I would balk at this situation, if a recent conversation wasn’t still echoing through my head. A friend admitted that he felt like he was actually better friends with another friend online than off. He pointed out that offline they didn’t exchange more than two words, while online they would joke, and chat like best buddies. The same later friend admitted that he was more comfortable texting than using most other communication mediums. The possibility of texted-across-the- table conversations might not be so difficult to fathom after all.

Texting has become almost second nature for me. I’ve gotten to the point where I will send a text before I pick up the phone. It pisses me off that my mom won’t get texting capabilities on her phone, since sometimes I just want to send her a one or two line message, rather than having an entire conversation. But, what will I remember when she’s not around to talk in the dreaded far off future? The one-line text I sent her? Or the conversation we had while she was walking down the beach, breathlessly describing the sunset and giggling about everything and nothing. Energies are impossible to convey on a tiny screen.

Here is an example of the texting language from A Visit From the Goon Squad.

Next 2 myn. No mOr Ar/lyt

Cn u stp it?

Tryd

cn u  move?

Stuk

nyc, Lulu wrote, which confused Alex at first: the sarcasm seemed unlike her. Then he realized that she wasn’t saying “nice.” She was saying “New York City.”

Of course, I must also admit that—like a million other folks–I’ve become addicted to Facebook over the past few months. I will admit–and this is painful but true–that I check Facebook going on five times a day or more—and that’s without having a “smartphone.” I can’t imagine if I had a hot little Ipod touch burning holes in my pocket, allowing me instant access anytime I fancy it.

No, I do my obsessive social network checking (don’t even get me started on Twitter) by actually logging onto the good, old fashioned computer, booting up and checking my page first thing, last thing, and even in between, and in between the in betweens. Hell, I’m going to take a break from writing this paragraph to check my Facebook page, just to make sure no one has posted a new link to an old soul song, or some political rant, or maybe an update about the weather in their particular area. I am fully addicted to the social network (though I have yet to see the movie about the beginnings of Facebook starring my beloved “JT” otherwise known as Justin Timberlake as the infamous Sean Parker of Napster fame).

William Powers, author of Hamlet’s Blackberry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age, makes me feel better about my urge to constantly check for updates. He explains that the constant drive back to the screen may be the result of “evolutionary programming,” since the human brain is wired to detect and respond to new stimuli. Back in the stone-age days, this ability protected us from the threat of predators in a dangerous world. Of course, the chances of a wooly mammoth trying to eat us for dinner now is nigh impossible, but our brains are still wired in the same way.

“Today the stimuli we receive from our environment are different—instead of wild animals lurking in the trees, we’re on alert for ringtones and new messages—but the biochemical effect is hypothetically the same. When your mobile lights up with a new call, you get, in the words of one scientist, a “dopamine squirt,”says Powers.

Dopamine squirt is a good way to put it. And puts a name to the need to constantly see what’s going on in the world of social networks. It’s just so easy to feel connected, but are we really connected? Powers argues that we need to make a conscious effort to create distance from screen time, through digital sabbaticals, and even nature jaunts away from the crowd. And we may have reached a crucial point in our technological development, where this becomes essential. Because what is next? Texting across the table rather than talking? I can’t get this scene from Egan’s novel out of my head, and for good reason.

Riot Grrrl effectively began in 1989, with the meeting of Kathleen Hanna and Tobi Vail, who went onto form the legendary Bikini Kill. As is often the case with beginnings, the rise of the movement was a heady, fast-paced time when girls began moving en masse to the front, taking up guitars, basses, and drums, and screaming bloody murder into the microphone, as a way to insert voices where silence had always been imposed. It was a time of radio shows, and handmade zines like “Jigsaw” and “Girl Germs.” It was a time that produced the wry, nursery rhyme punk of Bratmobile and the searing upside down ballads of Heavens to Betsy. It was a time when politics and music became one and the same, and the stage wasn’t a place where a woman’s only role was to look pretty and sing nice. Justifiably livid at the accepted sexist symbolism and swagger of capitalist patriarchy, Vail and Hanna wrote zines and started a band (on a recommendation from Kathy Acker) as a way to get out the message that girls were a force to be reckoned with and “gradually the two friends staked out common ground arriving at a vision of a cool, accessible feminist movement that Tobi dubbed the Revolution Girl Style Now.” The actions by a small group of girls led to explosion of a network that stretched across the nation. They held weekly meetings in punk strongholds in D.C. and Olympia (and later spread the Midwest and other cities), talking sexism, misogyny and social change.

In 1989, I wiled away my own teenage years in the suburbs of Los Angeles, caught up in a haze of Led Zeppelin, stoner boy crushes, and car trunks full of 99 cent store wine. I’d grown up in a political family, but one in which traditional gender roles were never challenged, and if anything, were subconsciously enforced. It wasn’t until I graduated from high school and moved to Northern California that I began exploring punk rock (starting with the pop-punk of Green Day), and the feverish power of screaming into a microphone with a guitar slung over my shoulder. I was a bit of a hippie, a bit of a punk, and fairly confused about my place not only in the mainstream world, but in the culture of punk rock, which carried its own strictures and hierarchies of what constituted cool.

