Tag Archives: stories

Book Review: Midnight Mass by Paul Bowles

20 Wednesday Dec 2017

Posted by in Book Review, nostalgia, reviews

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I believed I had read all the fiction Paul Bowles ever published in these 18 years since his death. The discovery last week of the short story collection Midnight Mass, with the familiar Black Sparrow paperback binding – earthy tan with green and purple block print – was thus a very emotional experience.

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Immediately I was flooded by memories and thoughts of the man I considered my favorite author from the time I discovered him in ’87, the summer I got my first tattoo, until his death at the end of the last century.

Instantly, too, in that powerful way that great literature connects us with the world we are in, I remembered myself experiencing his works: where I was, the effect it had upon me. The empowerment and awe I felt after finishing one of his short stories or novels: blown away.

Paul Bowles was a huge influence on me as a writer and thinker. He was one of the most powerful allies in my struggle with immigration to the United States and in philosophical discourse in Europe. That he wrote from the subconscious as described by his wife, Jane, was the most romantic and amazing concept to me when I was young and I longed to be able to do that – not to understand it, but to do it.

The utter irrationality of the Western project, the neoliberal insanity we have all endured so long, was exposed by Bowles and then swiftly and violently shattered by the reality of life among the desert people of North Africa. In other works, a slow and seemingly disconnected series of events between locals in a village would be described with such lucidity and simplicity that the differences in thinking between east and west were made suddenly crystalline in the end – hits you like a koan.

The collision of culture was total and instead of Coca-Cola and the Golden Arches mowing down the village, the puny, minuscule westerners melted away in the heat of the Saharan sun, driven mad.

Midnight Mass is the last collection of Bowles’ short stories published by Black Sparrow and features at its center the elegant, drifting, rootless novella Here To Learn, a gorgeous story about a girl from North Africa who just keeps moving buoyed by her beauty, her wit and her ability to learn quickly how to negotiate the West.

The collection starts with the titular story, Midnight Mass, one of Bowles’ incredible parties; the Nazarenes careening around in their expatriated stupor of drinking, carousing and complaining, the locals bursting with romance only to become suddenly something else – the change of face.

There are stories about the locals and their fantastic, sometimes circuitous logic and its culmination in a kind of basic justice. There are tales about the utter undoing of our perception of a shared understanding of this world.

At the Krungthep Plaza is an amazing story set as the U.S. President is due to pass through a certain North African village. The machinations behind the scenes and the conflicts between locals, expats and the security teams are expertly related, culminating in a wild effusion of emotions that I can only described as angst against the way things are now.

It’s all just so great. I miss Paul Bowles.

(sigh)

Paul Bowles, 18 years after he died, was the best writer I read this year.

 

 

 

GBC Reader Vol.2, Issue 5: Fights and Flights

09 Friday Jun 2017

Posted by in GBC Readers

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SFGiants (25-37), 4th in NL West

14 games back of Colorado, 3-7 in last ten games, road trip ended in Milwaukee with an extra innings win last night and home stand starts today against the surprising Minnesota Twins.

Since we last left you dear reader, Hunter Strickland decided to unilaterally employ the unwritten rules – on a two and a half year old personal grudge – and hit Bryce Harper square in the hip with a 98mph fastball in a two-run game we could have won.

A lot was written and said about it, but this piece by Jamal Collier at MLB is pretty succinct and without bias.

I was disappointed in Hunter, but since it happened I’ve cooled off. Maybe it was done at the exact right time – a ‘meaningless’ game in June with exacting precision to the hip – even Harper called the right way to do it.

I find the unwritten rules cool only when the whole team seems into it. I was with Buster on this one and I cannot believe the people who suggested he should have intervened. The guy just came back from a heater to the head!

But then last night, in a game that really felt like a turnaround game, Strickland came in for the first time since the incident and was scary and dominant. Made me wonder if maybe we need a guy like that.

There are a few pieces on how Samardzija is having an epic year but getting Cained hard. It’s a bummer.

 

 

Love ya fam

 

 

 

MTK

 

GBC Reader Vol. 2, Issue 4 – Slowly Improving Giants with Six Game Win Streak in May

18 Thursday May 2017

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The last ten days have been promising for the G-men. We took 3 of 4 from the Nemesis at the Yard! It was great. Kershaw beat us and Cueto got a little hot under the collar, resulting in a bench-clearing kerfuffle, but it was great to #BeatLA again.

