Adam Gnade

1) Looks like we’ve got a week of RAIN ahead. Serious rain. Flashflood rain. Time to light some candles and hunker down with a stack of books and watch it happen. Right now I’m finishing Bolano’s Nazi Literature in the Americas (GREAT), then I’ve got the spring Paris Review, the last half of Death in the Afternoon, and Ray Carver’s All of Us waiting. The best way to keep writing is to keep reading. As of tonight I’m way ahead of schedule with the new book. This is really happening. Whoa, my wall just shook; this storm’s a motherfucker. 2) The new baby chicks are doing great. They’re still in their brooder in the farmhouse but they’re lively and loud and growing fast. 3) Planting season starts this weekend. Still have last year’s garlic, onions, rosemary, and kale in the ground but we’re looking to go BIG this year. 2012 might be the end of the world but we’re going to eat well and feed everyone we know. 4) I was told in Portland that I’m “kind of chatty” which I took to mean I’m not a horrible, depressed pile of shit anymore. I’m good with that. Like Ray sings, “I’ve got death in my meat and I’m tired of dragging it around.”

1) Got back to the farm in time for some early spring; the pear and cherry blossom trees covered blooms; the ducks and chickens laying like crazy; new calves in the fields below us. Spring out here looks like a really mellow Will Oldham song, if that makes any sense. (“A King at Night”? “New Partner”?)

2) Big thanks to everybody who came out to my book reading in Portland (especially Lindsey Nevins). Biggest crowd I’ve ever seen. You guys are great.

3) Spring on the farm also means this: NEW BABY CHICKS. Six Rhode Island Red pullets…

It’s dark and I have my reading light on and it’s just me, 4am, the red-eye 12:40 out of Portland, everyone asleep in their seats, the cabin rocking to the side with (gentle) turbulence. The plane drops in space and the luggage makes a jostling sound and the engines scream out there in the cold and pitch dark; the wing tips blinking. (The seatbelt lights go on … ding. What was it Blake sang? “Look at these passengers/If there’s babies I’ll survive”?)

I’m reading Bolano’s excellent Nazi Literature in the Americas but I’m thinking about my friends back in Portland and I can’t keep focused. When you live out in the middle of nowhere and everyone you know is off somewhere else, you put a greater importance on the smallest of things: a few minutes in a quiet bar with Dan and Conner and Lindsey and Ray; meeting Erik in the rain outside Shanghai Tunnel; Mia playing “Wild Horses” on the bar juke, enough to break your heart. It’s all affirming because you don’t get it so often. 

Which is to say, I’m glad to be headed home because I like how I live but I’m not sure home will ever be home until all the people I love are there. Of course that’s impossible and if you think about it too much the longing will drive you crazy.

Maybe that’s why people want to go to heaven so bad—all your friends and family (present, past, and beyond) there and accounted for. I know a few things but I don’t know about heaven. What I know is this: life is short and lonely but there are good things that make it worth living. The idea is to grab those things when they come and hold onto them as long as you can. Of course you can’t hold them forever, but what can you? Nothing. Life is water through wet cloth. It’s all trees and sky passing by a car window, and you can never own any of it, no matter how hard you try and no matter how much you want it. The key is to make your peace with that and have as much fun as you can without hurting anyone. There’s no meaning of life but there is meaning and life, and it’s there waiting for you. All you need is to have your eyes open wide enough to see it when it comes along. It’s worth it. I swear.

Portland’s been better than I remember it. I think (in general) I remember the bad times most of all, and this trip was none of that. There were long talks and bars and there were good friends and late nights and that’s about all I wanted and that’s what I got. Now the bad from before seems softened but I know it is as it was: rough, shitty, sad, mean. Not this time. Not at all. Okay. Yes. Alright. Time to go outside and walk around Downtown and see the rain.

