I don’t remember when I got into Raymond Federman, but it was probably during the process of trying to look up every influence Mark Leyner mentioned in interviews.  If you haven’t read him, both Take it or Leave it and Double or Nothing are genius, and demonstrate his mastery of experimental narrative.  Both of those books influenced me greatly, and made me keep pushing to get Rumored to Exist done.

I found Federman’s email back in 1999, and dropped him a line, letting him know how much I appreciated his work.  I didn’t expect a reply, and was surprised when he sent this.  It’s probably the best advice I’ve ever been given, and I should probably print it out in 500-point type and paste it to the wall above my monitor.

From: Moinous@aol.com To: jkonrath@rumored.com Subject: Re: noodles Date: Mon, 25 Oct 1999 12:20

EDT

dear jon

in l966 in paris I was having lunch with the great samuel beckett and I told him that I had started a novel [it was double or nothing] and he said to me:

raymond if you write for money do something else

and after a moment of silence [very comfortable silence with sam] he added

and never compromise your work

I hope I have respected his advice

I now give it to you

write write and write some more and then suddenly the writing will tell you if it’s finished — di not revise - jsut write between the words above the words under the words between the lines —

most important key on your computer - delete

tell the people a random house that federman has a great new novel jsut finished but he does not ocmpromise his work therefore he is not sending it to them

thanks for your good words about my work — what read the other novels too —

where did you arrive from - which planet - and what do you do to survive —

writing is like jogging - it must become an addiction - do it everyday same place same time - except when you don;t do it

be aware that publishers are no logner interested in good writing —

more soon

federman

I watched an hour-long documentary with Richard Linklater a week or two ago, an interview that was done on some Austin cable TV show, which looked like one of those public access deals that they always had in Seattle in the mid-90s when I first got a TV, with a guest and a host or two sitting in front of a curtain, a grainy VHS-quality video feed with one of those title generators that did the blocky Amiga 500 looking graphics in a stripe across the bottom. Production quality non-withstanding, this was a pretty incredible interview, probably done in around 1994, mostly about his work ethic and the movie Slacker.

It talked a lot about his first film, It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books, which was the Stanley Kubrick film school experiment: he bought a camera and a couple of thousand dollars of film stock and started shooting, collecting footage for a year and then spending another year editing it down. And it wasn’t done as a calling card movie, which is what everyone does now: make a film like Clerks, and then shop it to studios and either get it distributed on the Sundance/indie circuit, and/or get a deal to make a real-budget picture. He did neither, except he got the experience to get ready to do Slacker. And that wasn’t a calling card movie either, although the fact that he made money on it made him instant fodder for the suits, and he parlayed it into Dazed and Confused.

Side note: I was obsessed with public access and the idea of making a film back when I was in Seattle in the mid-90s. I would tape almost anything interesting on the public access channel, and make these “cable hell” tapes which I then sent to Larry in Chicago and he would watch them in the background while studying for law school. My apartment also had a thing where you could go to a certain channel on your TV and you would see the security camera feed for the front door, so I would tape that, and then run downstairs with a sign and flash the devil horns and make a face or whatever, then run back up seven floors and stop the tape. That got old fast, but we used to love this strange chick that was on, a chubby nude model who was obsessed with Tori Amos and thought she was a painter, poet, ARTIST, whatever, and would paint her face or body with tempra paint and mime these bizarro dance numbers to obscure Kate Bush b-sides and then go on these babbling monologues about some personal drama. I did buy a video camera, but I never made a film, because I realized that filmmaking involves the herding of people and the scouting of places and the work of direction, which is probably one of my weakest abilities. That’s what I love about writing, especially now with self-publishing, because I can create entire universes on my own, and even as an extreme introvert, I don’t need to interact with other people to get shit done. (Selling books, that’s another story…)

One of the things that resonated with me about Linklater was his discussion about Slacker as a “kitchen sink” movie, how he was able to throw in absolutely anything that was in his head during that summer, any old stories or lost memes or friends of friends he found interesting. He’d read a short story by a friend and then ask to borrow one of the characters, and drop them in some other situation on the college campus town of Austin. He had this form he had to stick with, this idea of an entire day, moving from reality to reality, jumping into these individual movies of different peoples’ lives, but he could get almost anything to work within that. I like that a lot.

