You used to be such a sweet boy.
What changed?

You used to tell me everything,
Ask me all your questions.
You couldn't wait to show off
Your times tables.  At age three.
Which you worked out for yourself.
What changed?

You used to climb into my lap
And rub the buzz-cut fuzz
On the back of my head.
You used to ask the barber
To cut your hair
So it was just like mine.
What changed?

You used to show me your stories,
Talk about your friends,
Tell me what was on your mind.
You used to let me point out
When you were straying
From the straight and narrow
In deed or in thought.
What changed?

You didn't used to keep to yourself,
Skulk around the house,
Stay in your room,
Use that gutter language.
I didn't used to need to drink,
Or use this belt on you.

What changed?

childhood | poems

Late yesterday I received an email rejection in response to my recent audition for a popular Chicago-area reading/performance series.

This is the second year in a row I've applied. Last year my submission showed "a lot of hard work and potential" but wasn't right for the series. I would not have bothered applying again this year except that one of the directors of the series saw me read one of my personal essays at Tuesday Funk and urged me to submit it.

Well, I did get the audition this time, but while my piece was "engaging" with "funny moments" and "strong" writing, there were doubts about my ability to "command the entire room." ("Think of how you might tell this story to a group of friends in a bar.") Which is potentially fixable, of course. All I need to do is pay for one of their workshops.

You know, I think I'd rather spend the money on beer, telling the story to a group of friends in a bar.

chicago | reading series | readings

This is long overdue, but some folks over on Facebook asked me for a recap of the movies I saw last month at the SXSW Film Conference & Festival. But first, you might be asking, what was Bill doing at SXSW Film anyway?

Nothing mysterious. I attended the SXSW Interactive Festival for the first time in 2012. Though I had a great time there, I kept seeing posters for movies I wanted to see but couldn't because I didn't have a Film badge. So for 2013 I bought the Gold badge, which gives access to both Interactive and Film.

If I go again in 2014, I might just get the Film membership. I enjoyed it that much.

I didn't get to attend everything I wanted, but here's a rundown of the four feature films I did manage to see.

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING (dir. Joss Whedon)

Joss Whedon's black-and-white adaptation of the Shakespeare comedy, filmed in twelve days at his own house, was definitely one of the hot tickets of the festival. Featuring familiar faces from all over the Whedonverse, the adaptation is a lot of fun and often cleverly staged, though I found it pretty uneven on the whole. Not every actor gets a good handle on the language, though Amy Acker is wonderful in the lead role of Beatrice. The show-stealer, though, is Nathan Fillion as the bumbling Dogberry. Worth seeing, in particular for Whedon fans. Opens June 7.

(After the screening, Whedon and most of the cast held an hour-long Q&A. That was worth waiting in line right there.)

MUD (dir. Jeff Nichols)

My expectations for this, Jeff Nichols' third film, ran very high on the basis of his earlier movies, Shotgun Stories and Take Shelter, both of which I loved. I was not disappointed. This story of two teenaged boys in Arkansas who befriend a drifter on a remote river island is thrilling and harrowing, but is also a sweet and lyrically told coming-of-age story. It's no surprise that Matthew McConaughey is so good as the drifter Mud, but it is a surprise that Reese Witherspoon turns in such a gritty, unglamorous performance as Mud's love interest. (It's been a long time since she's had a role like this.) But despite supporting players like Sam Shepard, Sarah Paulson, Joe Don Baker, and Michael Shannon, the real stars are Tye Sheridan and Jacob Lofland as Ellis and Neckbone, the two boys who are caught up in events just beyond their understanding, both criminal and emotional. Nichols really has a way with actors, not to mention with landscapes. Opens April 26.

I predict this is going to be a big hit, and I also predict that audiences will love it so much that there will be an indie backlash against it later this year as the film where Jeff Nichols sold out. If that happens, ignore the backlash.

UPSTREAM COLOR (dir. Shane Carruth)

If you saw Shane Carruth's first film, 2004's twisty, tricky time-travel flick Primer, then you know pretty much what to expect from this, only his second feature. Upstream Color is told in the same compressed, elliptical style of collage, with great stretches that go by without dialog. It's the story of a woman putting her life back together after a traumatic brainwashing incident, and, like Primer, it adds up to both more and less than the sum of its parts. More, because the stunning visuals and editing create a powerful and hypnotical emotional effect. Less because, even more than the earlier film, Upstream Color leaves you feeling stupid, as if you've missed something important that was right in front of you, or maybe that Carruth only wants you to think was there. I would recommend seeing it, especially if you liked Primer, but know that it will probably frustrate you, and that it contains some truly horrific, hard-to-watch imagery of cruelty to pigs. Opened, like, last week.