We had a 17-inning game that ended on a Buster Posey walkoff HR! Around the Foghorn’s Vince Cestone ruminates it could be the game that turns things around.

Stat Man Doug Bruzzone has two pieces on our pitchers and our hitting that are interesting.

Barry Bonds is Finally Getting a Plaque on the Giants Wall of Fame

Brisbee’s take has a complete list of those honored and this gem: “If you’re agitated by the Belt Wars, you have no idea what it was like to live through the Great Snow Conflicts.”

While Haft has some nice, clean history and stats of the greatest power hitter to ever play the game (the GPHOAT) up on the Giants site.

Pence went on the DL and the Giants called Mac Williamson up. But he hasn’t done much yet. Christian Arroyo has been the star of May thus far. The rookie was called up and immediately brought fireworks and a clutch bat that seemed to juice the team. He needs a nickname and I prefer Spanky, case he looks like Spanky from Our Gang, but I am old, so it looks like the memory-less Millennials are gonna settle on The Kid or Boss Baby.

Concerning the Author’s Previous Attempts at Fiction

05 Tuesday May 2009

Posted by in Berkeley, Commentary, essay, journal entries, Letter From MTK, novel, self portrait, thoughts

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Between 1995 and 1997 I wrote my first novel, Mood. Because digital printing and imaging were nascent technologies, and because I was growing increasingly interested in doing art myself, in making visual art myself, Mood was conceived and designed specifically, with a graphic element that drove the creative engine of the work: the passage of an image of the changing moon moving through the margins, and the presence of the night sky on the pages by making the pages dark and the letters light, with the slightest alteration of color and contrast of the pages and letters as the book progresses to correspond to the light provided by the moon as it passed through a fortnight of phases during the course of the narrative of the novel. The pages were to be the night sky and the letters the stars – paragraphs were constellations.

The timing of the narrative takes place during the fortnight represented by the physical pages and artwork, and as a conceit, the main character’s name changes with each phase of the moon. Set in San Francisco, I employed many contemporary businesses – bars, restaurants – that were popular among scenesters then. I punnishly changed names, or not, on a whimsical basis. Anyone who went out to hear live music or DJs or art in The Mission, North Beach, SOMA or elsewhere in the mid 1990’s would recognize many locations by their descriptions in the novel, Mood.

I physically took Mood to New York City in August of 1997, and attempted to have it published. I hand delivered copies to Sonny Mehta at Random House and at all the major houses. This was the exact moment when many of NYCs oldest and most famous publishers were being bought out by large German corporations.

Response to Mood was almost negligible. Only one agent wrote back at all, a handwritten note to say he liked the style but that the work was too experimental. The book was never produced as imagined and for a dozen years has existed as only a single, 187-page hardcopy, bound in 1997 (which may be lost in India), and as files stored on floppy disk. In January 2000, one chapter of Mood was published as a short story by the Conde Nast women’s monthly, Jane magazine. That story, Shanti, was roughly 1500 words long and represents my first published work of fiction that had a national audience. More than 50 readers wrote to an e-mail established to receive feedback. All the feedback was good.

I stayed in New York to attempt to write more and address the publishing industry, but grew increasingly disappointed in the changing face of the industry and writing in general. The New Yorker rejected seven of my submissions between 1997 and 2009, though once they wrote by hand that I was on the right track, “this one is more like what we might run,” the unsigned note read.

In 2001, my short story, Close the Piano, was published in an anthology of South Asian writers out of Toronto, Canada, under the pseudonym Raj Balas. I did a public performance as Raj Balas reading a part of that story aloud to a group gathered at the Asian American Writers Workshop in Manhattan, in April of that year – four months before the September 11th attacks which changed my career trajectory, somewhat, as I began and have been doing much more art, performance, news and journalism rather than fiction writing, ever since.

After 9/11, I nearly stopped writing fiction altogether. This has been an intense period in my life that includes the birth of my son and years of writing hard news and politics for Pacifica Radio, as well as anti-war essays and e-mails for a half decade. I was very politically active during the Bush/Cheney era. I also completed a lot of art, performance and installation work that was politically motivated in response to our changing world.