I was alienated even from those who considered themselves alienated. I listened to the bands that were labeled riot grrrl, but I was definitely part of that second wave, the people who rolled in after1993 after it had been all but dismissed by people like Hanna and other members of the original movement. I think I first read about Bikini Kill when they were featured in the cute band alert in Sassy magazine. By that point, the media had surrounded and spun riot grrrl into something more palatable to the deadening mainstream, and they’d been featured (without consent for the most part) in Spin magazine, the New York Times, and other major media outlets. Vail wrote Jigsaw about how she was watching her “articles faith and fervor become unrecognizable “embraced only by posers or maybe just well intentioned and hopelessly enthusiastic extremely isolated young girls living in small town America who read dumb articles in dumb magazines written by dumb people.”

I’ve written before about the Bikini Kill show in a Santa Rosa backyard that changed my life. My Heavens to Betsy cassette played on heavy rotation, and I started to seek out other bands with girl musicians. I got into Slant 6, Team Dresch, The Spinanes, Blatz, Spitboy, and countless other bands as a result of those first discoveries. The music by these fearless girls and women hit me in the gut and never let up. I needed it to feel like I had a place in the world. My best friend and I started a band; we learned how to play “Hit Me With Your Best Shot,” (I wish I could say we did it ironically but as memory serves I actually really liked this song and I could manage to play the three main chords without fucking up too bad). I never officially joined any riot grrrl chapters, mainly because I found them to be too middle-class and white for my taste, I did go on to be part of a group in San Diego made up of a diverse group of women who were fed up with the male-dominated local music and punk scene. We were influenced by riot grrrl in that we talked about sexism and how to take empowered control over our own bodies, made zines, did clinic defense and radical pro-choice performance art, and put on art shows that challenged patriarchy, but we also set ourselves up in opposition to what we saw as a too cool for school attitude displayed RG. We envisioned ourselves as a scrappier, more diverse arm of the movement. But without RG, I don’t think Ocho Y Media ever would have existed, at least not in its most inspired form.

Years later, I still give thanks to RG for being there in my formative years as musician and a woman. I’m heading into my late thirties and I continue to play music, having just taken up the drums (which I’m convinced are like the best instrument ever). And I still play guitar. And I still make zines. And I still feel/fill that same urgent, driving need to express my rage and anger at the continued manifestations of sexism, classism, racism and patriarchy in American society. And my life has played out in an infinitely more fantastic way than it would have if I’d never stumbled across that cute band alert in Sassy magazine.

On another music note, the universe seemed to align in that the week that I read Girls to the Front happened to be the same week that the new release by the Corin Tucker Band, “1,000 Days” came out on Kill Rock Stars. I was a bit worried that motherhood would mellow Tucker’s songwriting, and yes, her songs are different, for this isn’t a Sleater-Kinney album, but my reticence was blown away within a couple listens to the album. Tucker’s voice still marvels with deep soulful wails punctuated by dark driving guitar sounds. Plus, Sara Lund from the amazing Unwound (mid- nineties Olympia drudge pop) drums on this one. Pick this up along with the new Marnie Stern and seriously, your life will be one step closer to paradise.

I bought version #213 out of #295 of the zine, meaning that Art Noose handset the type for almost three hundred of these books. She didn’t do it for the money, as my copy cost only $2.00 at Needles and Pens, a store in San Francisco with abundant zines and books for sale, alongside handmade dresses, purses, and jewelry; it is my favorite souvenir from the week that I spent as part of the “Our Other Weapon is a Zine: Northern California” tour during the tail end of August.

The tour kicked off in Santa Cruz, where I read along with Tomas Moniz who does Rad Dad (short for “radical dad” and winner of the 2009 Utne Independent Press award for Best Zine), Dani Burlison—my creative comrade in an endeavor we call Petals and Bones—and Gilroy-based zinester John Bobst. John writes this ridiculously sarcastic and funny zine called Silly Little, and, well..the title gives you a taste of the author’s humor. At our reading in Oakland, Artnoose, Capella Parish and Anna Reutinger and Roxie Perkins of Crosshatch Zine all made appearances. How’s that for an amazing line-up of artistic instigators? Anna and Roxie read a choose-your-own-adventure story from the latest issue of Crosshatch that begins on the morning after zombies take over Oakland. Um, yeah, it was as awesome as it sounds. Davis and San Francisco also featured fantastic guest readers like Katie McCleary, Renee Cashmere, and Andria Alefhi of We’ll Never Have Paris zine.