Hey Portland,
I’m in town to do a book reading tonight at Powell’s. I’ll be reading the first chapter of the new one. Downtown, 7pm-7:15pm. Come on by and say hello.
-Adam

A bunch of people have written recently to ask about my storyline. Something like: Question: Why does Hymn California and The Darkness to the West (and the songs) have one set of characters and the last three novellas another? 

Answer: There are two separate storylines I’m working on. One is centered around James Bozic and Frances Alicio from Hymn and Darkness (and some of the songs). The other, from the novellas, is concerned with the characters Joey Carr, Tyler Monahan, Chente Ramirez, Ted Boone, Eva Neveski, and Maggie Harker. 

The only connecting character is Ben Frank, but the book I’m finishing (Youth is a Wolf Dark and Golden) begins to bring both storylines together. The next book I write will have everyone I’ve ever written about and it will explain everything once and for all, but that won’t be for a while. 

Between now and then I need to finish Dark and Golden (deadline 6/5) and work through a couple novellas and short zines of connected material. I’m thinking Dark and Golden will be out mid-late 2013. (There will also be some new songs with material connected to the Joey/Maggie story.)

I can’t tell you how nice it is when you start seeing things work out…

1) When you’re raised up around country music and then cut your teeth in indie-rock you get a lot of disinformation. One thing you hear from people is, ”There’s only one Hank … and that’s Hank senior.” I bought it for years. Popular opinion, and I mean across the board, will tell you that of all the Hank Williamses across the multiverse, Hank The First is the only Hank worth your time. 

That being said, a couple years ago I stumbled onto some Hank Williams Jr. records from the ’70s in the five dollar bin and my preconceptions were blasted all over the wall. 

I still love me some Hank Williams Prime but try and tell me “OD’d In Denver” isn’t one of thee finest bad-ass outlaw songs ever written. Is he hip? Far from it. Are the songs good? Find the 1979 studio version of “OD’d in Denver” and decide for yourself.

 After that work your way through “Whiskey Bent And Hell Bound,” then “Family Tradition,” “The Pressure is On,” ”A Countryboy Can Survive” (my personal favorite), “Old Nashville Cowboy,” the big league strut of “The Conversation” (with Waylon Jennings), “All My Rowdy Friends Have Settled Down” (second favorite), etc. Sure Hank Jr.’s done some awful things but, haven’t we all?

2) One of the least awful things you can be is a fan of something. Something you can love but not own. Something to give your heart to and not have it broken.

3) If the universe really is infinite like the multiverse theorists believe, then there is only a limited amount of ways matter can come together to make form. Which means across the (literally) endless spectrum of constituent universes, there are countless Earths and countless yous, most of varying composition but some—MANY, because infinite space is a big thing—that are totally identical, that exist in the same physical form as you and on the same quantum table; a you that is reading this right now off that same phone, a billion yous drifting across the high dimensional planes reading the words “high dimensional planes.”

What if there was another you in a parallel universe that had slightly different tastes, beliefs, and basic aesthetic inclinations? Say, a you that likes Hank Jr. juxtaposed against the Hank-Sr.-loving you here in the observable universe—an opposite you, but a you that is more or less synchronous. What would you say to the alternate you? What if there was another you that hasn’t made the same mistakes? If not, are you truly alone because there is only you?

4) Is parallel universe theory a form of immortality? A you always out there, always alive no matter what happens to the you of right-here-right-now. A you existing infinitely. Could that be an explanation of “god”?

The idea of “fictional realism” posits that because fictions exist, because a thing/character/person exists in fiction, it will exist somewhere in physical form across the multiverse, i.e., all things imagined will be real somewhere because of the limited variation of matter. That includes Nick Carraway, Scout Finch, Harriet the Spy, Batman, Temple Drake, Mabel Longhetti, Harold Chasen, Jake Barnes, Augie March, Augustus McCrae, Anna Karenina, you name it—as long as they obey the fundamental laws of physics they would (hypothetically) exist; the idea being something like, “Everything that can … will.”

