Adam Gnade

I’m not big on resolutions but I like the structure of lists. Last year my non-resolution resolution was to keep track of all the books I read. Here’s 2011…

January 2011
Moby Dick, Herman Melville
Ava’s Man, Rick Bragg
Nebraska, Ron Hansen
My Brother is Getting Arrested Again, Daisy Fried
The Hours, Michael Cunningham
Harriet the Spy, Louise Fitzgerald (re-read)
As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
Stephen Hawking, The History of Everything
Paper Dance, Leroy V. Quintana, Victor Hernandez Cruz, and Virgil Suarez

February
Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy
The Book Thief, Marcus Zusak
Youngblood Hawke, Herman Wouk
Mr. Vertigo, Paul Auster

March
Last Evenings on Earth, Roberto Bolano (re-read)
Lost Illusions, Honore de Balzac
O Pioneers, Willa Cather

April
Green is the New Red, Will Potter
Call of the Wild, Jack London

May
War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson

July
Amulet, Roberto Bolano
1984, George Orwell
Night, Elie Wiesel
This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald (re-read)

August
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce (re-read)
The Hiding Place, Corrie Ten Bloom
A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway (re-read)
Diario de Oaxaca, Peter Kuper

September
Kettledrum, Andrew Mears

October
The Green and the Gold, Bart Schaneman
Look Homeward Angel, Thomas Wolff
Don’t Stop the Carnival, Herman Wouk
Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe
Billy Budd Foretopman, Herman Melville
Sons and Fathers, Ivan S. Turgenev
Deliverance, James Dickey
Sons of the Rapture, Todd Dills

December
The Third Reich, Roberto Bolano
Dubliners, James Joyce (re-read)
By Night in Chile, Roberto Bolano
The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky

ADAM GNADE “THE WINTER/THEIR APARTMENT” FROM RUN HIDE RETREAT SURRENDER Lyrics: It is winter again and you are fighting with your woman. From outside the apartment on the hill leading up Broadway, pressed against cold window glass, the warm glow you’d see would be Norman Rockwell life—NBC and a Christmas tree—wrapping paper tubes unraveled on the couch, presents half wrapped, shoeboxes—their lids off—open and waiting, where the dregs of pizza boxes, chewed-on crusts, and red wine jugs sit. Sliced cheese or cubed provolone gone dark yellow on white paper plates.

Your hands thrown over your head; her eyes wet and red. And from outside the window you would see a symphony, a tragic comedy, and song and dance blues, or election year blues, wartime blues, love-life blues, growing up blues, the sorrow of ancient oak tree deep root pained. And San Diego winter where at 6 a.m. you and her drive to work and see your breath in steam billows, to jobs you hate and to making money that goes God knows where.

Up the street the cars line Broadway, their windows fogged with dew drops dripping on the concrete. Southern California morning, the bums are staggering out of wet bushes draped with spider web trails and damp pant cuffs, scratching brown beards and wondering where their life went, and how did they get to this and whether they’d ever touch a woman again and oh, for one last grasp of warm teenage breasts they felt in the back of a car, high school homecoming night maybe, 1985, or somewhere near there, an elegant young body or smooth long side and the eyes of shivering nervous, of a woman that wants you because you are good and you are worthy and you make her feel good. But never again and they are resigned to that—nothin’ but dollar coffee at 7-11 and another day waiting for handouts and hobo death.

The nights now are filled with talk and then quiet, where you feel dumb and thick-mouthed—can’t say nothin’ but mumble and plead your case. You were never brave like she is, so you sit and drink and grow hard skeleton face and scare her, scare your family too, while your body rots, while your muscle goes to fat, then sagged skin while your brain goes evil, the squiggling worms and flitting haints, the spirits of soul leaving your body.

So she delivers sermons and speeches, implores you to get the hell out of the city.

“We’d be so much happier,” she says.

You could quit your jobs and run away like you used to, back when you did things just because, and because it felt good to run away, and because you didn’t worry so much like you do now … just because and leave the assholes behind and fuck ‘em anyway, they don’t mean shit.

She says it doesn’t matter what; run, hide, retreat, surrender or your apartment will be your grave.

