Passengers

The passengers on the Boeing 747 issued a collective groan when the big jet banked and made a sweeping turn over the desert on its way back to Los Angeles International Airport, where it had taken off less than an hour earlier. Crackling over the intercom, the pilot announced that an oil leak in one of the four giant Pratt and Whitney turbine engines required him to shut it down and return for repairs. Since there was no airport nearby with a runway long enough to accommodate a 747, we were headed back to Los Angeles. A few people talked in excited whispers and others cinched their seatbelts tighter as the jet lost altitude and slipped close over tips of the 10,000-foot San Gabriel Mountains. Though still fifteen minutes out of Los Angeles, the flight attendants had already taken their seats. Across the aisle a woman with dark red hair nodded her head in prayer. When the plane finally touched down, the cabin erupted in cheers and applause. Back in the terminal, representatives from the airline told us that the cause of the oil leak had been the failure of a fifty-cent 0-ring. When they instructed us to board the same plane an hour later, half the seats remained empty.

Ever since that time I’ve found excuses not to journey long distances. I’ve even convinced myself that I enjoy a good, long drive. Nevertheless, air travel is as much a part of life in the twenty-first century as horses were in the nineteenth, and there are times when even the most squeamish traveler must stow his fear in the overhead compartment and temporarily suspend his belief in gravity. Though for me flying comes at a psychological cost, there are hidden benefits as well. As a strange kind of compensation for overcoming my reluctance, whenever I fly I seem to draw seats next to interesting people.

Once, on a nonstop from Paris to San Francisco, I sat next to a dreadlocked twenty-one year old Portuguese girl named Anna. She was reading a novel by a Brazilian writer, so I asked her advice about contemporary authors writing in Portuguese. She borrowed my notebook and filled a page with a list of names and titles. “These are just some of the better known ones,” she said. Pulling a silver ipod out of her striped wool bag, she asked, “Do you like music?” She handed me the headphones so I could sample a band with a strong techno beat while she wrote the names of her favorite musicians on another page of the notebook. As we talked, she took a tiny bottle of clear liquid from her purse and applied it to the metal ring that protruded from her lower lip. It’s important to keep piercings in that area wet, she told me, and saliva’s not the best lubricant. Then she delivered a dissertation on the art, psychology, history, and sexuality of body piercing.

In addition to the metal on her lip, she showed me the rings, studs, and i-bars on her tongue, ears, and brow, but left to my imagination the ones in less publicly accessed spaces. She loved piercings, she told me. She’d been doing them professionally for two years, working at a body mod shop on the outskirts of Brighton and then doing them on demand in Paris. Piercings are addictive. “There’s something about the process, you know, the pain, that’s hard to describe. It’s very intense,” she said. “I like to do them for other people, and I like to have them done for me. But it’s really important to get it right. You must make people comfortable, talk to them the whole time. It’s so personal. And you better really explain how to care for it afterwards so it heals okay. You know, so many people don’t know what they’re doing or even why they’re doing it.”

She was going to California with plans to spend a year working at a tattoo parlor in Isla Vista, near the campus of the University of California at Santa Barbara. A friend of a friend she met in Paris knew the owner. “I spoke to him on the phone,” she said. “He seemed very nice and told me I could sleep on the couch.” She hoped that custom agents at the San Francisco airport wouldn’t find or object to the large quantity of surgical needles in her luggage. “I don’t know where I’d get needles,” she said. “Besides, we like to use our own kind.” The more she thought about those needles in her luggage, the more apprehensive she became. “What are they going to think? I hope they don’t tell me to leave immediately.”

Though young enough to be my daughter, she was curious about the details of my marriage. “You know something about women, about life,” she said when I told her I’ve been married for close to twenty-five years. She had lived with different men in England and in Paris, but she wasn’t sure she’d ever really been in love. “How is the sex now after all this time?” she wanted to know. I told her it was just fine. At some point the flight attendants brought food and drinks and the lights had dimmed for a movie. It was a short ten hours, and before deplaning we exchanged email addresses. Months later I heard from her. Denied an extension on her tourist visa, she had gone to India and completed a Transcendental Meditation program at an ashram. Now she was traveling alone on a bus into the mountains. “The people here are amazing,” she wrote. I have no idea what happened next.

