![]() You have three thousand books, and you’re thinking about reading that thing again? Really? Yeah, well: those last hundred pages are actually starting to make sense - but maybe that’s just the Stockholm Syndrome kicking in…) (I would definitely not blame you if, upon learning that I’ve read Gravity’s Rainbow eight times (so far), your reaction was to back away with an expression of mild horror. ![]() I own nearly three thousand books and I’ve even managed to read some of them. (And I have a soft spot for Mirror Man, which was one of the first really influential LPs I bought during high school - along with XTC’s English Settlement, Suzanne Vega’s first album, Robyn Hitchcock’s Globe of Frogs, Peter Gabriel’s melt, and Coltrane’s Live at Birdland.) ![]() Speaking of names: I am not related to Captain Beefheart but I love his music, especially Trout Mask Replica (of course) and Doc at the Radar Station. You can read about my typical (typical, at least, until May of 2022, when I moved and upended all my daily routines for the first time in years…) writing day here, at My (Small Press) Writing Day, curated by the hardest working man in poetry, rob mclennan. I participated in Thomas Whyte’s ongoing Poetry Mini Interviews, which appeared in five parts over the course of five weeks in March and April of 2021: one, two, three, four, and five. I have also published some poems under my own name - in some fugitive and long-vanished print magazines and in a flurry of self-published chapbooks, back in the ’90s and, more recently, at a number of online magazines. Subsequently, and rather inadvertently, I published some poems under that pseudonym, online and in a print anthology devoted to the then-new Hay(na)ku form. After all, there’s more of us than of them. But to live, apparently, is to war with trolls. It just seemed like a smart thing to do, long before the trolls began slouching en masse towards the comments sections to be born. Also, even then, there was something about online “communities” that made me want to keep it all at arm’s length. A pseudonym allowed me take it exactly as seriously as it deserved - namely, not at all. I chose to blog pseudonymously partly because I’m an introvert, but mostly because I originally intended the whole blogging thing to be a lark. It was fun while it lasted, but I never want to hear the words “Flarf” or “School of Quietude” ever, ever again. I was a poetry blogger for a while during the Aughts. ![]() Oh, and I was also a customer service representative way back when people still bought things using land-line telephones and glossy four-color catalogs printed on paper and bound with staples. Over the years, I have been, among other things, a typographer, a tutor & substitute teacher for middle school & high school, a singer/songwriter, and a repair technician for Macintosh portable computers. So I have returned to the Twin Cities, for good. But eventually I discovered to my surprise and dismay that to be happy, I need four sharply delineated seasons - especially if two of them are seemingly endless and absurdly brutal in their extremes. Stickers on my suitcase, stamps in my passport. For most of that time, I felt like George Bailey if he had managed to get out of Bedford Falls. ![]() At one time or another, I’ve lived in (among other places) Santa Fe, Salt Lake City, NYC, and PDX. ![]()
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