5) What makes you you and not someone else? Petty shit like musical taste? Sexual proclivities? Eye color? Where’s the defining line? Can you see it? Could you touch it if it was there in front of you?

6) What is it that makes you feel less alone with yourself?

-Adam Gnade

Microcosm Publishing is selling a limited batch of signed and numbered copies of my latest novella, The Heat and the Hot Earth. There are 20 of them and they’re two dollars a piece. You can get that here.

-Adam

This past summer I went on tour with Damon Moon and the Whispering Drifters. It was me playing solo, Under White Pines, and Damon’s band. Good times and a lot of swimming and a lot of beer and a lot of trouble. Their new record is out and it’s fantastic. Here’s a video for the title track. See if you can catch the cameo my book Hymn California plays in it…

New hand-painted covers for the split zine Bart Schaneman and I did. Copies are here. This one, They Will Stand On You And Spit, is the first installment of a six-part collaboration series I’m doing with some talented friends. Next one will be announced soon. (Hint: expatriate Californian farmland fiction.)

This is what I’ve been trying to say all week and because I couldn’t say it the way I wanted to I’ve stayed away: The internet is sad and gross and unbecoming. Twitter is not entertainment and it never was. Facebook is worse than heroin and high fructose corn syrup and Rick Santorum combined. Phones are no substitute for friends. “Comment sections” are for cowards and cannibals and horrible ghouls who’ve never loved a good thing truly. This whole stinking mess is full of borrowed identity and dismissive backtalk and shallow running, and I can’t get with that.

The things I love best don’t translate to 140 characters. I love reading giant old novels as thick as a telephone book and I love cooking food for my friends and I love riding trains and drinking good red wine.

I write books, and that’s the thing I love best. To be a working writer in 2012 means you form some sort of relationship or alliance with the internet, whether unholy or otherwise. If you’re publishing the things you write, and you want people to find your books, coming to terms with the internet is unavoidable.

What I’ve been knocking around this past week or two is whether I want to engage in it at all. Part of me wants to take myself off the internet and disappear entirely—adios, it’s been lovely, fuck it all and salt the earth; the other part knows we need to use all the tools at our disposal, and use them ethically. 

Maybe tomorrow I’ll say fuck it again but I think I’m going to stick around and use this for what it is and blaze as much glory as I can while it’s still legal to be wild and free. (I like what Banksy said about intrusive public advertising being ours to deface and I like the Situationist idea of subverting things you don’t agree with.) The internet might be an end of sorts—an end of valued art and attention spans and privacy—but I’m going to ride along here on the far edge. I’m going to use it for what I can and protest the bullshit by giving the goods with as much quality as I can muster. (It’s about getting what you can from the beast and doing it with kindness. Ask any dumpster kid, that Odwalla juice is still just as good after it’s been tossed out. Trains are still going somewhere whether you hop them or pay your fair.)

I don’t want to buy in to the empire as the empire burns but I want to have a good time and tell some stories and raise some hell with what I’ve got while I have it; if the internet helps me get there, then fine, I’m good with that.

I don’t know if that’s dancing on the ruins, per se, but I’m sure as hell going to dance.

-Adam Gnade

Dear friends,

People are scared to take chances. We work all our lives and we plan for our deaths and when something new comes along we’re like, “Wow, that sounds like an adventure but, no, I think I’d rather stay right here.” Well, fuck that. Bravery is one of the best things we’ve got. It’s gold, and it’s FORCE; the push to get up, get moving, and make a life worth living.

My friends Valeska Hykel and Andrew Mears are trying something new and brave and it’s inspiring on days like these when I hardly want to get out of bed, much less face the day.