A couple of times, as we prepared for the tour—once during a write-up for a short newspaper piece and once on the radio—Dani and I were asked, “Why zines?” Why now? Since blogs and other 21^st century technologies allow us a way to reach a much wider audience, with less paper waste, and less effort, what is the point of a measly little zine? Or maybe I was asking myself these questions, even as I championed this formerly robust art form. I love blogs, and I read my favorites on a daily basis. Hell, I’m a fan of most 21^st technologies. Having recently read, Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky, I mightily agree with the notion that harnessing the power of group dynamics on the internet as a way to promote social change is a worthy endeavor. That said, the fundamental aesthetic joy of holding a copy of a handset zine, the paper grainy and solid under the pads of my fingers, is a joy not soon to be replaced by a computer screen.

If I’ve learned one thing from dedicating an entire week of my life to spreading the gospel of the zine, it’s that we need both modalities. While I won’t be trading in my laptop anytime soon, I also want to take a break, lie on the couch with a cup of coffee in hand, a handmade zine in the other, as I stop to marvel at the ingenuity and sheer perseverance of writing and creating something that few people will ever see. Art for the sake of art, for the sake of getting a voice out into the world. What a beautiful notion.

Schulz drew his iconic and lucrative cartoons from a dark, well-worn office built in a grove of redwoods near a dirty creek. I’m sure when he moved here, the creek wasn’t the dirty, homeless haven that it has become, but times change. During his lifetime he and his wife bought the a rundown ice arena near his studio, paying to have it completely refurbished, and renaming it the Redwood Ice Arena. He also had a hockey court with blue cement floors and white walls put in, as well as an outdoor tennis court. After Schulz died in 2000, the grounds around his playground became the site of the Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center.

This modern, glassy building is right down the street from my house, and I’ve been walking my dog in the fields near the hockey rink for the past four years, almost every day, and while I have enjoyed seeing the happy tourists congregating for photographs next to a ceramic Snoopy’s doghouse statue, I’ve never actually ventured into the museum proper. The reality being that I couldn’t bear to part with a single dollar to see old Peanuts comics on view and modern art tributes by people like Christo to the “Peanuts gang.” I mean, I loved my Snoopy lunchbox, snow cone machine, and t-shirts when I was eight, but like I said, times change.

But when my husband suggested we go check out the museum on a free night—the occasion for the free entry being the museum’s eighth anniversary, I said yes without hesitation. I was finally going to enter the building that I’d peered into, mused about, and walked past for so many years. Plus, they were serving free ice cream cake. It took us two minutes to walk over, and once we stepped into the actual building, the exhibits were pretty much what I expected, but still entertaining. I especially liked the random collection of pop culture artifacts that supposedly served as Schulz’s inspiration—a macramé owl, a silver lame vest, a Davy Crockett hat, and a pristine long board pushed up against a wall. Hmmm, okay.

But the most interesting moment of the night came when we were approached by a museum volunteer as we stood before the “Wrapped Snoopy.” A gift from Christo to Schulz, a thank you for the cartoonist’s support of the artist’s “Running Fence” project, erected in Sonoma County in the mid-1970’s. The artistic integrity of a Snoopy doghouse sloppily wrapped in what looks like bedsheets was lost on me. The woman asked us how we liked the museum and we got into conversation. It turns how that she had just moved from Brooklyn, New York and had only lived in our little city for ten months. She was rhapsodic about living here, talking about how much friendlier people were than in New York, and how much she loved the weather. She told us about her walks through the Fountain Grove area where she had moved with her husband.

So this is where I actually get to the book I want to talk about this month. In 2006, Chronicle Books published this amazing collection of photos and essays titled The Visionary State: A Journey Through California’s Spiritual Landscape. Written by the trippy California-phile Erik Davis, the essays offer fascinating information about the “restless, heretical edge of the Anglo American experience as it probes the inside and outside of religious institutions.” In the essay “Divine Winery,” Davis tells the story of Thomas Lake Harris, a mystic who moved his Brotherhood of the New Life Colony—a theo-socialist commune—to California (specifically the town where I live) in 1875. He called it the “Eden of the West.” Harris and his friends lived in a richly-decorated, two-story manor where Harris taught his acolytes about Divine Respiration, and the hermaphrodite God that he called the “Twain-One.” At the same time, the group established a winery on the grounds that would one day be Fountain Grove, where they built a thriving wine export business. Eventually, Harris was “shamed” (the man did think that fairies lived in the bosoms of women) into stepping down as leader, and after years of being successfully run by Kanaye Nagasawa, the winery fell into disrepair. But you can still walk the creepy grounds of the ruins, where ancient wine barrels covered in graffiti loom under a progressively deteriorating roof.

We excitedly shared all of this information with the woman from Brooklyn, as she peered at us through her hip New York glasses. She seemed interested, but a little put off by our obsession with the Divine Winery. It seemed so far away from the sparkling, proper museum filled with the important but so commercialized-that-it-has-almost-lost-all-meaning Peanuts images that surrounded us. Two versions of the California dream, one that ended in riches, and one that ended in ghosts and decay. I’m thinking ceramic Snoopy statue in front of the divine winery, holding strange fairies and 19^thcentury wine goblet in paw, but alas, never the twain shall meet.

