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Visit Carver’s Dog

 

Until I get my RSS feed up and running and embarked on a little viral marketing, I will be using Wonderland to post occassional updates on the happenings at my new cyber-digs, Carver’s Dog.

First, there’s Lit Blogging 1.0, the first in an ongoing series of posts looking at the literary blogosphere with a particular emphasis on L.A. New short fiction is to be had a few days a week; the most recent additions are the noir tale Dinner at the Motel 6 and Call of the Wild or Something Like That, a curious incident that speaks subtle volumes about the gaping holes in alcohol recovery programs in this country.

I hope to see ya over at Carver’s Dog soon. 

Moving On …

I have moved, both physically and electronically. As for the physical, I’m living in Las Vegas right now. Long story. I’ll tell ya later. I am also no longer posting here at 8763 Wonderland but can be found at my new site, Carver’s Dog, a depository for fictional and semi-fictional musings from L.A.’s most far-flung suburb.

Iced Tea and Pie

“I had a depressing thought the other day,” said Avery. He shook a packet of Splenda into his iced tea and eyed the waitress hungrily.

“You have depressing thoughts all the time. What’s unique about this one?”

“Well … you’re forty-eight and I’m fifty-one.”

“Wow. They can teach chimpanzees how to count.”

“What I’m getting at is this …”

“Yes?”

“The Kennedy assassination, for example. The examinations and studies that have been done over the decades …”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, you and me …?”

“You and me what?”

“Well, simply put, we will never live long enough to learn what really happened on 9/11,” Avery said flatly. “Do you want another piece of pie?”

Ishmael in San Francisco

Let’s tell a tale of a writer. We shall call him Ishmael. Like his father before him he dwells in the hinterlands of San Francisco, North Beach if you ask me to be precise, a rather seedy and sordid part of town, nudity and booze galore at the strip clubs that line Broadway – where Ishmael lived, in a residential hotel above Showgirls Cabaret – and more Italian restaurants than anyone really needs.

Ishmael settled on a favorite bar, a comfortable haunt on Columbus Avenue with a lush literary history. It was here, at this bar with its warm wood panels and lush low lighting from Tiffany lamps, that Ishmael called home when the four small walls of his hotel room threatened to crush him. Ishmael did his writing at the bar, his reading at the bar, production work, when he had it, would be done at the bar (there was a 12 week period when Ishmael wrote and produced an infomercial for a world famous sex toy manufacturer) – everything he did in his day he did at the bar. And he drank at the bar. Of course.

“Ishmael,” his doctor said one day, clutching a lab report in his hairy hands. “Don’t you have anyone who wants to see you live to a ripe old age?”

“Why would you ask such a vague question?” Ishmael squirmed on the cold white exam table.

“Because if you don’t quit drinking now you’ll be dead by the time you’re fifty-one.”

Ishmael, it has been said, leaped down from the table and shook the doctor’s hand while profusely thanking him.

“For what?”

“You just gave me three years. I thought for sure I’d be dead in a month, the way that I’ve been feeling lately.”

Ishmael did, however, give up his beloved beer. He still drank, but never beer.

One day, after becoming a permanent fixture at the saloon he so cherished, he was asked if he wanted a job, a doorman job.

For the next several months “Good evening, may I see some I.D.?” would become his mantra night after night four nights a week. Other key phrases were “The men’s room is downstairs, ladies is upstairs” and “No, really, honestly, sir, I think the bartender is right; you’ve had enough to drink tonight. Now let’s take a little walk outside, okay?”

He was shivering in the cold outside the bar one night when they – the bar managers, that is – approached him. They wanted to know if he would be daring enough to rely on his skills as a writer to put together a James Joyce celebration the bar was planning. Ishmael accepted. For eight weeks he studied Joyce until he was speaking like a true Dubliner. He created a production of live theater, with actors reading from brief selections of Joyce, selections that were carefully redacted from the original text and then pasted together in a manner that suggested linear narrative. Or something like that. And the show was a resounding success, wildly exceeding everyone’s expectations, including the audience who must have believed they were coming to a hear a cold, austere lecture with somber readings, instead of an entertaining show that played more like old time radio theater.

Ishmael sure was a hit that night. Everyone wanted to praise him, buy him a drink, offer a hug and a handshake.

“All I really did,” Ishmael boasted bashfully, “was bring a writer’s eye to the material, cutting and hacking away at the material until it resembled something lucid.”

Lots of talk of that sort was bounced about all night. But the next night it was business as usual and Ishmael was back working the door, frisking for identification of proof of age. On these slow nights, when he stands on the hard pavement and stares down the street at the Trans-America Pyramid, the cold beating through his arthritic body even though he is wearing three layers of clothing, the numbing effects of a painkiller and a shot of rye refusing to comply with his pain-wracked body and soul – it was on these nights.

It was on these nights that he truly missed the great white whale.

Jack Kerouac at Vesuvio

VESUVIO TO HOST LITERARY EVENT TO HONOR 50TH ANNIVERSARY OF “ON THE ROAD”

SAN FRANCISCO (August 30, 2007) – Vesuvio Café, long associated with Jack Kerouac since the earliest days of the Beat generation, is hosting The Ragged Promised Land, a live show to honor Kerouac’s On the Road on the 50th Anniversary of the book’s first publishing.

The literary entertainment event scheduled for September 5 features readings of excerpts from the book, punctuated with live acoustic jazz.

“The excerpts from On the Road have been selected specifically to showcase Kerouac’s travels in California,” says Rodger Jacobs, the show’s director.

Jacobs, an award-winning writer and documentary producer, will be performing the readings along with Joe Shackel, Jim Reese, Gregg Martinez, and Jan Becker. Vesuvio co-owner Janet Clyde is handling producing chores.

Popular acoustic jazz trio Alt Tal will be on hand to round out the show.

Event details:

“The Ragged Promised Land”
Wednesday, September 5, 2007
6:30 – 8:30 p.m.
Vesuvio Café
255 Columbus @ Kerouac Alley
21 & Over/ID Required