On another flight, this one from Sacramento to Washington, I sat next to a thin, energetic woman who told me that aliens had repeatedly abducted her as a child. We’d been making small talk about our travel plans—she and her mother, who was sitting in the row ahead of us because they’d been late boarding the overbooked flight, were on their way home from a funeral—when she suddenly put her hand over her mouth. “Oh my goodness. I’m sorry for asking so many questions,” she said. “I don’t mean to be rude. Maybe you’d rather read your book or take a nap? It’s just that I’ve got a habit of talking people up to pass the time.”

I smiled and admitted I had the same habit.

Chuckling to herself, she said we’d ended up in the right seats after all then. “I listen to people all day long and never yet got tired of it.” The key to good conversation is to be a good listener. If you’re patient and let people have their say, they’ll tell you some pretty interesting things, that’s for sure.

I agreed with her. “Everybody has a story.” That’s when she told me hers.

“Most people don’t believe me,” she said, after she’d asked me if I was interested in hearing about her experience with aliens, “but that doesn’t bother me much now. I’m used to it.” She fidgeted with her necklace and studied my face for a moment before she continued. Then she took a breath and began.

“Up until the age of sixteen they’d come for me,” she said. “I’d be asleep in my bed and a warm green light would fill the room. Then off I’d go, up to their ship. It happened fast, almost before I could catch my breath. They came for me about every six months.” I listened intently to what she told me. She spoke deliberately and when she paused, I waited for her to continue. “I’d have liked to think it was just a dream, but after a while I knew better because of the experiments they did on me. Didn’t they, mama?”

An elderly woman with oversized glasses peeked her head above the back of the seat in front of me. “They surely did.”

“I don’t want to say all they done, but most of it wasn’t nice. It made me so I’m not afraid of nothing now.”

“Are you worried they’ll come back for you again some time?” I asked.

“No, I’m not. Because I know for sure they won’t. I know a lot of things I probably shouldn’t.” Then she told me a story about how she’d tried to warn the son of a family friend that if he didn’t stop using drugs and committing petty crimes something bad would happen. “He laughed at me and walked away. I told him I would pray for him. Later on that same day he died an unnatural death.”

Just before the plane landed, the woman pulled her purse out from under the seat and gave me her business card. She owned a barbershop in Saint Louis where she cut men’s hair. “I won’t touch women’s hair,” she explained. When I told her she should write down her stories, she looked at me and said, “I’m telling them to you for a reason.”

For years I carried the card she’d given me in my wallet. When I looked for it just now, it was gone.



[This is a draft from a collection of essays, feature stories, and memoirs about some of the strange experiences I've had. Others in the proposed collection concern occult parlor games, doubles, cults and culture in martial arts, finding a lost or abandoned toddler, the southern California beach culture of the 70s, avant-garde writing as a profession, and "Alice in Azorath", an insider's look at the computer game, World of Warcraft.]

Vive le pointillisme

I've done drawings using dots to create halftone types of shading effects before, but I'd never tried pointillist techniques in painting, so I thought I'd play around with the idea. It seems very odd to "publish" a work in an early stage of completion, but I already mentioned I'd try to show some examples of projects on which I'm currently working. So here's a detail from the painting. While I'm not sure where this concept is leading me, I think pointillism might be something to try in purely abstract paintings. 

What Have You Been Working On?

I used to love when people asked me that question. It would give me an opportunity to outline the plot of my latest novel or tell them about the film script I just finished. I might have tried to explain the concept of my interactive paintings or describe some strange sculpture I was planning to make out of bent saplings. 

As one gets older one becomes less self-absorbed. I still get up in the morning happy to have another day to experience and share with others, but I'm less inclined to think that my artistic creations have much if any importance. My work will not change the world, nor is it likely to last as long as the solid houses others once built out of logs or stone. 

For the past year I've been working on a handful of diverse projects all at once. I'm in no particular hurry to finish any of them. When I get a chance, I'll post a few bits and pieces.

The Prose Poem

What exactly is a prose poem? 

I've been writing prose poems and thinking critically about the form for close to three decades now. In 1982 I published my first collection of poems, which included half a dozen odd looking miniature stories with justified margins. Over the next decade I published three collections of prose poems: The Masked Ball, Puppet Theatre, and Carnival Aptitude. Early on, I'd been reading Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and the French Surrealists and I found the open form exciting and full of potential. I also liked the idea of laying a trap for readers wary of poetry. If it looked like prose, maybe I could get them laughing before they realized they'd been had. 