What do the hair depilation scene in The 40-Year Old Virgin, Todd Haynes’ Superstar, and Sarah Manguso’s stunning, lyrical memoir The Two Kinds of Decayhave in common? According to David Shields, author of the book Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, these seemingly disparate art objects all share a commonality in that, while they are works of the imagination, they also toe the line between “reality”(a word that Nabokov claimed should always be in quotation marks) and fiction in a wholly new way. “Art is theft,” begins the book, with a quote from Picasso—one of the only quotes out of hundreds actually attributed, in the text, to the original speaker, and Shields spends the next 205 pages making just that argument.

Taking a clue from hip hop–particularly sampling–Shields “borrows” from other sources as a way to build a new kind of collage.  Each chapter of Reality Hunger contains short numbered vignettes, entire passages taken from other sources, without citing (on the page) the original source. Curious readers can flip back and forth between the body of the book and the appendix–which publisher Random House insisted be included to avoid legal ramifications—but Shields suggests that the reader instead grab a sharp pair of scissors and remove the pages by “cutting along the dotted line.”

While I didn’t heed Shield’s advice to cut out the appendix (it was a damn library book for god’s sake!), I did control my urge to flip back and forth between the appendix and the vignettes, an act that took a shocking amount of self-control on my part. In this action, I felt like I was actually interacting with the book in an intriguing way, one that got me thinking the assumed lines between attribution and originality, between myth, memory, and truth. Soon, the reading felt liberating. I have been struggling to finish a series of short stories for the past three years, trying to finesse them into something that resembles what I think they should look like, something so wholly fiction that the seams are hidden, like a fine couture dress. Shields book helped me to think about the “reality” that often times, I am more drawn to writing in which the seams are ragged and transparent, than those stories that are polished to perfection; while I do enjoy sinking into a nice work of fiction, the older I get, the more I enjoy books that challenge genre without adhering slavishly to the guidelines monitoring fiction.  Examples include the Meat and Spirit Plan by Selah Saterstrom, and Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.

“This book contains hundreds of quotations that go unacknowledged in the body of the text. I’m trying to regain a freedom that writers from Montaigne to Burroughs took for granted and that we have lost. Your uncertainty about whose words you’ve just read is not a bug but a feature,” writes  Shields (see, I can’t help but give the guy credit) just before he suggests cutting out the appendix with a box cutter.

Why all this trouble to “steal” from other sources, to muddle the reader’s expectations of truth and fiction? Well, Shields is writing a manifesto, one that forefronts the argument that an artistic movement is forming, one that shares certain key components.

1. A deliberate unartiness; “raw” material, seemingly unprocessed, unfiltered, unensored, and unprofessional. Randomness, openness to accident and serendipity, spontaneity,; artistic risk, emotional urgency and intensity, reader/viewer participation; an overly literal tone, as if a reporter were viewing a strange culture; plasticity of form, pointillism; criticism as autobiography; self-reflexivity; self-ethnography; anthropological autobiography; a blurring ( to the point of invisibility) of any distinction between fiction and nonfiction; the lure and blur of the real.

In short, Shields declares that the novel is dead, or in the process of dying a slow and painful death. The time of the seamless Tolstoyan dream has ended, to be replaced by a mixed, hybrid form. In fact, he argues that this is not so much a replacement, as a return to original form. And while I find these ideas intriguing and freeing, as a so-called “fiction” writer, I am even more intrigued by the interaction between art and “reality.”

I started thinking about this while listening to the new Charlotte Gainsbourg album. I find Gainsbourg to be endlessly fascinating, ever since seeing her in a 1996 movie production of Jane Eyre—a book that I have read five times, thank you very much. The actress plays the patron saint of homely and disenfranchised girls with a confused, bemused energy, her lopsided mouth a perfect representation of the Jane Eyre’s homeliness. Gainsbourg is also a singer and her latest album is titled  IRM, the French acronym for an MRI scanner. In interviews, she has talked becoming intimately familiar with the IRM machine after a water-skiing accident led to a brain hemorrhage in 2007. The title track captures the experience of being in a hospital, undergoing tests, wondering if you are going to die. As I listen, I’m not sure if it is the actual song that I am drawn to, or if I am so fascinated with the history behind the song that I’m filling in the meaning, making it into an experience outside of the art object itself. Many albums are autobiographical, but this one in particular has got me thinking about the increasingly blurred lines (reality television has something to do with this) between what is made up and what is “reality,” and the importance of what both the artist and the reader (or listener) bring to the table. “Urgency attaches itself now more to the tale taken directly from life than one fashioned by the imagination out of life,” writes Shields –or not Shields. This not only explains the popularity of the Real Housewives franchise, it also gives liberty to writers and artists to pull unabashedly from their own experience, to break genre, to wallow in the freedom of being able to be both the “I” and not the “I” all at the same time.