My explorations into visual art – which began in 1996 with Rigo 23 in San Francisco – began to fruit in New York in part as a result of collaboration with Christopher Wilde, Marshall Weber, Mark Wagner, Sara Parkel, Amy Ferrara and others at Booklyn Artists Alliance, and also because, on an irregular but intense level, I began assisting Rigo 23 with large scale art and installation projects all around the world. I became a working artist somewhere between the year 2000 and 2003 – when most of my placed work found its home in educational and arts institutions in the U.S.A. This is also when I founded Fifty Foot Pine Tree Press (Los Angeles, April 25, 2002) to begin producing limited editions, artist’s books, prints and digital art, now on the web at www.ffptp.org

In the 21st century, I began to make artists books and to do collage, drawing and painting more than to write fiction, however, I did write one more novel and five more short stories while in New York City. None of this work was published, though the novel was posted page by page, online, in its entirety, by a now defunct website. That novel remained online for a full year, December 1999 to January 2001.

I have only finished one story since 9/11, as raising my son has made it nearly impossible to find the mental space and time to write what I want to write. The only fiction I have finished in the last 3 years is Before You Came, the opening chapter of a novel with the working title, The Outsider Inside.

M.T. Karthik

Berkeley, California

May 2009

Karmic Rubber Band

09 Monday Feb 1998

Posted by in conceptual art, essay, journal entries, NYC

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2/9/98ce
— 55 West 13th Street, Manhattan, New York, noon

Today is a Monday in February and the sun is shining in New York through clear skies.  It is cool but not cold and the blue in the sky is high and whitened by a thin wintriness. These events are from last week:

Karmic Rubber Band

B., my neighbor down the hall is a recent arrival in New York City from Austin, Texas where he has been for the last 6 years.  Prior to that he lived in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.  Now he’s 27 and lives in our warehouse building in Greenpoint, Brooklyn and works in Manhattan at a retail bookstore (a national chain) and at The Bottom Line club.  Last week, he had friends in town visiting from Baton Rouge.

MT., 27, and JO., 22, punks traveling from Baton Rouge to New York and back in a little, two-door, Honda CRX within which they were also sleeping, were staying alive by eating peanut butter sandwiches and MRE’s – Meals Ready to Eat, military rations purchased by MT.’s father, a soldier – while on the road.  They were young scrappers who had taken to living in condemned buildings in Baton Rouge to keep from having to get too many jobs.  They had been on the road for a month or so.

I met them briefly the night before last Monday morning when I ran into them in the hallway outside B.’s door.  I asked them that morning what they were up to.  They were building a frame for B.’s bedroom wall.  I offered them some marijuana to help them stay focused and get through the task.  They accepted, so I left them with a small amount of weed and my pipe and lighter and headed off to work.

I got into work and had a message from my friend M. who was taking the day off from work and planned to be downtown near my office.  We made plans to meet for lunch.  By 3:00, I hadn’t heard from M. so I decided to get some lunch for myself before my 4:00 meeting with the Vice President and several members of the Accounting department.  I walked out of my office, though, and saw M. just walking towards me in the street.  He had just gotten to the building.  It was the first coincidence of the day.  I took M. around the corner to Bar 6 on Avenue of the Americas for lunch.

Afterward we made plans to meet in the evening and I went back to work while he strolled off to the East Village.  At 4:00, I went with C., the manager of the department in which I work, to the meeting with Accounting.  It went all right and when I returned it was already 5:30.  M. was waiting outside my office building for me.  I brought him up to check out where I work and then we went walking.

We ended up at St. Mark’s Bar in the East Village, enjoying high-flying alto solos by Bird over quartets and quintets of swinging rhythms and over our heads as we sipped a couple of cold beers and talked about music and art.  I went to the bathroom.  While I was in there, M. got the high sign from a fellow at the bar.  When I joined them, we all went outside to have a smoke.  Out on the sidewalk we made a smoker’s circle. M. and I introduced ourselves to our host, R. who produced a fat little joint to pass.

R. is a light-skinned brother with a thin, evenly-groomed mustache.  He has short, carefully styled hair and full lips that part to reveal a glowing set of teeth when he smiles.  We all laughed and chatted as we passed the smoke, talking about all manner of things.  Somehow the conversation came around to my space in Brooklyn.  I mentioned that I was living in an unfinished warehouse space, that I was working on it to build a live/work studio.  R., suddenly looked at me strangely as he pulled on the joint that had just been passed back to him by M.  After exhaling, he asked if I was living in Greenpoint.  I was surprised that he guessed.  All I had said was that my place was in Brooklyn.