So now it’s controlled burns in fields, oil derricks, freight trains, pig farms, wheat crop, cloud-topped mountains lazy and humped low on the horizon as we roll toward Boise. And there are hazy blue skies that go on forever and stretch up in a huge ceaseless arc above us, the place between the sky and the heavens, where space begins and all is dark and unformed and silent in cosmic orbits and celestial gasses like red and purple flowers blooming or like egg drop soup in some Chinese diner in LA.

Frankie and I talk on the phone and as we say goodbye she says, “Well … see you soon,” to which I thoughtlessly reply, “No you won’t,” and we both go silent, separated by 2,000 miles. The cattle low softly in the fields, and onward we move.

(Excerpt from the novel Hymn California by Adam Gnade)

Out of high school and still living at my parents’ house I feel trapped and eternally 10 years old. I talk to Alex about going to see the country. “I just want to drive across the thing. Just to see it.”

“Let’s go to Vegas.”

“No, I want to see other states, places I haven’t been before. I need to drive across the country. I feel like it’s something that’s missing from my life. I can’t just stay here in San Diego forever,” I say before realizing I’m talking to myself. Alex doesn’t need this. He’s in school, has a job, has a straight path set in front of him. Alex is going to be a chemist. He wants to work in Los Alamos. I know nothing. I want nothing, besides these things I can’t have. To see America. To get the hell out of San Diego. The life of someone else.

I try to write about American life but I don’t know America. I sit in my bedroom in San Diego, the room I grew up in, and I feel like a liar, like I’m faking. I try to write songs, but each one feels wrong. Stories, wrong. It’s not my own life I’m writing from.

Alone, at home, after my parents have gone to bed, I take out maps and trace lines and say names that feel magic: Cross Plain, Elbow Lake, Greenville, Sioux City, Detroit, Chicago.

All I know is San Diego and Tijuana. There is no magic in these cities. There are no miracles and laughter and strange mornings here.

I dig through the books that keep me going and images of America break out in full gushing color. I lie back in bed and feel the cool of reinforced concrete-sided grain elevators. I think of ghost towns with names like Bodie and Calico, the saw grass swamp of the Everglades, islands, inlets, promontories of Maine, Niagara Falls, Cumberland Plateau, the Great Smokey Mountains, the Blue Ridge Mountains, the Allegheny Mountains.

I comb through my mother’s atlas and stare at pictures of the Chesapeake Bay, flooded tributaries on the East Coast, salt marshes like the Great Dismal Swamp. I see Cape Hatteras, Barrier Island, Harker’s Island, Cape Lookout.

These places follow me into my dreams: burning tobacco fields, cypress swamps of the delta, Cathedral Canyon. I wake up, have breakfast in the empty house on Saturdays, then walk aimless through the streets of Pacific Beach, long and clean and palm-lined and close my eyes and hear the poetry in American places; words like Guadeloupe Mountains, Lake Eire, Rio Bravo.

There is a big America out there that I don’t know and it’s bittersweet to think about.

(Excerpt from the novel Hymn California by Adam Gnade)

My new book, The Heat and the Hot Earth, is out now from Punch Drunk Press. It’s six bucks. The one and only place to order it is at this link: http://store.adamgnade.com/product/pre-order-the-heat-and-the-hot-earth-novella

1) Never work a job where the bosses don’t respect you. Never be afraid to say fuck it and quit your job, even if the economy is shitty like ours. A fuckface boss will ruin your life and make you bitter.

2) Set your expectations high but be ready to work. Be ready to fight like a wild animal.

3) Be good to people. Even the shitty ones. Let the assholes be assholes. You’ll sleep better.

4) Never lie. Even when the truth is painful, tell it. Square up to the repercussions.

5) Find good heroes, the ones who make you feel less alone.

6) Find the genius in you. Even if it makes you uncomfortable it’s important.

7) Learn how to spend time alone. Too many friends will cheapen your friendships. Find the best people and stick with them.

8) Know that the best people are quiet and brave. The best people listen and the best people know how to do things. To be great, fill yourself up until you’re full.

9) Do it (all) yourself. Don’t wait around for record labels or publishers or bosses or moneypeople. If you wait to be discovered you’ll wind up disappointed.