HEY BARTENDER (dir. Douglas Tirola)

Hey Bartender is a feature documentary about the resurgence of cocktail culture in the past decade. It's probably best experienced at a theater that, in fact, serves cocktails—I saw it at the Slaughter Lane location of the Alamo Drafthouse—but will be equally enjoyable no matter where you can manage to see it. The film features interviews with many of the stars of the American cocktail scene but focuses on two bartenders in particular: Steve Schneider of Manhattan's ultra-successful Employees Only, and Steve Carpentieri of Dunville's in Westport, Connecticut, a bar that's suffering as the cocktail revolution passes it by. Both Steves come across as sweet, sympathetic guys you want to see succeed, and both face some extreme obstacles along the way. (Bonus points that the soundtrack is made up almost exclusively of Joe Jackson songs.) I can't find a release date anywhere, which is a shame, but I hope you'll at least be able see it at a festival or on demand sometime soon.

Both Steves were at the screening I attended, by the way, and Steve Schneider (a former Marine) created a special cocktail for everyone in the audience. I loved his story so much that I couldn't help giving him a hug after the screening. He seemed to take it in stride.

austin | conferences | film | film reviews | sxsw | texas

Novelist J. Robert Lennon wrote recently on Salon.com that young writers should avoid reading much contemporary literary fiction because most of it is terrible. (The essay, in fact, is headlined: "Most Contemporary Literary Fiction Is Terrible.") It's a well-argued piece, worth reading, but what really caught my attention was this passage:

But a fiction writer ought to engage with other parts of the culture, too. This includes reading outside one's genre — I happen to favor sci-fi and mystery, but I think it's fine for literary writers to read YA, romance, fantasy or whatever they please. Literary writers are in the privileged position of being permitted to raid any genre for tools to subvert and repurpose.

This is a limited, and limiting, view of genre. It implies that no genre but literary fiction can amount to more than the sum of its tropes, and that the tropes of genre fiction are only useful to the literary writer insofar as they can be employed to ironic or postmodernist ends.

Both those implications are false. Central to Lennon's essay is the proposition that most of contemporary literary fiction is stuck in an insular, navel-gazing loop—in other words, that it continues to reinforce and perpetuate its own tropes. A few works might break out of that cycle and transcend it, but if we accept that most works in the category are stuck inside a constraining boundary of accepted elements, then we are defining literary fiction as a genre. And if any works in that genre are capable of transcending its limitations, then why can't works in any other genre do the same?

Editor Moshe Feder once described the processing of borrowing and lending between genres to me in terms of blood types. (He in turn had borrowed the metaphor from someone else, and I'm sorry I don't recall from whom.) He said that genres all have different capacities for giving and getting. At one end of the spectrum is the mystery genre, the Type O or universal donor of literature, which can lend its tropes to any other genre. At the other end is speculative fiction*, the Type AB or universal recipient, which can take in tools and techniques from all other genres. Arrayed between are all other genres, including romance, western, spy, crime, and, yes, literary, each of which can give and receive to a greater or lesser extent.

This is a useful and pleasing metaphor in some ways, but things are really more slippery and complicated than all that. I've always thought of the universe of fiction as a multidimensional spectrum, with all genres free to commingle and exchange their DNA. For every literary novel like Time's Arrow by Martin Amis that borrows fantasy tropes to ironic ends, there's one like Luminarium by Alex Shakar (last year's L.A. Times Book Prize winner for fiction) that imports science fictional tropes and treats them seriously and realistically. Likewise we have The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe, China Mountain Zhang by Maureen F. McHugh, When We Were Real by William Barton, Spin by Robert Charles Wilson, and any number of other works of speculative fiction that borrow liberally from what we might call literary techniques to varied and stunning effect. (And need I even mention George Saunders these days?)

In fact, I like to take my spectrum one step further imagine something along the lines of Jorge Luis Borges's Library of Babel or Neil Gaiman's Dream Library—an infinite library containing all possible works of fiction. The portion of this library containing works set entirely within the world of our consensual reality would be vast, of course—but relative to the size of the library as a whole, it would be vanishingly tiny. A smaller portion of that tiny portion of the library would correspond roughly to what we think of as literary fiction. Everything outside of that? That would be what we think of as speculative fiction.

Viewed this way, speculative fiction becomes the superset of all possible fiction. What this implies is that for a writer of speculative fiction to work at the absolute top of his or her game, that writer must be able to employ all the tools, tropes, and techniques of all other genres of fiction. Far from inhabiting a literary ghetto, we really inhabit the outer sphere of all possible genres, encompassing everything else—or so we should aspire.

