Bilge Forever!

The Bilge Show Episode 15 - watch more funny videos

ZOMG, it's a rom com! (Nom nom nom.) How not avant garde at all. This week on the Bilge show: Every movie every made rolled into one hackneyed preview, plus! MORE Daisy of Love, MORE Bachelorette, and MORE of Bill and Janice fighting about nothing. Our last show until Friday, July 10, and remember, Janice is dead to the internet through August 19 (hence the fancy third person). But "she's" still available to you in proxy by clicking the above, and watching it over and over again, until you realize how stupid the show is, and how little worth your time it is to view it repeatedly. Please enjoy!

The great anti-internet experiment

So I’m really going through with it, as terrifying at it is – I’m going offline for two months as of tomorrow, and will be offline through August 19. I’m doing this for a number of reasons:

I’ve been a little overwhelmed with the volume and nature of some of the correspondence I receive – though I am very grateful for every email and comment I get, I find that I can’t always respond in a timely fashion, and the guilt and frustration of that gets to me;

I want to rewire my brain to slow down and stop taking in so much useless information;

I’ve been using the internet to make myself unhappy, and I want to break that habit;

I’m sort of losing the desire to communicate publicly, and that’s death for a writer.

(Also, I kind of want to see if I can do it, or if I crack and start bingeing on TWoP recaps of the Bachelorette by Monday.)

So I won’t be answering email, checking Facebook or Twitter, or checking or posting to this blog (or anybody else’s blog) for the next two months – I’ll be disabling my internet browser to make sure this actually happens. I’ll be reading the hard copy of the Times we subscribe to; if I need to know what the weather’s going to be, I’ll turn on NY1. I look forward to learning nothing new in the next two months about the cast of the Twilight movies, or this Speidi person people keep writing about.

Bill will be posting new episodes of the Bilge show, though we will be taking a two-week hiatus from the show – new episodes resume on Friday, July 10. And I will be reading at KGB bar on Thursday, July 16 for the Drunken! Careening! Writers! series (7pm, 85 East 4th Street, free) – I hope you’ll miss me so much by then that you’ll be inspired to come see me in person.

This may be a stupid idea; this may be career suicide; this may not even work. But whatever happens, I feel certain that I’ll learn something from it. I look forward to sharing that with you when I find out what it is. In the meantime, I’ll miss you, and hope you’ll have a great summer.

Thanks for being the best readers a writer could possible hope for. See you in August.

Girls are not for sale!

Visit The Council of Daughters

I am so incredibly happy and excited to announce a new campaign to raise awareness about child sexual exploitation in the US: Girls Are Not For Sale. Featuring artists like Beyonce, Mary J. Blige, and Sinead O'Connor, the campaign seeks to enlighten and activate people to help combat the sexual exploitation of girls -- find out more about how you can participate by clicking the link above to join the Council of Daughters. I'm a member, and I couldn't be prouder. I hope you'll join me in announcing to the world that girls should be celebrated, not sold!

Disembodied voices command you to watch!

The Bilge Show Episode 14 - watch more funny videos

It's Friday, so it must be the day before Saturday. And also the Bilge show! Featuring the mysterious effects of living over an Indian burial ground, an analysis of psycholinguistic trends among American twentysomethings, and a laugh track gone haywire. Only one more week before our summer hiatus, so stock up on Bilge today!

Percival Everett is a genius

And I'm late to the party.

A few weeks ago, I posted the trailer to a movie called Precious, based on Sapphire's novel Push. Push is narrated by an illiterate teen named Precious who has been molested by her father and abused by her mom; told in Precious' own misspelled vernacular, the story sees her giving birth to her second baby at the age of sixteen as she struggles to learn to write with the aid of a teacher named Blue Rain. I loved this book when it came out in 1999 -- way before I started teaching writing to at-risk teens -- and it has remained on my top ten list since then.

Fellow author Tayari Jones linked to my post from her blog, and mentioned some issues she had with the book, recommending that people who read Push also read Percival Everett's 2001 novel, Erasure. The suggestion was seconded here on my blog by author Martha Southgate, who said, "I think it might help you understand why some African-Americans have significant problems with this novel...The popularity of this narrative and the absence of competing ones is, as an African-American writer, I think, highly problematic."

