This is not the case for the suburbs. The ‘burbs are an alien land, filled with strange people, structures, and landscapes. I took a walk yesterday in the suburbs outside of Denver, where my family always spends Thanksgiving, and managed to find some subjects of interest.

This creek bed runs adjacent to the park outside the gated community where my aunt and uncle live.

It runs under the main road.

The National Ballet of Denver is not in a strip mall. It's in the back of a strip mall.

 

I've always been intrigued by this Indoor Skydiving building.

Children in jumpsuits await the chance to be thrown up into the air by a strong fan beneath a grate in the floor.

 

There's definitely a skill set related to indoor skydiving. Although you don't even get to jump off anything, which I found incredibly bogus, you can manipulate your body in different ways to fly around in extravagant fashion. This employee was "running" around in circles in the air upside-down.

If you don't hold your body right, you can fall onto the grate. This spells "lawsuit" in the burbs, so children are naturally not left to their own devices.

 

Ride your badass motorcycle to this badass bar after a badass indoor skydiving sesh.

The wilderness of future development.

This house was already sold.

 

So was this one.

 

Dan and I were drinking one night about five years ago at a bar called Buddha Bob’s, while his girlfriend was pregnant with their first child, and I asked him how he felt about being a future dad. He said, as I well knew, that he didn’t even really know who his dad was, and that the series of boyfriends that lived with his mom while he grew up were mostly total shitheads who smacked him around and degraded him. He said, given these facts and the negative ways they’d affected him, that he was going to do whatever he could to be the best goddamned dad he was capable of being.

And that’s exactly what he’s done. Is doing. It’s obvious how easy it is for cycles to repeat through generations, kids with shitty dads become shitty dads themselves, despite good intentions, etc. But Dan has bucked the trend. This owes to the fact that he’s just a solid all-around dude in general, thoughtful and honest, hard-working and responsible, generally good humored, and that he was smart enough to find a baby mama (basically wife at this point), Nissa, who wouldn’t take any shit even if he tried to dole it out. It’s a happy fucking functional family if I’ve ever seen one, and I got to spend a few hours in their living room yesterday bullshitting with Dan and Nissa and horsing around with the kids, who gleefully urged their dad again and again to throw pillows at their faces.

As you may have noticed, this blog is no longer being updated. Check out my new project, Room 220, an online source for all things book- and lit.-related in New Orleans, supported by the literary arts nonprofit Press Street.

press-street.com/room-220

Yours,
Nate

We’re reading in New Orleans…

(View Part I: The Introduction)
(View Part II: The Essay)
(View Part IV: The Second Response)

Nate,

I’m grateful for the opportunity to reflect on and respond to this unusual treatise on crime, class and homosexuality — God knows where you unearthed it. I’m a little dubious that you sought me out for my ability to “answer thoughtfully”; I suspect it’s more my special expertise you’re after, as a card-carrying criminal and certified homosexual. The question of a fag’s place in the socio-criminal sphere is actually one which I’ve pondered at alarming length, so I appreciate the chance to hold forth on the subject.

I know little about Pasolini. The thoroughly modern thing to do would be to Wikipedia the poor bastard; I’d rather stick to my own scant impressions of the man. I saw one of his movies: avant-garde claptrap that I was too stoned to fathom, if you want my honest appraisal. I also attempted to read “A Violent Life,” his semi-autobiographical portrayal of hardscrabble Italian hustlers. The book, I recall, read like a movie, an effect I soon grew tired of. It had a sort of early-60’s graininess to it, and evoked an obsolete era to which I had difficulty relating — “Pasolini was old-fashioned,” as Hocquenghem surmises. I seem to remember that Pasolini was killed not so much by a “swindler” as a hustler; the linguistic difference is subtle but significant.

He reminds me strongly of Jean Genet, another venerated avant-queer who always seemed too remote to fully fire my imagination. Both men ruminated compulsively over the intersection of crime and homosexuality. Both seem unrelentingly literary.

What strikes me about Hocquenghem’s eerie polemic is that it seems to straddle eras, his lens panning away from Pasolini’s quaint world of public-urinal-trolling seediness — wasn’t Senator Craig’s true transgression not that he sought out gay sex but that he had the Old-World effrontery of seeking it out in an airport men’s room? — as the modern, “integrated” fag comes into blurry focus. The question he raises is whether this generational shift has done anything to change the “delinquent” nature of homosexuality; and if so, what has been lost along the way?