“Moe Tucker used to flip this on its side,” said Will, the guitarist, as he turned the battered bass drum in the middle of the living room practice space over, “Instead of using a pedal, she played it like another tom.”

“Really?” I said. My dark mood began to lift. What an original trick, made all the more promising because it had been used by the drummer from the Velvet Underground. I’d rather sound like her than Lars Ulrich anyway! Maybe there was still a chance for me to venture beyond the guitar. Maybe I was being too hard on myself, holding onto this idea that music has to be polished and melodic in order to be worth anything. How many bands did I listen to in the nineties that didn’t give a fuck about being perfect? Often times, the rawer and messier the music was, the more I liked it. Huggy Bear, anyone?

“We want a more primitive sound anyway,” added the singer, “And your drumming works for that.”

“I can do that,” I responded, feeling once again inspired to take up the drum sticks, the inadequacy descending back into the pit from whence it came. I promised them I wouldn’t quit the band just yet and that I would go home and listen to tons of Velvet Underground to get all pumped up for our next practice. (I’m listening to their 1969 self-titled record as I write this and I’m reminded that Moe Tucker’s notions about singing were about as high-falutin’ as her drumming philosophy—meaning, no pretension, whatsoever)

Driving home from practice that night, I listened to classic rock on the radio, paying close attention to the percussion, realizing more and more that drumming didn’t have to be complicated. When it comes to drumming, simplicity is the key. I mean, honestly—Neil Peart and Art Blakey are about the only people I want to hear drum solos from anyway.

Later, I stumbled upon a Beat Happening video for the song “Black Candy.” The drummer from my old band was a big-time Beat Happening fan but I’d never really given them a chance. Considered one of the originators of “twee pop,” the band was formed by Calvin Johnson (who is also one of the founders of K Records), Heather Lewis, and Bret Lunsford in 1982. They hailed from Olympia, Washington—a breeding ground for primitive beats and rule-breaking music in the eighties and nineties and probably today. During this particular performance the drummer plays standing up, his only equipment: tom, snare drum, sticks. I watched the video—thinking, “I can do that!” For the millionth time, I remember what drew me to punk rock/DIY in the first place. Primarily, the thundering realization that music and writing do not have to be aesthetically perfect; that in fact, what some consider primitive, ugly or silly can actually be the most stimulating and inspiring art.

I love what Moe Tucker says about her drum “philosophy” in an interview with Drummer Girl Magazine:

“I always think that the drummer’s just supposed to keep time—that’s basically it. I always hated songs where if you rolled at every opportunity, there would be a constant roll throughout the song. Or crashed a cymbal at every opportunity or every place where you felt like you should do that. So I consciously avoided it. While you’re crashing you can’t hear the vocal and you can’t hear the guitar part, you know? I just always felt like the drums shouldn’t take over the song. They should always be under there, obvious, but not taking over the song so that suddenly you realize all you hear is drums.”

So I’m taking on Maureen Tucker and Heather Lewis as my drum gurus, while worshiping at their altar of cool, raw simplicity. Other bands that have taken this approach: Young Marble Giants, The Need, and sometimes, Yo La Tengo.

I’m looking for more inspiration when it comes to simple, innovative and “primitive” drums as I embark on this drumming adventure, so any suggestions are welcome!

It all started when I bought a $30 used turntable off a friend of mine, who had found it at a garage sale. My husband and I then spent a rainy Sunday setting up the turntable in the living room, right where a television might have gone in earlier iterations of my life. It was an exciting day. I alphabetized my CD collection, listened to everything from John Fahey to Helium to Blackalicious. And then, last week, my husband came home on his lunch break, face beaming, his arms filled with a stack of worn vinyl records. He works at the Center for the Blind, and an elderly woman, one of his regular clients, has a son who is a blues musician. The son has taken to handing over favorite records whenever my husband comes by for a session with his mother. Last time, it was a CD by Bahamian singer and guitarist Joseph Spence—a man who invented his own guitar style and sings and hums along with the music like a long lost member of the Muppets Band. Before that, it was a stack of classic rock records, including something by Sandy Bull.

“Why did he just give these to us?” I asked immediately, suspicious that we had ended up with someone’s trash pile—a stack resembling the potentially promising ones piled at the back of thrift stores that almost always end up containing the multiple copies of Barry Manilow and Laurence Welk and not much more.

“He’s just one of those people that likes to give his stuff away. He likes to share things and doesn’t place value on owning them,” my husband said. I felt lame for even questioning the guy’s intentions.

We descended on the records like kids in a candy store, pulling out jazz records by Eric Dolphy, Art Ensemble of Chicago and Billie Holiday. And Bob Marley—lots of Marley—including “Catch a Fire” which is held nestled within a record cover that resembles a silver Bic lighter. You can actually lift off the top off the cover, as though you are lighting a…well, you know what they used those lighters for.

