25/30: Conversations With My Classmate-Professor Over Lunch in Cardiff

Of all the places, high street, of all the places on high street, a faux-mexican

chain with bad spellings and valleys accents. Here again for all the unpacking
at the logical end of the course we took together.
find ourselves comparing notes eight years from the day he said

so you’re also an American, and showed me the best seat

in the mini-cafe.

The years they have been kind?

Strange? About the same?

His kids are people now, big

laughs and so many transgressive

authors, Naked Lunch Naked Lunch

Naked Lunch and how the students

need

to be shaken

and twisted

and broken

you just keep writing and throwing it

out and keep writing and throwing it

out to the high street, he gestures,

something for the people, these

people they just go about their little

lives.

At some point in our thirties we just start looking the same

for a long time. We met when he was a year younger

than I am now, he’s lost a little weight, but aging only

shows in family pictures.

So many beat authors  and  pages full

of violence, his students complain, especially

the women, but people need to know

life’s not all gardens and shopping

and roses. he references Thoreau

and Ginsberg and Lydia so and so

and says something about guts

on the page. GUTS.

To break up the bland, pleasant

horror of domesticity.

What are we doing

here on the high street,

if we’re not picking  up tail

or telling rough truths?

He’s married. I’m not. He was married when we met.
I wasn’t. The Cardiff we meet in and the Cardiff

he lives in are different places even so.

The new book is meant to be

destroyed, because art is temporal.

I get a copy for free. He has to give

some of his students credit, they call him

on his shit. He’s got shit, like I’ve got shit

like they’ve got shit, but these

are his classes and

I learn more, here on high street

about Cardiff Uni Politics

than will

hopefully ever be useful.

Always used to joke to me to not get married, fuck around as

long as possible. Struck me as sad, and honest. A third weak

beer in and I remember three years ago, he sent a few links

for professor jobs in Cardiff, then one in Bellingham that

he’d thought about.

But you can’t uproot family. You, you could go anywhere.

He pulls a page out of his book and wraps his tip in it

things are going pretty well, he re-iterates, life is what it

is, just kicking against the long going

and I take another look down high street

contemplating curriculums for those who only

wish

their desperation could be

quiet.

Arguments with myself and another:

Point.

Counterpoint?



musical note: dig the new jam up until the spell-out-the-lyrics bit. which seems a bit, well, lame.

Writing this. . .

. . . from a bus station in London, waiting for a coach to Wales. Oh yes.

"You shouldn't be so self-deprecating! You should just be awesome."-- a girl named Stephanie, on Saturday

Saturday I read at a salon-style reading at Josie Davis' house wherein there was pie and wine and ipa and Paul Nelson and Anastacia Tolbert and they were both excellent and I felt like my stuff was well-received. I read:

Little Fear of Drowning
Not Like a Gas Stove At All
Lake City
Swansea-Cardiff Blues(Bellingham Edition)
Feel the Buzz(Cardiff Edition)
Ambition is Critical(Swansea Edition)
God Delegates
Extra Wide Bathtubs
Genus, Species and Flavour

incidentally, it was the 1-year anniversary of my return to the USA; hence reading the Welsh Trilogy in complete, in order. The first time I've done that. I still love those pieces, but lately have been feeling an itch to get a more complete round up of new, post-SMCD in tip-top reading shape. Lake City tends to go over real well. At least in Seattle.

other news: Shane will have 2(!) new books out soon, which I helped in selecting/editing pieces for. Have applied for a micro-residency at Pilot Books and have a gig in Portland at the end of August. Writers group is going well. I have about four pieces on the tip of my pen, just waiting to get good.

there are other things in my life that occur, but this was gonna be an "artistic" update anyway.

More rockers for the pile

Stuart Cable, who played drums for the Stereophonics, was found dead this morning.

I was never a fan of said Welsh band who often sounded like an unholy mix of Nirvana and U2 (or at least, the vocals had that going on) but thanks to my regulars at the Rhyddings and that perverse thing musos have where they talk as often about the stuff they don't like as the stuff they do, the Stereophonics were as big a part of my Wales musical landscape as anything else.

Below is one of their songs that I actually grew to like over time.