The philosophical divide that Hocquenghem navigates is one I’m familiar with. In my late-night bouts of time-travel, I sometimes journey back across the schism of Gay Liberation and explore Pasolini’s turf. It’s a landscape that I’m drawn to, if one I don’t quite comprehend. In this noir-ish realm, homosexuality requires quite a bit of detective work, its rites secret and complex — baroque, as Hocquengem has it. Something turns me on about this insistence on secrecy and predilection for the darkened doorway — it appeals to the unliberated fag in me, who doesn’t feel comfortable holding hands with a man in public or fighting for gay marriage. A good part of me, in short, comes down on the side of homosexuality’s inherent delinquency, if only for the sex appeal of it — my “libido attracted by objects outside the law of common desire.”

Another part of me tends toward the Burroughs school of literary escapism, where homosexuality is not so much delinquent as it is the only game in town — an alternate realm where boy soldiers suck each other off as a matter of routine. Even further down this rabbit-hole lies Pierre Guyotat’s Tomb for 10,000 Soldiers, a psychedelic re-imagining of the French-Algerian War that is so incessantly mud-splattered, blood-soaked and semen-drenched as to be virtually unreadable. God knows I’ve tried, several times, but it’s like staring at the sun, and after only a few pages my vision is fried. Here, delinquency doesn’t even hint at the depths of sexual violence; the book makes Pasolini’s hustlers look like choirboys.

But what do these flights of fancy have to say about our position today? Certainly, from a liberal-establishment perspective, the opportunities for a young faggot are brighter than ever. I might not reasonably hope to become, say, the President of the United States — despite what they always told me! Democracy has its limits — but I’m more or less free to be queer and pursue my life’s interests unimpeded by sexual orientation. I can, at least, seek out sex without undue fear of being murdered. Which is all well and good. But, as Hocquenghem remarks, “let’s not confuse self-defense with respectabilitization.” Or, respectabilitization at what cost? The author’s briefcase-toting, mustachioed, ad-exec fag seems outdated; let’s take this Hocquenghem on a stroll down modern-day Halsted Street, that he might witness establishment homosexuality in its full flower. Well-heeled fairies parade in $100 jeans; cultural activity on the strip is largely underwritten by multi-national beer companies, and if the season is right he might catch the alderman stumping for votes at the Pride Parade. The author might hang around the corner or Roscoe and Halsted for months on end without hearing anyone mention the “struggle for liberation”; he could haunt every fag bar in town and not find anything sordid or grandiose.

And yet, has delinquency really vanished entirely, or has it merely found new avenues for expression — moved, as have so many other human activities, online? Craigslist, for example, maintains a bustling bulletin board for anonymous sex, a sort of vast, virtual public urinal more sordid and grandiose than anything in Pasolini’s day, a pervert’s buffet of gangbangs and gloryholes. Is it a “freemasonry of crime where the homo and the murderer interact”? Maybe nothing as hysterical as all that, though I do offer the following news item: New York-based radio journalist George Weber was found dead in his Brooklyn apartment, in late March of this year, bound with duct tape and stabbed upwards of 50 times; the confessed killer was a troubled 16 year-old hustler (the New York Daily News described him as a “Satan-loving sadomasochist with a knife fetish” — sordid enough?), who Weber picked up on Craigslist. Much as in Pasolini’s day, many commentators saw the victim as being every bit as guilty as his murderer; even on gay sites like advocate.com there was a great deal of finger-wagging — “They were both wrong,” one poster advised. “The victim shouldn’t have been having sex with a 16 year-old to begin with, much less supplying him booze and drugs…” How much, then, has really changed? Hocquenghem perhaps underestimates the indomitability of homosexual delinquency. Plenty of dark recesses, I think, remain in the homosexual sphere.

I was searching for the Townhouse Gallery, a multipurpose art establishment at which I would attend an exhibition opening later that night.

I arrived at my approximate destination and wandered into a nearby Hilton, approached the balding Egyptian man at the Information Desk and announced that I was lost. He chuckled and gave me a map, then scooted me out the door. I told the concierge outside which street I was looking for, and he said it began beneath a billboard we could both see from the hotel steps. “Great,” I thought, and took off in that direction, only to learn a few seconds later that he had neglected to mention that in between where we had stood and the beginning of Mohamed Bassouny St. stretched the four busiest streets in the world.

Cairo traffic is a seething, fluid mass of chaos, rubber and metal. Lanes aren’t even guidelines, and the cars are packed around each other on all sides, with motorcycles in between. It is more impressive in scope and composition than the pyramids. It’s a hulking beast that operates according to the riddle of the sphinx.

Luckily, my days as a traffic control worker on highway construction sites have steeled my nerves in respect to cars zipping by my vulnerable body at close quarters. One learns quickly that a car must only miss you by a quarter of an inch, or less, for it to do absolutely no damage, no matter how fast it is traveling. My friends with whom I’m staying here explained to me that crossing the menacing lanes of Cairo is largely an act of faith. “You step off the curb, and … Insha’Allah,” they said.

