Stephen Dixon

Last night at a party in Baltimore Jake and I ran into Stephen Dixon, writer of witty, poignant, sometimes fantastical stories, also a former professor of ours.  The class was so relaxed, so positive, it seemed like all he wanted us to do was get over our fear of writing.  Once he wrote "You're a real pro," on one of my stories, and that was all I needed.

At the party he was seated in a corner eating the food ("Have you tried the food?" he asked us.  "It's very good.") with his daughter and her friend.  He seemed pleased that we made ourselves known to him, and said he didn't quite remember my face but he remembered my name.  "The name I remember."  He listens to you when you speak to him, considers, and waits until the thought is fully formed before he speaks.  When we told him we live in Brooklyn he said "They don't let you in there anymore if you're over a certain age."  Jake said later it felt like he was writing the scene in his head while we were talking.

We were one of his last classes at Hopkins before his retirement, and on our last day he brought in a case of Coronas.  Jake broke one trying to open it on the edge of the table.

Below, a very short story published in Matchbook in January of last year.

WIFE IN REVERSE

His wife dies, mouth slightly parted and one eye open. He knocks on his younger daughter's bedroom door and says "You better come. Mom seems to be expiring." His wife slips into a coma three days after she comes home and stays in it for eleven days. They have a little party second day she's home: Nova Scotia salmon, chocolates, a risotto he made, brie cheese, champagne. An ambulette brings his wife home. She says to him "Wheel me around the garden before I go to bed for the last time." His wife refuses the feeding tube the doctors want to put in her and insists she wants to die at home. She says "I don't want any more life support, fluid or food." He calls 911 for the fourth time in two years and tells the dispatcher "My wife; I'm sure she has pneumonia again." His wife has a trach put in. "When will it come out?" she says, and the doctor says "To be honest? Never." "Your wife has a very bad case of pneumonia," the doctor tells him and his daughters the first time, "and has a one to two percent chance of surviving." His wife now uses a wheelchair. His wife now uses a motor cart. His wife now uses a walker with wheels. His wife now uses a walker. His wife has to use a cane. His wife’s diagnosed with MS. His wife has trouble walking. His wife gives birth to their second daughter. "This time you didn't cry," she says, and he says "I'm just as happy, though." His wife says to him "Something's wrong with my eyes." His wife gives birth to their daughter. The obstetrician says "I've never seen a father cry in the birthing room." The rabbi pronounces them man and wife and he bursts out crying. "Let's get married," he says to her, and she says "It's all right with me," and he starts crying. "What a reaction," she says, and he says "I'm so happy, so happy," and she hugs him and says "So am I." She calls and says "How are you? Do you want to meet and talk?" She drops him off in front of his building and says "It's just not working." He meets a woman at a party. They talk for a long time. She has to leave the party to go to a concert. He gets her phone number and says "I'll call you tomorrow," and she says "I'd like that." He says goodbye to her at the door and shakes her hand. After she leaves he thinks "That woman's going to be my wife."

by Stephen Dixon

My baby teeth

In Baltimore for the time being...

[screenprints - 2hawks2fishes]
[music - Civilian by Wye Oak]

Eagerly anticipating

Lykke Li - Love Out Of Lust by LykkeLi

The revolution will not be televised

With his 1968 spoken word track "The Revolution Will Not be Televised," Gil Scott Heron is largely considered one of the pioneers of hip-hop.  His comeback album, "I'm New Here" was released about a year ago, and now we have a souped up remix--"We're New Here"--by Jamie Smith of the xx, out February 22.  SPIN has is streaming until its release:



Sweet beats, from the original:

I've seen stranger things happen before

The New Yorker's epic 25,000 word Lawrence Wright article about Paul Haggis's fight against the Church of Scientology offers hours of mind-bending, Tom Cruise-bashing fun.

   Carrying an empty, locked briefcase, Haggis went to the Advanced Organization building in Los Angeles, where the material was held. A supervisor then handed him a folder, which Haggis put in the briefcase. He entered a study room, where he finally got to examine the secret document—a couple of pages, in Hubbard’s bold scrawl. After a few minutes, he returned to the supervisor.

   “I don’t understand,” Haggis said.

   “Do you know the words?” the supervisor asked.

   “I know the words, I just don’t understand.”

   “Go back and read it again,” the supervisor suggested.

   Haggis did so. In a moment, he returned. “Is this a metaphor?” he asked the supervisor.