We spent Saturday night listening to Billie Holiday, talking about her life and what we had learned from reading the extensive liner notes. My husband hadn’t heard much Billie Holiday, and it was cool to see his reaction to that honeyed, broken voice—and I kept flashing back to a time in my life when her songs where the only thing that held me together. We talked about how Lady Day had been born to Sadie Fagan—only fourteen when she gave birth—and how her father had been a musician who took off early to play in Fletcher Henderson’s band. We listened to “Ain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do” and smiled when she sang about jumping in the ocean, and cringed when she sang about getting hit by her man. I held the record cover, pouring over the stories, the quotes from Holiday herself, smelling that musty vinyl and really inhabiting the music for a hour or so. I don’t do that with my MP3’s; I don’t know if I ever will. And that is why I know for sure that in twenty-five years, it will still be about the full-on experience of the record, and that this is the one constant I can depend on when it comes to music in my life.

Photo by Flickr user Shane Gavin

In this economy, and as visual and short bits of information rather than long-form, thoughtful stories become increasingly standard, this might seem like an act of stupidity to some. But, I think of us as warriors, we believe in some essential truth that can be put to page, that what we are doing is important, and that someday it might be rewarded. On the phone, my friend talks about how she is struggling to put food on the table for her kids while I bitch about not being able to afford my monthly allotment of beer and books and not being able to pay of my student loans, but we are struggling to establish the same identity—one that revolves around creativity, speaking truth to power and finding a way to escape the urge to return to full-time “non-creative” work. Is this selfish? Maybe? Is this brave? Definitely.

At times, it seems to be a daunting and desperate effort that may amount to nothing. But in my clearest moments, I know that my focus should not be on the end result, but on the way that I feel when I’m putting stories on paper, when the characters begin to speak, and I can explore subjects and motivations that I may not have the words to understand or express in daily conversation, in regular life–the dark rivers that flow underneath our waking consciousness, and how people can do the strangest things.

I think about the work of writers like Laura van den Berg whose short story collection What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, published last year by Dzanc Books, traverses those dark rivers in such a completely delightful and soul-filling way. For me, a good short story carries the same satisfaction quotient has a well-constructed and tasty burrito—it doesn’t take long to get through but at the end you can lean back, put a hand on your stomach and say: “Ah, that was delicious and I don’t regret spending a minute of my time on it.”

Van den Berg’s stories of elusive, half-visible sea monsters, bigfoot impersonators and aspiring long-distance swimmers carry that steep sense of satisfaction. Her characters are all women; from teenagers to forty-plus married professors, struggling to navigate (sometimes falling into) the lacunas and pits that make up their daily lives. In the title story, a young woman named Celia travels to Madgascar with her mother—aging beauty and expert on primate habitats—only to realize that her mother cares more about doggedly pursuing myths than acknowledging what is truly before her. Celia is left alone for the most part, and she fills the long days with walks to the coast—where she practices long-distance swimming in the seawater, avoiding the shrieks of the Indris that inhabit the forest. There are moments in this story and the rest of the pieces that sing with beauty—descriptions of bodies at rest and in motion, of dusty African hunts, of murky lakes, of caves and poppies, and of emerald-green jungles. Animals, beasts, darkness, heat, absence, ache, water, sickness, obsessive research and sweat, weave through each of the stories—pulling and swelling up against the main characters as they escape to faraway places, both physically and psychologically, as a way to make sense of the inhospitableness of the world around. It is a lyric exploration of the tug between making sense of difficult situations and trying to escape a reckoning with the mysterious forces of life, the strange territories of the people we love the most.

In the end, it is the discovery and savoring of stories like these, that makes me want to continue to write. The words fill me with a drive to achieve the same catharsis, when a sentence perfectly captures a moment or feeling that previously felt uninhabitable. Like making maps of private mountains—and giving those over to be discovered by whoever decides to read them. The key is to have the self-determination to draw out that map in the first place, even in the face of monstrous fear. As Ariel Gore another fantastically inspiring working-class woman writer says in her latest book, Bluebird: Women and the New Psychology of Happiness: “We can write our own scripts, write our own stories, take stock of all the things that have made us unhappy. And we can follow the threads of joy, too, like sparks flying from the campfire, see where they land.”

Photo by Flickr user Athena

It amazes me how much–for someone who professes to so anti-capitalist, anti-consumerism and anti-bourgeois culture– I struggle with the acts of consumption and spending.   I first threw off the shackles of cravings for Wet Seal bangles as a teenager, discovering the joy of thrift stores after a trip to the local Value Village yielded an entire new wardrobe for thirty dollars, one infinitely more interesting than the leggings and floral baby doll dresses I’d been coveting in the window of Contempo Casuals. Almost twenty years later, I remain engaged in a dizzy tango with both the (implanted) desires for material items and the knowledge that a life lived outside of the false strictures of capitalism is a more interesting life, indeed.

Two books have got me thinking about this topic , and have got me reinvisioning the possibilities of my own life outside of prescribed desires and assumptions. The first is one is The Art of Eating In: How I Learned to Stop Spending and Love the Stove.  Written by Cathy Erway, another entry in the long line of bloggers turned book writers, the book details the author’s two years of living in Brooklyn without ever eating out at a restaurant.