He was holding the joint, now-half smoked.  He smiled and said, “Do you know a guy named B.?  It was incredible:  8 million people in New York and we get pulled out by a guy who knows my neighbor.  He was a co-worker of B.’s at the The Bottom Line.  We couldn’t believe the coincidence.  I laughed and said, “It’s even more perfect because just this morning I gave his friends a little bag to get them through the day.”  We looked at each other and for just half a second locked eyes and then collectively looked down at the joint.  I looked down at it, thinly burning with ashy flecks across it’s orangey tip in R.’s hand. “That’s my weed!”  I half-shouted.  We broke up the circle and fell away into individual peals of laughter, three high-flying brothers smoking a j. on the sidewalk in the Village and cracking up

The coaccidence was dazzling.  Over in Brooklyn in the morning, I give away a small bag of weed to my neighbor’s friends and not ten hours later in Manhattan, a co-worker of his, unknowingly and independently gives my friend the high sign and ends up sharing a joint with me.

A couple of nights later, on the eve of their departure to Baton Rouge, I took MT. and JO. to dinner.  I figured the two young punks would need a little better food than MRE’s to sustain them on the long journey back to the deep South.   B. came along with.  We went to the little Thai place in Greenpoint a few blocks from our place.  When I told him the story of meeting his friend R., I ended by saying, “Hey man, I know I can trust you as my neighbor.  I mean I lent you something and I got it back within less than a day, a borough away … I mean your shit is tight … you’re like a karmic rubber band.”  And we all laughed and had a good time.

After we smoked the joint down, we went back in the bar to finish our beers.  Then M. and I made our way out to my place.  We hung out, smoked some more pot as I cleaned up and we made plans to go to St. Nick’s Pub.  My hot water still wasn’t working then and I was really funky, so I asked M. if I could stay out at his house that night and he readily invited me to do so.  I grabbed up some clothes, threw them into my work bag and M. and I were off to Harlem.

BROTHER CAME FLYING OUT THE SUBWAY DOOR …

… BALD HEAD shining, hollering, “Milky Way, Man, Milky Way!” paid the guy, got the candy and got back on the train before the doors closed.   And we made our way on to 145th street.  That’s what I wrote down on the back of a business card on the way up to M.’s.  with brother unwrapping that thing all casual-like and munching on it as we rolled along.  I’ll tell you the things I’ve seen on the New York City Subway one day.

We went up to M.’s place on 145th around the corner from St. Nick’s so he too could change clothes.  He had a message on his machine from a woman he had met the week before who reported she would be at St. Nick’s that night.  Earlier, after I had given the young punks the weed and come into the office, and before lunch with M. and my series of coincidences and coaccidents, I had written myself a short journal entry:

I have been having crazy nights.

… Just Long Enough

St. Nick’s Pub has an open mic jam session on Monday nights hosted by MC Murph and produced and promoted by Berta Indeed Productions.  It features Patience Higgins and his quartet, who host some of the baddest local talent cutting one another in solotime and occasional newcomers and amateurs as well.

When we arrived things were sounding a little cheesy but they straightened up a bit and before long we were sitting and finding grooves as various soloists made their way through Parker charts and other standards.  We weren’t there twenty minutes when M.’s friend arrived with her two girlfriends T. and J. – three chocolate-colored, gorgeous women who turned every head in the house at one time or another.

M.’s friend is beautiful.  She is thin and curvy, about 5’6” tall in heels and she has a bright smile that she shares when inspired to do so.   She is a poet and spoken-word artist who performs regularly in the New York area.  Her friends are equally beautiful but uniquely so.  T. had long cornrows and a round, gentle face.  J. was an Amazon.  Well over 6 feet in heels, she was tall and lanky and moved with a gangly beauty that gave her ebony arms a mystical quality.

J. was kinetic.  Her arms moved smoothly and hypnotically, yet quickly and out of her own control.  We all sat together, listened to the music and talked.  J. and T. stood up often and danced, with one another and alone, bringing a desire to the hearts of everyone present and filling the room with the magic of music’s power to move a body and soul.  They were sexy and nimble and moving sensually, energized by the swelling music that filled the little joint.