I think when I wrote Rumored, it became my “kitchen sink” book, because when I look back at it, there are so many little thoughts and notions that came out of email conversations and episodes in real life and stories that knocked around in my head since childhood. I had this framework, a specific form or scaffolding that I hung all of these things off of, and I struggled a lot with whether or not to stick to this format or try to remix everything into a conventional narrative. And I didn’t, although there’s a very subtle plot to the book if you read all 201 things in order, but I wanted to break that construct, and I did. But when I go back and re-read bits of it, ten years later, I notice where the pieces originated. I see a road trip I took in 1999 or a conference I attended for work or an episode where I got stuck in an airport or a recurring nightmare I had as a kid.

I don’t feel like books have to have plot, and I don’t feel like plotless books have to be unreadable. I know when people talk about plotless movies or books, first of all, that’s seen as an insult, a problem. I think people either relate it to a book that has a weak or bad plot, that plods along with no development. Or they think of the art film where a group of children with Down’s Syndrome throw ape feces at a wall covered with blank 1040 tax returns for six hours, and think, “what the fuck does this mean?” and it has to be some kind of artistic statement that you have to hypothesize that it’s a representation of the latent developmental problems of our capitalist society inflicting oppression on African countries crippled by IMF debt. Or whatever.

I think life itself is plotless, and when we transpose a segment of life (or fictional life) from the meatspace non-linear world to a linear, flat book, we use plot as a set of expectations, a contract with the reader to guarantee that we the author will provide certain events that unravel in a specific way that will make the reader continue the journey. When we write an act 1, we foreshadow what will happen in the act 2 and 3 to tell the reader that they should stick with it. There are only 29 plots or 17 plots or 3 plots or one plot, and by telling the reader that your book is going to follow a plot that they already know, you are giving them expectations on how things will unfold. There will be twists and turns, and that’s what makes things (slightly) different, but plot is what pulls a reader through the story.

I guess my problem with this is that eventually, every book will become the same book, and instead of becoming an experiment to challenge the form, you ultimately fall down this hole where your contract with the reader becomes so rigid, any deviation from it is blasphemy. And if you fall into the realm of genre writing (more on that some other time) you MUST adhere to these standards, and the more you do, the more the reader feels “rewarded”, which is asinine.

The hard part is coming up with the framework or system to write the plotless book, because you need to figure out some way to glue together all of those pieces in your kitchen sink to get to your few hundred pages of book.  And that part’s hard to explain.

Man, I need to go re-watch Slacker.

“I pulled the VW Rabbit off the road and killed the engine.”

“You’re probably wondering why I did this.”

“I’ve always had a great interest in reference material.”

“I love Las Vegas, and I still have trouble telling people why.”

“There were riots in the streets, people gunning down cops, escaped prisoners dragging motorists out of cars stopped at intersections and smashing their brains in the pavement, Klansmen burning crosses, kids lighting bags of shit on fire and even people eating the brains of the undead.”

“I rented a room at the Vista Hotel in DC on January 18th to celebrate Marion Barry’s crack cocaine arrest with her, found an old black and white camcorder to hide in the wall, and bought enough narcotics to keep Peru in the black for months.”

“I’d do the same thing every weekend: get high on fiber, design a robot.”

“This all started back in the summer when KFC came out with that sandwich made from an entire bucket of fried chicken, two bricks of lard, and a pound of bacon.”

“Kilimanjaro is a snow-covered mountain 19,710 feet high, which makes it almost as high as I am as I write this story.”

“I snorted another line from the Oracle 11g promotional coke mirror I kept in my desk drawer, a fine row of crushed-up Claritin-D tablets rendered into a chunky dust of near-legal speed. I’d need every milligram of go-powder I could snort, shoot, or shove to get through editing this PowerPoint deck, a status report of status reports we submitted to the status committee on change management procedures currently in status.”