So when I hear the same thing from two smart women, I'm going to listen. I went looking for Erasure in the bookstores by my house; when I found that they didn't carry it, I ordered it online. And when it came, I put aside The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and read it at once. 

HOLY SHIT. This is a great book. 

Everett's narrator, Thelonious "Monk" Ellison, is the polar opposite of Sapphire's Precious -- the hyperliterate son of middle-class suburban parents, Monk writes obscure post-modern novels reinterpreting Greek classics, until, incensed by the success of a novel called We's Lives in da Ghetto (seeing it, Monk says, "was like strolling through an antique mall, feeling good, liking the sunny day and then turning the corner to find a display of watermelon-eating, banjo-playing darkie carvings and a pyramid of Mammy cookie jars"), he writes a send-up of "ghetto fiction" called My Pafology (later renamed Fuck). The book becomes a runaway success, allowing Monk to care for his mother, now suffering from Alzheimers, after the death of his sister, an abortion provider shot to death by protestors.

I can't properly describe the effect this book has -- it's by turns funny, sad, beautiful, ugly, poignant, and ridiculous. It made me laugh; it made me angry; it made me happy, guilty, astounded, and, most of all, incredibly jealous of the talent that produced it. 

I loved it so much, I immediately read Everett's latest novel, I Am Not Sidney Poitier, the story of a young man named Not Sidney Poitier whose working-class mother struck it rich by investing in the Turner Broadcasting Network and then died. Raised in Turner's house, he strikes out as a young man into a race-crazed America he doesn't understand, one that doesn't understand him either. More of a comic novel than Erasure, I Am Not Sidney Poitier is equally brilliant, if less serious.

I wrote to thank Tayari for recommending Everett's work. Did it affect your experience with Push? she asked. 

Yes and no, I said.

I met Sapphire in 1993, when I was attending a lot of poetry readings, and giving a few myself. She was on the verge of publishing her first book of poetry, American Dreams, and she lived around the corner from me in Prospect Heights (which in those days was still kind of, as Monk's alter ego would have it, "da Ghetto"). There was and is no question for me that Sapphire is the real thing, and that her writing is based on her real experience of being brought up by abusive, working-class parents. I continued to follow her career, so I knew that she'd started teaching writing to at-risk teenagers, and when Push came out, I could tell that the character of Blue Rain in Push was based on her; I assumed that Precious was based on the students she encountered in her program. God knows, I've certainly encountered a few Preciouses in my time; I even quoted a few in Girlbomb and Have You Found Her. Are portraits of these girls "banjo-playing darkie carvings?"

I don't know. But now I know that they can be seen that way, especially by some African-American writers who are tired of seeing people with similar skin tones to theirs represented in the same old way -- illiterate, abused, downtrodden -- while other, less stereotyped portrayals of African-American characters go ignored by white reading audiences. 

So I'll second Martha Southgate's comment on this blog: "Please check out Everett's novel after you read [Push]. Please." I did, and I'm glad.

OH GOD NOT THE BILGE SHOW *AGAIN*

The Bilge Show, Episode 13 - watch more funny videos

Okay, ONE LAST THING before I quit the internet forever -- the Bilge Show, lucky episode thirteen! Featuring reviews of Terminator 4, Late Night with Conan and Fallon, and more Barbra Streisand than you can shake an Elliot Gould at. (Note: He hates it when you shake him.) Watch it, or you might upset the time-space continuum! (Probably not, but it's safer just to watch, right?)

Qwitter?

It has come to my attention lately that I am really fucking bad at using the internet.

This realization came to me the other morning, after I spent fifteen minutes looking at the blogs and Twitter feeds of people I dislike. Why in the world would I do this? Why would I go and seek out information about people who have been hostile to me; people who, when I think about them, make me angry? Do I enjoy being angry? What could I possibly stand to gain by upsetting myself by spying on their lives? And how creepy does that make me?

Don't answer yet, because I get even creepier: After spending yet another fifteen minutes of my short, precious life reading bullshit written by assholes, hoping to find proof that they are miserable, and that they're reaping all the failure they've worked so hard to sow, I logged on to my private Twitter account and wrote nasty "blind items" about them. I called one of them a psycho drama queen; another I decried as a pompous self-promoter. My schadentwitter complete, I packed up the laptop and went to work.