T. even arranged with MC Murph to sit in.  She wanted to sing. It was her first time singing at St. Nick’s.  She did “On Green Dolphin Street,” and after a little timidness in the first go around came back after the solos to finish strong and clear with only a slight, wavering tremolo to reveal what may have been any nerves on edge.  She sang clearly and held her body still to the microphone staring evenly into the audience, smiling at her friends occasionally.  We all enjoyed ourselves.

I am new to this place, to these people.  I’ve learned it’s foolish to try anything too soon.  So I was keeping quiet.  Listening to the music and relaxing.  I ached to let these three women know how much I admired their shapes and styles, but knew how stupid I would sound saying so.  But it’s good, I think, to let people know you notice their beauty even if time and space conspire against doing anything about it in the now.  If you have an opportunity, you’ve got to seize it.

J. was talking with us all at the table when she managed in the whirling motion of her long, beautiful arms, to knock over her drink.  She pulled her chair back from the table, startled, as we picked up her drink and patted at the table with napkins, telling her not to worry about it.  “Oh, God, my arms are just too long,” she apologized as she scooted back from the table, “I’ll just move back here.”

Quickly and for perhaps the first time all evening I spoke up, “No baby, your arms are … just … long enough,” I said, looking directly into her eyes, “come back over here and we’ll just move your drink.”  I ordered another round for her and the other women and we were all too smooth for words.

M. and I strolled in the cold, back to his place.  On the way I teased him about his friend.  He kept saying, “She’s not my girlfriend!” and when he did I heard the desire behind it.  We both knew how nice it would be if she were.  Before going to bed, we listened to both sides of the Abbey Lincoln album he had bought earlier that day down in the Village.  Her voice rang rich and sweet through the Harlem night as I drifted off to sleep on M.’s comfy old couch.

And that’s the story of last Monday.

<Break>

Tuesday I woke up at M.’s house with a bit of a headache from the gins-and-tonics the night before.  Predominantly from the gins, I’m sure.  I decided to skip work so I called in sick and stayed in the city.  I caught the D down to 59th street and then went walking over to the Upper East Side.  I had lunch by myself at a little French bistro – ordered a seared Tuna – and bought a couple of back pocket journal/sketchbooks.  Then I strolled over to Gracious Home on 72nd and Third and picked up some paint brushes.  I went home and slept.  That night I was in, listening to Mingus and watching ships pass the Manhattan skyline as the lights went on in the City.

Wednesday I got up and went to work to try to achieve something, anything.  It was good.  I managed to make.  There was the lecture … gotta get that lecture covered.  It has too much to handle poorly.

Thursday I took off from work again, rainy and cold weather and the hot water finally on.  I hung out with the visiting kids from Baton Rouge, made a dope deal (scored a $50 quarter bag of some weak-ass shit) and built a shower curtain set up (a “d” rod with a hanging cord to a metal ring in the ceiling of the bathroom).  I took the Lousiana punks for their going away dinner that night.  Had a hot shower for the first time in my space on Friday morning.

Friday was D. and being out and acting silly – drinks at Bar 6, dinner at L’Orange Bleue (430 Broome Street), drinks at bar ñ and then on to Soho.  A late night walk through the East Village and ending up at a little cheesy brazilian bar called Anyway with a guitar duo who couldn’t keep time but could finger-pick like a couple of Brazilian freaks.  We laughed and acted silly and misbehaved and were just happy together which we hadn’t been in months.

Then the weekend has been an explosion of food and drink and joyous celebrations of a million senses.  My fortune cookies and horoscopes are all overwhelmingly positive and my mind is confused about what I am supposed to be doing.  I keep going with the flow.

My new roommates have a 1971 Ford Gran Torino of a metallic green color with a white hard top.  It is a beautiful old machine.  I now have keys to that machine and on Sunday we loaded up into that low-riding cruiser, crossed the Queensboro Bridge and came into the city.  We went to Pongal, the South Indian place in the twenties and then to this really cool sake bar downstairs on 9th street at 2nd in the East Village, it’s called Decibel.

Cruising on a Sunday afternoon.  In the green machine.
New York:  Manhattan.  Brooklyn.  Queens.

mtk 1998