   “No,” the supervisor responded. “It is what it is. Do the actions that are required.”

   Maybe it’s an insanity test, Haggis thought—if you believe it, you’re automatically kicked out. “I sat with that for a while,” he says. But when he read it again he decided, “This is madness.”

Read:
THE APOSTATE

The new Bright Eyes album, (out since Tuesday) with its science fiction spoken word interludes and Rastafarian allusions, provides a suitably bizarro soundtrack.

Listen: 

You must have been a beautiful baby

Irina Werning brings us back to the future with her nostalgic and uncannily accurate recreations of beloved family photos.

[via Vulture]

It's a mad, mad, mad, mad world

Photo Credit: Heidrun Lohr

Love and marriage (and marigolds)

Happy Valentines Day!

Cuddle Magic

Tonight at the Knitting Facotry, 8pm, opening for Nat Baldwin of the Dirty Projectors.

Herewith, a track recorded (by just a portion of the many piece band) in the fall of 2009 at the Jalopey Theatre.

[Recording by Jake K. Leckie. Photo mine, Nevada City, CA.]

My mother has thoroughly mastered the art of condensation

"She chiefly communicates with us by means of telegrams, and her telegrams are rather inscrutable. They say women don't know how to write them, but my mother has thoroughly mastered the art of condensation. 'Tired America, hot weather awful, return to England with niece, first steamer decent cabin.' That's the sort of message we get from her--that was the last that came. But there had been another before, which I think contained the first mention of the niece. 'Changed hotel, very bad, impudent clerk, address here. Taken sister's girl, died last year, go to Europe, two sisters, quite independent.' Over that my father and I have scarcely stopped puzzling; it seems to admit of so many interpretations."

[Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady, 1881]

nota bene:

'Tired America, hot weather awful, return to England with niece, first steamer decent cabin.'

[91 characters]

'Changed hotel, very bad, impudent clerk, address here. Taken sister's girl, died last year, go to Europe, two sisters, quite independent.'

[138 characters]

We may have been ready for Twitter long before we thought we were.

Super what?

Stephane Wrembel (in a quartet) conjures Django Reinhardt every Sunday night at Barbes in Park Slope.

Here, a song of his from the Vicky Cristina Barcelona soundtrack.

Night Catches Us

Artfully filmed, the tone is at once breezy and comfortable--set deep within a Philadelphia neighborhood full of barbecues and lazy porch play in the summer of 1976--and tense, as the characters try to both defend and escape their violent past.

Powerful performances by Kerry Washington and Anthony Mackie, and great to see Jamie Hector and Wendell Pierce play roles that pay homage to the ones they perfected in The Wire.

Interesting, though sometimes jarring, use of archival photos and footage, and yes, a stirring and sweltering score written by the Roots.

[photo courtesy Magnolia Pictures]

Facelift

[Photo via Gothamist via NYPL]

If you stay inside, you are protected

People like us

"People like us have no time for happiness."

[Gunhild Borkman, John Gabriel Borkman
Frank McGuinness's adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's 1896 play

At BAM through February 6]

The Community Chest cards were lowered in place by crane

He had been sent biographical notes and pictures of his fellow guests on the frozen fjord and been struck by the smile of a certain conceptual artist whose name, Stella Polkinghorne, was familiar, even to him. Her most recent media storm involved an accusation of an infringement of copyright that had never come to court. She had constructed for the Tate Modern a scaled-up Monopoly set on a playing field in Catford, each side of the painted board a hundred meters long, a space one could stroll about in, with near-life-sized houses on Park Lane and the Old Kent Road, accommodation one could enter to observe an unequal distribution of wealth. In the empty homes of the Mayfair rich, tapestries, woodcuts by Dürer, and discarded champagne bottles, while down the Old Kent Road, among the East End poor, junk-food wrappers, discarded syringes, a TV playing soaps. The dice were two meters high, the Community Chest cards were lowered in place by crane, the dog-eared banknotes made of plywood were in tottering twenty-five-meter piles on grass. In all, an indictment, it was supposed, of a money-obsessed culture. Do Not Pass Go was celebrated, reviled, photographed from the air by passengers on their descent into Heathrow. Children liked stampeding across the board in herds and crawling inside the top-hat token. The makers of the game began a legal case, which they dropped in the face of public derision and rising sales. A local business association on the Old Kent Road also brought a case, or said it would, and nothing was heard.

[Ian McEwan, Solar, 2010]