About four hours later, I felt sick to my stomach. I'd just taken huge, ugly potshots at two of these women from behind the safety of my locked account, sneered at them to a bunch of people I'm trying to look good in front of. And putting other people down (no matter how much they -- trust me -- deserve it) makes me look...good? Not really. It makes me look gross and bitter and obsessed and...ugh. Creepy.

Ashamed of myself, I deleted the posts. Which is something I've done quite a bit of, lately -- posting things to Twitter and then deleting them. Because I post things in a fit of pique, and then think better of it later. Which means I should not be posting at all. 

I just did it again this morning -- I got the latest in a chain of emails that pissed me off beyond measure, and I jumped right online to complain. Never mind that some of the people who read me might know what I was referring to; never mind that I should be a professional and shut up about people I dislike, and focus on positive stuff instead. I just had to let everyone know that I was right and this mystery person was wrong and my god, people are such assholes. But that makes me the asshole. 

So I've been thinking about taking an internet break for the summer. What would life be like, I wonder, if I didn't wake up and go straight to the computer? What if I didn't spend hours each day answering email, checking Facebook, reading useless gossip on Gawker? Wouldn't it be great to NOT receive emails that piss me off? Wouldn't it be great to break myself of the habit of (as a wise friend once called it) "hate reading"? I realize that I might miss some things -- emails from readers, YouTube videos of cats doing ridiculous things -- but I feel like I might find other things to replace them -- clarity, peace, relief from the overwhelming onslaught of information.

I'm not sure if I'm going to go through with it, or how I would manage it, since (like most humans) I do a lot of business via email. But I sure am thinking about it. I would definitely miss the interaction with loyal blog readers, but I feel pretty certain that I'd return to blogging at the end of the summer -- maybe even with renewed purpose and vigor! Or maybe not. 

Either way, I want to say thank you to the many wonderful and supportive people who make the internet a pleasure by commenting on this blog and sending notes of encouragement. It's for you that I want to write a great next book; it's for you that I want to be a better blogger. It's for me that I want to be a better person.

Bilge-Aversary!

The Bilge Show, Episode 12 - watch more funny videos

It's the Bilge Show first anniversary special! Wherein we discuss the Bachelorette, Daisy of Love, and Schopenhauer. Cameo appearances by Leo, Minky, and Orville Redenbacher. Don't miss this very special episode of our not-very-special show!

A GEM of an article

"It was a Friday night at the Bowery Poetry Club, and a group of ethnically diverse young women in their late teens and early twenties were preparing to take the stage. But these girls weren’t performers. They were survivors of New York City’s commercial sex industry..."

Check out this wonderful article about the GEMS party in the Villager this week! Thanks so much to reporter Will McKinley for covering the event, and photographer Andrew Marks for the photo -- more to come!

Full of it, as usual

Last week, I led two writing workshops -- my weekly one at GEMS, with a group of girls age thirteen through twenty, and a private one, with a group of women in their late twenties. I managed to recycle a few exercises between them, including one of the hardest: Write nice things about yourself for five minutes. 

The GEMS girls groaned; "I can't think of anything." I made suggestions. "Just make a list of things. Try. Five minutes." Some of them got down to it right away; others flopped around on their forearms, exhaling a lot. Seven minutes later, they were all still writing. 

The twentysomethings groaned; "This is hard." "Don't worry," I assured them. "We're not going to read these out loud." This helped, but not a lot. "I know it's hard, but you need to practice it. I'm going to do it, too." Seven minutes later, we were all still writing. 

I always try to do this one; I do most of the exercises along with the group, and sometimes find myself writing nice things about myself for ten or twelve minutes in a given week. I still don't get it right. I find myself qualifying, waffling, talking about things "I wish was better at," criticizing the writing itself in my head. But I think I'm getting better through practice. 

I know; it's twee. It's uncomfortable, it's embarrassing. Unfortunately, it works. You write nice things about yourself for five minutes, you feel better, and you feel more inclined to write. Sometimes, you even go for eight.