The whole blog to book phenomena has become quite the gimmick but there are some nicely surprising inspirations that I didn’t expect when I started reading. First, I love the detail with which Erway writes about food. She documents her meals and the experiences over the meals with loving attention to not only the food, but the context for the meals. There is a simplicity to her love for the act of preparing and eating good food that is endearing, one that I yearn to replicate. Second, Erway delves into the different ways to step out of the restaurant/eating out cycle by looking at urban foragers like “Wildman” Steve Brill–who gives tours of New York parks where fabulous edible plants grow like special treasures–as well as freegans who scour the streets of New York, finding incredible amounts of perfectly edible day-old bread, donuts and vegetables. Like the dumpster-diving punks that have been doing that shit for years, though I have never been brave enough to do that myself. It got me thinking about my own food consumption habits, and how the way we go about procuring and preparing our food can be a political act, not a new concept, but one I hadn’t given thought too in a while.  Also, choosing to prepare food at home can be step towards simplifying, and escaping the cycle of fast consumption without thought. I’ll never view my styrofoamed burrito takeout meals again after reading Erway’s study of the the incredible amount of waste that goes into these one-off meals, when you look at all of the extra napkins, plastic cups and utensils and paper bags. Inspired by the book, my husband and I are trying not to go out to eat for a month. We’re currently in our first week of cooking all meals at home. I won’t even talk about how many dishes I’ve done this week, but otherwise, it’s been pretty smooth. I’m actually using the slow cooker that was gathering dust under the kitchen counter for the past few years.

Another book that’s got me thinking about how much is enough is Voluntary Simplicity by Duane Elgin. Originally released in 1981, and revised “for the 21^st” century, the book is basically a manifesto about the reasons to live a life characterized by “ecological awareness, frugal consumption and personal growth.” It’s funny because many of the things that Elgin talks about are concepts that I’ve understood for years, especially since my early instruction in frugality and living outside of the mainstream inspired by the DIY/punk rock movements of the nineties, when it was cool to use and consume as little as possible (except for beer). Yet, I’ve seen those ideals fade among a large segment of the community as people grow older and take on mortgages and have kids. It’s like, what the hell happened? I know that many people have been able to maintain a life of conscious consumption and anti-capitalist ways of existing, and I would like to return to that fold. But I will need to do it in my own way, and in my own time, and by reading books that get me inspired to live in ways more aligned with my dreams and ideals.

Photo by Flickr user maureen_sill

Almond is funny, and the self-deprecating nature of his discourse is part of his charm, but the presentation of self-publishing as some brilliant new innovation got me thinking about the elitism of the publishing industry in general, and a gate-keeper mentality that I hope to see destroyed in the next few years as technology forces the literary world to widen their view of exactly who can participate in the making of literature and books.

“I simply decided to publish the book myself. But the truth is more damning. I felt self-publishing was beneath me, the province of deluded wannabes. I still craved the legitimacy bestowed by a publisher,” says the author about his decision to go DIY with This Will Only Take a Minute, Honey. After explaining the process of developing and editing the book, he exhorts authors to think about self-publishing as a way to gain literary traction since the “old way of doing things is collapsing under the weight of its own inefficiency.” And here is where I start to wonder: What exactly is the difference between Almond printing up his books himself, and all of those people who stole Kinko’s copy keys back in the nineties (okay, maybe not everyone had to get illegal about their zine-making, but I did) for the joy of placing those cut-and-paste sheets of typewritten words,  confessional stories, tour diaries, band interviews, onto the glass pane to be copied over and over, stapled together and released to whomever in the world might stumble across this black and white masterpiece. I guess I’m just not getting what is so innovative about self-publishing when so many people have been doing it for years?

Granted, there ended up being a glut of “bad” writing out in the world during the heyday of the zine-era, but the opportunity was also opened up for good writing to get in the public sphere that would otherwise never have seen the light of day. I mean, Doris Zine, Evolution of a Race Riot and Cometbus have inspired me more than most corporate releases. DIY self-publishing is not something for “deluded wannabes” though Almond’s comment sheds light on why, when I told one of the instructors at my MFA program that I would just self-publish a collection of short stories if I didn’t feel like dealing with pandering to an agent and trying to shove my foot through the tiny crack in the New York publishing world door, she looked at me as though I was out of my mind.