“I’ve never fucked anyone in a Chuck E. Cheese bathroom, I said to the anchorman from the Channel 4 News Team, a portly ghoul of a man wearing blackface and a stylish plaid suit made of velcro and tin. ”

Trying to shake a benadryl hangover, the evil pink mistress clogging every mental channel in my head with dizziness, apathy, and the dark grey dread and doubt and apathy that logjams any serious attempts at life. I remember waking at two or three, after the cursed recurring dream of being back in high school again, decades after escaping that hell, and spending hours in the parking lot, trying to find my car, the kind of realistic dreamscape that makes me worry if my car got towed or stolen for twenty minutes after waking, until I can convince myself that the torture of being back in Bighikistan and dealing with the preppies and assholes and evangelical christian taliban groups is nothing but an evil burn pulled on my conscious mind by the demons of my subconscious.

And then I did the infamous dizzying mental math of “it’s three, and my alarm goes off until seven, and this pill fucks me up for eight hours, but maybe I can cut it in half, and then shotgun coke zeroes when the alarm tries to fracture my sleeping brain.” And benadryl knocks me the fuck out, but plays with those REM dream settings, steps on them and fucks them so I sleep too deep, and skip the important step, the one where my subconscious plays, let loose on the playground with no recess monitors, just a blank brainscape occasionally jarred by the footsteps of a nocturnal cat that wants her breakfast four hours early. I can’t do this stuff every day.

I remember a fragment of a dream last night, where I returned to 414 Mitchell, and met some guy that lived there, tried explaining to him my previous tenure at the boarding house. He looked like one of those meathead hippy types, like the old bass player from Van Halen, a stocky guy with a mullety hairdo and a Jack Daniel’s obsession, who listened to jam bands seriously and called strangers “brah”. He acted antagonizing when we first traded words, but became a guarded friend when I mentioned my residence there decades before. He asked me why I left, implying some greater community at the house now, a fraternal bonding among the roommates, a utopian kinship. I started to explain the problems when I was there, the infighting and thefts and hostility, a dozen people living a dozen disparate lives under a single roof, endlessly at war with each other like a score of micronations feuding over a single set of vital resources. His look of doubt and hurt made me realize something changed in the last dozen years, either some transformation in the membership of the house, or more likely, a social failing in my own interpersonal skills. I left without pursuing it further, went off to find whatever the dream brought me to find, a distant landscape a common trope for my unconscious rambling.

But the night I first took Huperzine A — three nights ago — the dreams were markedly different. The shrink recommended the supplement, an ancient Chinese moss said to improve cognition, and I ordered a small vial from Amazon. The tiny pill, a 200 microgram dose, went on top of the usual gabapentin (the anticonvulsant probably causing my memory problems) but with no benadryl. The night’s sleep furtive, I couldn’t tell if I was asleep or awake for hours of the slumber, except my dreamscape was completely abnormal.

My usual boring dreams always take place in familiar scenery, the parental house or the aforementioned high school, or the constant theme of working at Wards. But this time, the altered sets were completely unfamiliar, an unrecognizable stage. I worked at an Alaskan factory, far north of the Arctic circle, making guns or weapons of some sort, and had a long conversation with a secretary about the kinds of doors required in an environment where it snowed eight feet a month. Then I took a car service in a city melded from Bloomington and Denver, a strange grey Vauxhall car with mini side wings like a Star Wars rebel ship. Inside, my co-rider started massaging the driver, a therapeutic massage tracing the various degenerative disk damage a frequent driver would have. The dreams continued like this, a lucid state between life and unconsciousness, and I woke untired, but also unrested, wondering if the drug would always have the effect, wondering how I could capture these dream-slips onto paper.

I did my first clean installation of OSX today, which is weird, given that I’ve been using OSX Macs since 2005.