I also observed on my first days in the city a tool used by Egyptians that seems to help put God on their sides when venturing on foot into traffic. I call it “The Cairo Force Field.” It’s always a good idea to find a local going the same way you are and to cross busy streets downstream from him, because people who live in Cairo are masters of this tactic, but if you are on your own or have gained sufficient confidence to cross by yourself, learning the force field is a must.

There is a secret language to Cairo traffic. A single honk from a driver means, “I’m going,” as in, “there is a gap in traffic in front of me and although you other drivers around me might be intent on filling it, in fact I am going to fill it.” A double honk means, “Get out of the way, I’m coming in,” and so on, with slight variations.

The Cairo force field is a pedestrian tool and is something of the adverse to the honk. When a person is crossing a street and using the force field, which is actually just a hand held out with a palm facing oncoming cars, it means, “I’m going,” as in, “I’m going to walk out in front of you now because I have ascertained that you have seen me and are going slow enough to be able to not run me over.” It’s really amazing how well it works. It’s like holding two magnets with similar charges together – they simply repel each other. It’s as if cars have positively charged magnets in their front bumpers, and when you’re in Cairo crossing the street, you have them embedded in your palms.

The force field only works on cars moving forward, however. A favorite, utterly befuddling move I have seen here repeatedly is when a cab or bus driver misses a turn, and instead of going around the block or flipping a u-turn, they simply back up into oncoming traffic. The drivers, understandably, do not want to be backing up into oncoming traffic for any longer than they have to, so they go as quickly as possible. No force field can stop them – you simply have to jump back onto the curb and be thankful for your life.

This video is not mine:

Total time spent in Lawrence, Kan., during that same time: 25.5 hours

My Megabus experience: great, save the theater dorks making noise next to me on the way back and the meaty smell of everyone’s sandwiches after we stopped at Steak ‘n’ Shake.

My friend Ryan’s Megabus experience: not so great

Was the trip worthwhile? Yes it was.

The following is a letter of disclaimer I suggest you present to future guests to your home based on my experience of staying at your house last night. While I appreciate your hospitality immensely, something like this would have gone a long way toward making my stay more comfortable and enjoyable.

Yours,

Nathan C. Martin

+++

DISCLAIMER:

Dear friend/relative/train-hoppin’ hobo to whom I gave my number last time you stopped through town on your way on the rails out West,

Thank you for choosing to stay at my home during your visit to Salt Lake City. This means a lot to me, because it indicates that I am one of your less anal-retentive friends that is still cool enough to allow such things to happen, while so many of our former cohorts have become old and lame and use excuses like, “I have to work early in the morning, and you might wake the baby,” when asked if a friend can crash his/her two dogs, smelly backpack, bandmates, random bar drunks, and startlingly unwashed body upon their furniture. I appreciate this greatly.

However, instances in the past have urged me to present all prospective guests with the following disclaimer, which I hope will clear up any confusion during the ridiculously simple process of occupying my home for a short amount of time for the purposes of free warmth and shelter.

This particular disclaimer is intended for guests who will be staying at my house while I am out of town on one of my raucous escapades. If you believe this is not your case and that you may have received this situation-specific disclaimer in error, feel free to contact me and I will provide you with an alternate version.

1) Make sure that I have not moved. I am of the ramblin’ vagabond variety, prone to up and leave whatever dwelling I currently occupy at a moment’s notice. Although it is unlikely that I will neglect to inform you that I have moved since the last time we saw each other, this has happened in the past. Before you pick up the key to my place from our bearded mutual friend, simply ask: “You live at the same place as last time I visited, right?” This will prevent such embarrassing situations as you standing in my old, empty apartment asking me via cell phone where the hell the bed went, while I try to direct you downstairs to my new bedroom through the door to the left of the kitchen, which, in my old apartment, is the door to the broom closet, in which, as you will discover after a thorough inspection, has no hidden staircase.

2) Remember the address to my apartment. If you do find yourself stumbling around confusedly in the apartment I am currently in the process of moving out of, and we clear up on the phone what has happened (after we both assume momentarily that the other has totally gone insane), pay close attention when I tell you the address of my new place. This will save you the trouble of walking into someone else’s home one block north of my new abode, and having to scurry quietly out after announcing your presence to a blaring television and hearing a startled man-cough come from the bedroom in reply. Such situations are pleasant for no one, and can be easily avoided by paying attention.