On that note, one my 2010 resolutions is to read more under-the-radar (in addition to the more well-established) literary journals. Annalemma No. 4 is a beautifully designed journal that focuses on visual art and photography in addition to writing. The first two stories were solid and short, like quick bursts of energy. The photographs and illustrations in the magazine, especially the lovely fine-lined and colorful pen and ink illustrations of strange birds, by Justin Gibbens, are worth the price alone. I also picked up a copy of CakeTrain Issue 7, which leans towards more experimental forms of writing.  After reading the first few pages, I thought damn, there’s a lot of poetry in here; I’m not the world’s biggest poetry fan, my preference being solid blocks of text I can sink my teeth into. But a funny thing happened on the way to me shutting the journal and placing it underneath a stack of books where it would gather dust and neglect–I kept reading. And I began thinking about the simplicity of the poem, the challenge of telling a story or at least conjuring an idea, a thought, a spark with only a few words. And another funny thing happened after that, I actually took out my notebook and wrote my own poem. Weird.

The new Tin House is pretty fantastic. There’s a story in it by Antonya Nelson about a forty-something divorcee in Albuquerque who has lost control of her son, her mother-in-law and her own life. I’d like to be able to write a story like that, one where the ends are frayed but satisfying.

Musically, I spent the mid-point of January listening to the new Yeasayer on repeat. It’s the sound of Grizzly Bear in the bath with Stevie B. while a copy of Depeche Mode’s Violator plays on a cheap battery-operated boombox.  The new Rocky Rivera album is worth a spin as well. I heard a couple of her songs on Hard Knock Radio, and damn, that is some good stuff. Political, super-charged lyrics with a sharp flair. Just the kind of music we continue to need in this day and age, like a reminder of what is possible. Oh, and she put the album out herself, yep.

Four years of full-time classroom teaching and an MFA graduate program had pushed recreational music and books to the bottom of my to-do list, but in 2009 I came back full force, obsessively listening to everyone from Fever Ray to Lightning Dust, from Erykah Badu to Slant 6. I remembered Bikini Kill and Neil Young. I discovered new favorites like Sunset Rubdown and Family Band. I listened to songs over and over, until I could sing along with every intonation, and hit all the ooohs and aaaahs like a karaoke master.

It was also a year in which I began playing and writing music again as voraciously as I did when I was in my twenties.  I was asked to play guitar in a band two days after I picked up my long-neglected and dusty Danelectro for the first time in months.

In 2009, I read like a true bookslut, hitting the request button on the library website as though my life depended on it. I spent precious dollars on literary journals and the occasional spanking new book or zine. I lent books to friends. I borrowed a fair share as well. Ann Beattie, Thomas Moore, Susan Sontag, Colson Whitehead, Lorrie Moore and Cindy Crabb (author of the inspiring Doris zine) are just a few of the writers that set off sparks in 2009.

Writing a column about my two great loves (aside from my husband and my dog) –reading and music—seems to be the natural progression after a long pause. I have a retained the pure, unadulterated joy in hearing a new album, in reading a perfect sentence, the same joy I felt in my teens and twenties.  It makes me happy to share this with a like-minded community.

The proliferation of free music and writing on the internet, while daunting to sort through, provides gems that might have gone undiscovered in the days when one had to stumble across an album in a record store or get a zine from a cool friend to find out about new music. These are still awesome ways to find out about bands (I learned about Sunset Rubdown during an excursion to Lou’s Records in Encinitas when my good friend told me about how incredible the band was live).  But now music blogs and podcasts uncover books in literature you might not be able to find in your local record store.  I’ve rediscovered Superchunk’s eternally charming 1991 release No Pocky for Kitty after reading about it on Gabe Meline’s blog City Sound Inertia.  I fell in love with Fever Ray after seeing the band’s creepy videos on Pitchfork, and remembered the glory of Stereolab after listening to Emperor Tomato Ketchup, in its entirety, for free on Imeem.

The explosion of online reading provides a fantastic opportunity to find articles and columns that print publishing simply can’t afford to provide any longer.  Online journals like failbetter.com, Barrelhouse, and Pank provide an opportunity to writers to publish, to get their ideas out, without the extensive connections required for traditional publishing.

In 2010, I look forward to excavating new literary journals, websites and story collections from the ever-deepening caverns of the literary world. Books like What Will the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us by Laura van den Berg, Bluebird: Women and the New Psychology of Happiness by Ariel Gore, and Possum Living out on Tin House books are on my short list for spring reads. I plan on spending time with The Collagist, a great online journal published by Dzanc books, as well as with copies (currently languishing by my bedside) of the latest Gulf Coast Review and A Public Space. I look forward to sharing my discoveries with you, dear reader, as well as hearing about some of your personal favorites.

Music-wise, I’m stoked on upcoming releases by Erykah Badu, Sleigh Bells, and Ted Leo, to name a few. I also promise you that Vampire Weekend will be mentioned once and only once in this column, and that is right now, and never again, and no amount of horchata will change my mind.

This column was written under the influence of Dragonslayer by Sunset Rubdown, Serene Velocity: A Stereolab Anthology, City Kid: A Writer’s Memoir of Ghetto Life and Post-Soul Success by Nelson George, Chilly Scenes of Winter by Ann Beattie, discounted unicorn/music clef earrings from the bargain table at Stanroy’s Music Center and the mid-winter fog of Sonoma County.

Photo by Flickr user Brandon Shigeta