The reason I’m not in the habit of nuking a machine and reinstalling everything is twofold.  One is that I’ve bought three Macs in that time period (a Mini in 2005; a Macbook in 2007; a MBP in 2010) and each time, they were factory-new machines with the OS preinstalled.  Prior to that, all of my desktop machines were built from pieces, and involved me installing an OS on a bare drive.  Most of the time, it was Linux, and when I first started, I’d have to find every blank or blankable floppy disk in the house, bring them all to work or campus, and download all of the floppy images for SLS or Slackware, using rawrite to create disk A1, A2, A26, B1,B2,N1,N2, and so on.  And then I’d get them all home, and halfway through the 27th floppy disk, I’d hit a bad sector and it would crap out and I’d have to dig around for another AOL floppy disk I could relabel and reuse.

My two pre-Mac laptops were both Windows machines from the factory.  I reimaged the Dell laptop and reinstalled Win98 in a different partition, and had to re-re-install it a half dozen times over the years.  The Toshiba laptop stayed with XP for Tablet and never got a Linux install, which was good because when that XP installation rotted out and required re-installation, Toshiba’s factory install DVD did not work, which is fucking genius.  (It would install a version of XP and drivers that would immediately BSD on boot.  Stock hardware, stock DVD, all stock settings.)

The other reason I never reinstalled OSX is I never needed to.  Windows is like a carton of milk sitting on a kitchen counter: it works for a while, but it will eventually make you puke and shit blood if you don’t completely replace it on a regular basis.  I guess I’ve kept a copy of Windows 7 going for two years now without a reinstall, so maybe those days are over, but who knows.  (Windows 8 actually has a feature that completely reinstalls the OS, which seems like a cop-out to me.)

I screwed up my current machine, though.  I’ve been using the migration assistant to move all of my apps and libraries and prefs and files from old to new machines, and installing new versions of the OS on top of the old one.  I think it’s probably fine to do that here and there, but I think I did it too many times.  I started with 10.4 on a PPC Mac, then migrated that to a 10.4 intel Mac, then upgraded that in place to 10.5, then migrated to another machine running 10.6, then upgraded in place to 10.7 and again to 10.8.  Somewhere in there, I fucked up a library, and my machine started getting flaky.

So, reinstall.  I cloned my machine onto a USB drive, and then made a USB installer for the OS on a memory stick.  Apple doesn’t ship their OS software on physical media anymore; an install lives in a recovery partition, or you can create a USB installer, which is what I did.  The actual reinstall was painless, and a lot of my config and stuff like my bookmarks and contacts magically reappeared on the fresh install, because it just goes and grabs all of that stuff out of iCloud.  I then copied over a subset of my apps, without installing every single thing I’ve ever installed since 2005.  Most Mac apps are a single monolithic archive file, and don’t have a bunch of loose files scattered all over the place.  The one big exception was Microsoft Office (of course), which I had to reinstall from DVD.

The only major bummer about reinstalling was actually copying over my music and photo collections.  Actually installing all of the metadata for both libraries was easy enough; you just copy over the libraries.  But the copies themselves took a few hours;  there’s no faster way to sling a quarter-terabyte of data from one place to another.

The only real snag I ran into during upgrade was that after rebooting, my external monitor didn’t work.  I freaked the fuck out on this, unplugging and plugging back in things, looking at if I needed to reset the PRAM or whatever, before I finally found out that I’d knocked the monitor cable and it was just slightly ajar, half of the pins no longer connected.  When I plugged it back in, it was fine.

The machine seems to be fine now, and is running much better.  Battery life is back to the pre-Lion levels, and I haven’t seen a beachball yet.  So, knock wood.  (Aluminum, whatever.)

BTW I went to the local Best Buy last night to get a new memory stick, which is probably the first time I’ve been there in a couple of years.  The place looks pretty damn destitute.  It looks like maybe 40% of the floor stock had vanished, and they just widened the aisles and put in a big-ass customer service counter to take up the extra space.  The only thing that was still densely stocked was the pre-cashier chute of high-calorie snacks that they make you traverse before you pay.  Maybe Best Buy should stop selling electronics and media and just focus on 5-Hour Energy and candy bars.