugar addiction. Ask anyone who was with me through those bacchanalian years: I could put down a pint of Ben & Jerry’s with the best of them. Sometimes two pints in a day. I’ve walked to gas stations and eaten secret pints while my wife was at work, then hidden the dead carton at the bottom the trash, so when she asked in the evening if I felt like ice cream...why, sure. Sure, I felt like ice cream.

But one can only slump half conscious in midday beds with ice cream cartons hanging out of their arm for so long, I suppose. Even the hardened sugar junkie must cry off eventually, if they’re serious about surviving their forties.

And things were starting to get a little weird.

So. Bird and I are trying out the Ketogenic diet. Switching your metabolism from carbohydrates to fats as a primary fuel source is a bit of trick, especially if the staples of your diet to date are chicken breast, spoonfuls of sugar, loaves of bread, and scotch.

Muddle headed. Weak.

Resilient.

(You’d think I banged dope half my life, the way I’m coming down off of the evil White American Powder--sugar--right now. Christ.)

Now that I’ve updated you on my diet, what else can I tell you about? Blogs are incessant streams of inanities, so...my sex life? The assorted firmnesses and/or viscosities of my last dozen shits?

Sorry: I’m feeling crappy. (Rimshot.)

Here’s the real scoop: I’m podcasting regularly again, a weekly show called Measuring Flicks that I do with my friend and fellow film-nerd, Karl Hartley. We’re watching movies that people probably haven’t seen, or, if they have, maybe didn’t fully unpack. Weird movies. Powerful movies. Complicated movies. Westerns, exploitation films, independent films, foreign films, whole runs of directors (Sophia Coppola and Quentin Tarantino are both on the docket for this season), snapshots of unusual performances by exceptional actors....

You can listen here, or on iTunes.

(I just did a quick search and discovered that you can also listen to it over on Player FM, which is odd, because I did not put it there. Ah, well, the more the merrier.)

The conversations I’ve had over the past month with Karl have been incredible. Edifying and enlightening and mentally acrobatic in a way that I don’t always get to be. It’s a rare bird that can chat its way through the sociopolitical implications of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance one day, and enthuse about the incredible mesmerism inherent in the performances of Nicholas Cage the next. Karl is such a bird.

(Bird is such a bird, more in the direction of comics and art.)

Speaking of Bird (parenthetically. Lord, I’m cheeky today), Karl and I are planning a bunch of episodes with her sitting in as a third set of particularly feminist eyes. The main show is on iTunes, but we’re doing a bunch of Patreon-exclusive episodes as well: stuff that might be a bit too much for the general public, or which doesn’t neatly fit into the boxes we’ve laid out for the first season.

The first Patreon series is going to be all four movies in the I Spit On Your Grave franchise: horror films about horrifically victimized women taking horrific their revenge on their victimizers.

It seemed timely.

So there’s Measuring Flicks. You should check it out, if you like movies (or films, or cinema), or if you like any of the other stuff I’ve done. It really is like putting my brain on display, and I’m enjoying it immensely.

I have other stuff I want to tell you about, but right now, I’m fairly sure I’m dying, so racked am I by cravings for a pint of the good stuff (The Tonight Dough, my drug of choice), a lighter, a spoon.

Pray for me.

If I survive, expect lots more soon.

--Max Peterson
From the top room of an impromptu detox facility somewhere in northern southern Michigan.