3) Bring your own utensils, and everything else. Since I am in the middle of a move, it is likely that there will be absolutely nothing in my new house to assist in the comfort of your stay. Things that you will probably not find there include: dishes, toilet paper, furniture, a shower curtain, and food, among many others. If you show up in the middle of the night after twelve hours of travel and try to cook a frozen pizza, you will likely be required to pull it from the oven using a keychain and a sock, onto the box in which it was sold to you, where you can let it cool until it’s touchable enough to pull apart with your fingers into manageable portions. I do have a bed, but it consists of two separate pieces: the mattress, which sits barren on the floor of my room, and the bedding, which has been lying in a pile of sog and mildew in the washing machine for three days.

4) Believe me when I warn you about locking yourself out. If I say to you, “Watch out for the front door, because it’s really easy to lock yourself out,” it is because this is a real-world problem that I have had to deal with personally, and it sucks. The problem is exacerbated when you lock not only your keys in the house, but your cell phone, too. However, if you do not heed my warning and find yourself stupefied at your own ignorance on my porch in the late hours of a December night, do not tromp immediately off into the darkness to look for help or curl up under your overcoat. My house is old and not airtight, and in fact I am accustomed to leaving the window to the living room closest to the kitchen unlocked. You might have to scale a few feet of rock wall and tear through some plastic insulation, but this small feat of acrobatics is much preferable to sleeping outside.

5) If all else fails… If you, like one of my hapless friends who stayed at my home last December while I was away in California, have the great misfortune of arriving in Salt Lake City late after a long day of travel, first go to the nearly vacant apartment I am in the process of moving out of, then march into the home of some poor hippie schmuck whose address bears close resemblance to mine, then want to cook some food but find not a fork or plate to aid you, and then lock yourself out and have to crawl back in through the window, there is still comfort to be found in my fridge, because though completely void of food, it almost always is populated by some beers. The keychain that holds my house key has a bottle opener on it, and after some rest on the floor with a couple of brewskies, you won’t even mind falling asleep beneath a comforter that is still noticeably damp.

Quimby’s Bookstore is a haven for the literate eclectic. Comic book enthusiasts and fiction aficionados feel equally at home among the scattered racks and tables stacked high with printed guides to everything from radical poetry to political philosophy, craftivism handbooks to macabre art. Though not short in any sense of gems straight from the professional printer, Quimby’s collection of handmade zines and chapbooks has made it an international destination for those who relish the underground network of DIY publishing. In the point-and-click era, Quimby’s remains a major hub for those who stay true to the write-print-fold-staple-send (as in, with a stamp) method.

Quimby’s opened in 1991 in Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood with a mission statement penned by original owner Steven Svymbersky: “I really want to carry every cool, bizarre, strange, dope, queer, surreal, weird publication ever written and published … because I know you’re out there and you just want something else, something other, something you never even knew could exist.”

Seventeen years later, Quimby’s is based around the corner from its original location and operates under the stewardship of Chicago Comics owner Eric Kirsammer. But even as Wicker Park has morphed from a sort of dingy bohemia into a host for chic boutiques and bank branches, Quimby’s has remained relatively unchanged. Chicagoans come to find the newest issues of their favorite independent publications, most of which Quimby’s sell on consignment, and visitors from around the world seek it out. (Quimby’s manager, Liz Mason, with tongue planted firmly in cheek, said the store is something of “a tourist destination for cool people.”)

Quimby’s fiction selection is relegated to only 12 shelves, but the denseness of its quality makes one wonder how the planks stay fastened to the walls. Five steps sideways can move your eyes over titles by Sam Lipsyte, Will Self, Dave Eggers, John Fante and Ed Park. Mason explained that the process of curating the fiction stacks is entirely up to the employees, whose sensibilities are largely in line with those of the clientele.

Besides its role as bookseller, Quimby’s also offers its space to an array of book-related events. Whether it’s Timothy Archibald presenting photographs and anecdotes from his book on homemade pleasure devices, Sex Machines, or members of the Temporary Services collective describing their tribulations dealing with penal authorities during the creation of Prisoners’ Inventions, each occasion offers its own delightful bafflement.

During a stop at Quimby’s on a recent reading tour for her novel, Vacation, Deb Olin Unferth told the audience, “When I lived in Chicago, I came to Quimby’s all the time, and I thought it was the coolest place on earth. … I was definitely not cool enough to be in here. So when they invited me to give a reading, I was like, ‘Wow, I have reached the pinnacle. I am officially cool now.’ But when I showed up, I felt strongly that I still wasn’t cool enough to be here.”

Don’t let the shop’s coolness dissuade you. Visit Quimby’s at 1854 W. North Avenue in Chicago, or online at www.quimbys.com.