10) Freedom is everything.

—Adam Gnade

1) People ask why I left the city and moved out to the country. Have you read the news lately? I love my country but the people who run it are running it into the ground.

2) It rained hard last week. The man who unloaded my stuff from the truck took a look at the green, wet, hilly land around us and looked at the stacks of guitar amps his partner was loading into the farmhouse and said, “I bet you guys can really wail out here” and I loved him for saying it. Fuck worrying about “the noise.” 

3) It’s night now and I’m listening to the Moon Pix record at full volume and I’m thinking about Emma Goldman. I want to live as wild as I can and I want to celebrate life. I want to live, and I mean really LIVE until I die.

-Adam Gnade

Third week alone and the quiet and weather is getting to me. Not getting-to-me-bad but getting to me nonetheless. I see how people in “extreme instances of solitude” become different people. I’m not different-people yet and this is not an “extreme instance of solitude” but, man, all this land and the cold and these dark, long nights, the wind whistling around the farmhouse … it’s something you don’t keep up forever. You should of heard the coyotes last night. My god …

It’s cold now and the cropfields are dead. This picture shows what was once a cornfield as tall as me. The birds scattering off the road as I went past…

So, some news: I have a short story in the new PRISM index art book and I’m pretty fucking excited about it. Got my copy in the mail and it’s a damn fine thing. Eighty-eight pages. Photography, art, writing. Comes with a CD comp and a DVD with a ton of short films. All curated by Jeffrey Bowers. All solid stuff. Pals like Ohioan and Phosphorescent show up on the CD. There’s a photo spread of headshots done by my buddy Yoni Kifle. Pretty outstanding. You can find that here. This is what some of it looks like…

Yesterday I went down to the catfish pond and it looked like the end of the world—the waters receding to nothing, the land all cracks and leftover things (a Christmas tree in the water, the exoskeleton of a crayfish, a Zippo lighter rusted to stone.) This is what it looked like. Dry. Dead silent. A thousand years from now and a thousand in the past. Meanwhile the woods were rustling and alive. I stayed on the borderland.

The book I’m writing now has changed courses. One character has bowed out (gracefully) and another has taken his place. This new character is based on someone you know but that’s a secret (and will always be.) I can feel this thing rattling around all day like a box of bones. When I sit down to work (here) the skeleton stands up out of its box and walks off into the house. For the next few hours I follow it (with a flashlight) but when I get close it steps back into the shadows. This book is about death and life (two storylines, two polarities) but life is shining up from it, a white-hot searchlight, a homing beacon, and I’m good with that.

 It’s easier to write about a place once you’ve left it. Out here on the farm, the chickens clucking in the dust, the garden full of wasps buzzing and life, I can see California. I can see palm trees in the red dusk and cars in beach parking lots. The sea smell, the fog at night; the onshore breezes and low coastline. There’s the waffle cone hut I hated and the boardwalk at Pacific Beach Drive and my characters Joey Carr and Tyler Monahan standing on the seawall like the last men on earth, watching the dark blue ocean, wind-chopped. It’s chilly and windy—October—and they’re wearing sweatshirts and jeans and sharing a 32-ounce beer in a brown bag. (Miller Highlife. Warm, flat. They don’t care.) And what are they talking about? Joey’s telling Tyler about Playas de Tijuana, the beaches by the bullring, the corrida’s colosseum walls, the ruined shacks on the sand like Beirut and the fish markets, the border fence stretching out into the sea. I hear that too. Word for word. When I’m back home in San Diego, I can’t see the place. But out here, halfway across the country, it’s right there and I’m going to TAKE IT. 

ADAM GNADE “I WILL PUT AWAY MY PAIN AND BE A BEACON” (THE WILD HOMESICK EP, PUNCH DRUNK PRESS) This is where my head is at right now. The fight, the work, the big push forward. Fall’s goin’ heavy. Winter on the verge. Big gray skies, windy cold mornings, and a lot of time “getting ready.” If you’ve ever lived somewhere with a real winter you’ll know what I mean. (“I Will Put Away My Pain and Be a Beacon” is on this record, available here.)