But even that view is too limiting and elitist. What I really want to say is that all writers should feel free to employ the most expansive palette they want. Artificial bookstore distinctions aside, good writing is good writing, and that should be the pursuit above all else for any writer. It's what the writers I like and admire the most have been doing all along.

Ultimately, we are all writers of speculative fiction.

#SFWApro

literature | reading | science fiction | writing

In his recent New York Times interview, Louis C.K. offers a good reminder of what it takes to build a career, for those who've been toiling away for decades:

NYT: You have the platform. You have the level of recognition.

LCK: So why do I have the platform and the recognition?

NYT: At this point you've put in the time.

LCK: There you go. There's no way around that. There's people that say: "It's not fair. You have all that stuff." I wasn't born with it. It was a horrible process to get to this. It took me my whole life. If you're new at this -- and by "new at it," I mean 15 years in, or even 20 -- you're just starting to get traction. Young musicians believe they should be able to throw a band together and be famous, and anything that's in their way is unfair and evil. What are you, in your 20s, you picked up a guitar? Give it a minute.

advice | art | career | work | writing

Maggie Thatcher's dead,
but so is Roger Ebert.
Always a trade-off.

death | deaths | haiku | poems | politics | roger ebert

I'll be appearing next week in not one but two of Chicago's most electric reading series—or "live lit," as we call it 'round these parts. They'll be on consecutive nights, no less, so please block out April 16 and 17 on your calendar and be there.

First comes WRITE CLUB on Tuesday, April 16th, at The Hideout. In this bare-knuckle series, three pairs of writers square off with essays on opposing topics. The audience decides who wins, with all proceeds going to charities of the winners' choice. I'll be defending GOD over DEVIL, for the One Tail at a Time dog rescue organization. Tickets are $10 cash at the door. Arrive early!

And the following night, Wednesday, April 17th, I'll be part of CHIRP Radio's THE FIRST TIME at Second City's new UP Comedy Club. This monthly series assembles seven or so writers to reminisce about an important "first" from their lives, backed with specially chosen songs by The First Time Three. For April the topic will be "First Crime." Tickets are $10, and buying in advance is strongly recommended. (And get preferred seating with a dinner reservation!)

To recap...

Hope to see you at both events!

appearances | chicago | crime | events | reading series | readings

cigar aroma
wafting in from the golf course
signals that it's spring

golf | haiku | poems | spring

Amid the staggering news of other losses this week, I want to remember to say a few words about Iain Banks, one my literary idols. (Two of my literary idols, really, if you care to think of his Iain M. Banks byline separately.)

I, like many of you, I'm sure, was stunned to tears on Wednesday morning by the news that Mr. Banks is suffering from late-stage cancer and probably doesn't have long to live. He broke the news in typically straightforward and mordant fashion, but that didn't make it any easier to take.

Iain Banks is an important writer. I can't think of another writer who so consciously, so prolifically, and so successfully divided his output between serious mainstream fiction and rigorous hard science fiction. He proved, at least in the U.K., that one need not confine oneself to a single genre or style of fiction in order to maintain a brilliant career. It would have been impossible to guess from his twisted 1984 debut, The Wasp Factory, that just three years later he would affix a giant M to his chest like some superhero of letters, fly into space, and bring Consider Phlebas back to Earth, introducing us to what may at the time have been the most mind-expanding and humane future society ever invented, The Culture.

And Iain Banks is an important writer to me. His books can be found all over our house—on the science fiction shelves, on the mainstream shelves, almost always in the to-be-read pile on my nightstand, and even, in the case of his whisky travelogue Raw Spirit, on the alcohol shelf. He's a model of professional productivity, putting out a book nearly every year, and he's as fearless in his contemporary novels as he is visionary in his science fiction. (In 2002's Dead Air, he was already riffing on the meaning of 9/11 before other writers dared even think about it.) And his work is a constant inspiration to those of us who find ourselves attracted writing in more than one world.

I had always hoped to meet him, and never moreso than when I was bumming around Edinburgh drinking whisky with some of his friends. The news that I probably never will, and that the forthcoming The Quarry will likely be his last novel, is heartbreaking. I hope it's not true, but even if it is, Mr. Banks, you've already accomplished more than most of us ever will, and in doing so have always made the implausible look more than possible. Thank you.

cancer | death | literature | science fiction | writers | writing

I saw the first
red-winged blackbirds
of the year
this morning.

Sixteen degrees,
west wind fourteen
miles per hour,
wind chill two.

I know it's the
first day of spring,
but I still think
they were confused.

birds | birdwatching | poems | spring | winter