In 1985 I wrote a M.A. thesis on the prose poem that included a long essay entitled "The Contemporary American Prose Poem: An Application of Paradox," which was later published in a collection of my critical writings.  In that essay I surveyed the origins of the form and tried to arrive at some kind of definition. Others have tried both before and since, some in essays and others in book length monographs. I'm not sure anyone has completely succeeded.

A couple years ago I co-edited a little anthology of prose poems called The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder. The short introduction I wrote for that volume invites the reader to enter into the spirit of the prose poem rather than attempt a rigid definition of the form. 

Here's part of what I wrote:

Though I've never been able to locate a can of striped paint or a stick with one end, over the past twenty years I have been asked to write about the prose poem on several occasions. Despite my best efforts to identify an underlying set of universal characteristics, or even to arrive at some more general kind of understanding of this shape-shifting literary form, I suspect my musings on the subject have never yielded a comprehensive definition nor much insight into the mysteries of the genre. Perhaps my dissatisfaction with my own efforts stems from the simple fact that prose poems follow few rules while at the same time insisting on many exceptions. And so with each successive attempt I've made to organize my thoughts on the subject, my efforts have relied less on the techniques and approaches common to scholarship and literary criticism, and more on strategies and practices associated with creative writing. In the end, it seems the prose poem is its own best, and perhaps only, definition.

One might say that trying to characterize and contain the prose poem is a bit like being sent on a "sleeveless errand," an April-Fools goose-chase to acquire sweet vinegar, a bacon stretcher or a box of straight hooks. After enduring the knowing grins of all the literary shopkeepers, one invariably comes to the realization that the prose poem doesn't really exist, except, of course, in the imagination. It seems to me there's no finer place to exist—especially for a hybrid literary form sired by the desire to loosen restrictions imposed by genre. Other writers have noted many times before that prose poems frequently employ the logic of dreams. Perhaps that's another reason why we love them—because they're so free to give voice to the unconscious...

Tightrope Walker

One of my first woodcuts, this print was carved on a piece of plywood. 

Martial Arts

Most people have no idea that I trained in martial arts and was a full time professional martial arts teacher for a couple of years. I began my training at the rather advanced age of 38. My son had wanted to study Taekwondo and I thought it would be a good way for me to get back into shape as well. 

I remember watching my first black belt testing like it was a movie. In my mind there was simply no way an older, out of shape guy like me could ever jump over people and break boards with a flying sidekick. Five years later I was doing exactly what I'd said was impossible. 

The martial arts culture is a strange mixture of ritual and hype, philosophy and bullshit. Sometimes it takes years to sort it out. While Masters and schools are often cult-like, money-grubbing, and negative, the training itself can be incredibly empowering. 

Asylum Arts

In 1990 I founded an independent literary publishing venture called Asylum Arts Publishing. For fifteen years I acquired, edited, designed, published, and marketed books to the trade, with a special emphasis on translations of French Romantics, surrealism, and four difficult to market and thus extremely underrepresented categories of books: serious collections of poetry, prose poems, plays, and short stories by living American authors.  

According to the non-profit organization Poets House, which keeps statistics on American publishers of poetry books, Asylum Arts was among the top ten publishers of poetry in the country for three straight years. That a one-man operation produced a greater number of poetry titles than almost all of the commercial, university, and subsidized non-profit literary publishers in the nation speaks volumes about the sorry state of poetry in this country. So does the fact that there are more academic programs granting degrees in creative writing with an emphasis on poetry than there are readers who purchase the Pulizer Prize winning volume of poetry most years... 

I originally conceived Asylum Arts as a niche publishing operation. Ironically, the venture failed as a result of its unexpected success. Spurred on by consistent and enthusiastic reviews of the books in national media, Asylum Arts quickly grew to be a trade publisher with the same requirements as large operations: seasonal lists, national distribution, deep discounts, heavy returns, and a team of sales representatives taking a cut of the profits. Then my exclusive distributor stopped making monthly payments and six months later declared bankruptcy, stranding 80% of Asylum Arts' stock in Connecticut and swallowing whole the money from six months worth of sales. The press never recovered. Over the next six or seven years the press sputtered along, publishing small print runs an abbreviated list. In 2005 I sold Asylum Arts, which lives on as an imprint of another small literary publisher.