A few months ago they started a printing company in Oxford called Double Suns. They do t-shirt and record and poster printing for bands and artists but what I want to talk about here is their silkscreen collaboration series. Way it works is every two weeks they invite an artist friend of theirs to team up with them and design a t-shirt and a “mystery item.” Both go on sale two weeks in advance of the release. In that time V and Andrew work with the artist on the logistics—what the shirt will look like, what the mystery object will be. At the end of that period the collaboration is no longer for sale and Andrew and V hunker down in the studio and get to work. After that they send them out to the people who have either bought one or subscribed to a number of them and when the deadline has been met no more will be made. Out of print. Forever.

The first collaboration was me. Andrew and V and I worked together to make a hardcover, screenprinted book I wrote and then a t-shirt, which was something like Walt Whitman meets the cyclops of Odysseus. After that they did one with Yannis from Foals. His shirt glows in the fucking DARK and his mystery object is an “octoid spinner.” (All of which you can see below). Up next was Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs and then Gemma Pharo (and onward. They’ve got the bands Jonquil and Fixers, the artist Tinhead, and Foals’ videographer Dave Ma coming up.)

It’s hard work. Everything is painstakingly hand-made and they break their backs over this stuff and practically live in their studio most days. Something new every two weeks is a rough fucking timetable. You either live it and give up everything else … or give up. There’s no middleground here.

The reason I’m writing this is I want them to succeed. If you support people looking for new creative ways of living you should check out the things they’ve made or tell a friend about it or send this link to your fucking doctor. I don’t know. Do something. Spread it around.

Here’s Double Suns’ site.

Don’t let good things like this pass by—or away. Support bravery, original ideas, and new ways of living. At all costs.

-Adam Gnade

Second review of my books in a week to mention John Hughes films. I’m pretty okay with that. The book I’m finishing right now is the most teen-movie-as-adult-hard-literature thing I’ve ever written. We’ll see how that works. I want to write the great American War and Peace as Sixteen Candles hybrid novel. I’m not even kidding. Let’s hear it for the high-literary soap opera.

It was a bare mattress on the floor. The mattress was light blue like all mattresses are and it looked brand-new and the springs bounced you when you shifted your weight. For a while we sat and talked and then we wrote a song together that started off sarcastic and angry but ended up sad and earnest. I played the singing saw, a musical saw. The sound it made was like whale song—high and deep at the same time, warbling, mournful—and you sat cross-legged facing me and played an orange acoustic guitar with nylon strings.

Eva, you sang in Russian. Your voice was low and soft and husky and you said the lyrics were about a man from your village whose wife was killed by wolves on the shore of the mill-pond and how in the night when he gets up for a drink of water he can hear her boots crunching through the snow; how she’s walking endlessly through the woods looking for him but she can’t see him because he’s alive and he can’t see her because she’s dead. She can only hear the sound of his bare feet on the linoleum (and only at night) and he can only hear her boots in the snow (and only at night). That’s all they have left and, as time passes, the nights when they can hear each other are becoming less and less frequent and they know that soon those nights will cease forever and they will have truly lost each other.

The chorus of the song is them singing back and forth. Where are you? I can hear you but I can’t see you. Why aren’t you here with me?

In the final verse it’s revealed that the man is dead too, that he hung himself in the kitchen after she drowned, and that their souls have been hunting each other for nearly seven years. The last line tells how at the end of those seven years they will both be gone—passed on to the next world, and separately. The wife to heaven because she lead a good life. The husband to hell because he took his.

(Excerpt from The Heat and The Hot Earth by Adam Gnade)

Well, I did it. The whole hand-written section of the manuscript is typed in. It’s big, and looking at it all I can tell the hardest work is ahead of me. By June 5th I want to have a printed manuscript I can let people like Bart and Rich and Dukes and Mears read and then I’m going to see about getting it published. Between now and then there’s a lot of rewriting ahead, a lot of adding and a lot of cutting. I’m covering more than two decades of story with this one and all the characters I’ve written before will be connected and filled in. It’s going to take WORK but I think I’m ready for it. Four months to the day …. I think I can do this.

-Adam