Uncle Sam's Decline

“Young Zak, no clinchpoop, returned home each summer full of the best shit one might retain at school. None of that ordinary preprofessional crap, Zak studied the old school—its literatures, philosophies, and histories—the best bathroom reading found in America. He went to one of those cold New England colleges somewhere between the city and the country, where somewhere between two and three thousand potty-trained youth take more cups of coffee than classes each day. They wore holed if holistic clothes, smoked cloves, ruined lungs, fondled loves—suburban doves desperately searching for soul in Nineteenth-Century Russian Lit or Contemporary Jazz Music Crit. Up North, Zak learned to privilege the other, signify the Mother, and love not thy Father so much as thy brother. But of course, rhyme was forbidden, and by sophomore year, while his virginity pledged to remain on hand, his eyesight left without even a word of goodbye.”

Night Shift

“Once upon a time, in some summer hiatus away from secondary school, I worked my first slave. It was the graveyard stint at the Gas N Grub convenience shop. From nine at night to seven in the morning, I bagged first, rang second cashier, cashed in on $3.35 per hour—at the time, I was thinkin’ it’s all for four future years of school. Man, I see now my ass was probably worth five, six, or seven times as much. Brotha, I toiled sedulously, often fatigued, through those convenient sixty-six minute hours—boss was payin’ nine hours of cash money dough for a ten-hour shift! What with low pay, jammed register, broken slushee machine, and all them complaining coed bitties—I was an adolescent poet-to-be who’d already found his inferno.”

how fond I waxed for thee

"But now, at the Spark’s entrance, Zak’s gaze turns to grin as crater-sized dimples reveal his true love. A couplet trespasses through his brain: “Oh park, dear Spark, how fond I waxed for thee/ while twiddling my thumbs in said Northern library.” Zak’s ebullience defies reason. Could he be fond for a depressed second-string city? Fond for a city park? From a cursory view, it seems like an ordinary park. At one end stand the half-eaten nets, at the other a jungly gym for children—logs, tires, pipes, and junk sculpted into a dog in crapper stance. Over the years, multitudes of . . . mutts have gotten the hint, and like many city parks, stale and fresh doggy doodoos dot the terrain."

~~ from Spark Park: A Tale in Two Parts

Uncle Sam's Decline

I was excited to see that The Airgonaut published "Uncle Sam's Decline," an excerpt from Spark Park. Previously published excerpts from my true first novel appear as "Persecuting the Poet" at Malarkey Books and "Night Shift" at Revolution John.

Novel Excerpts

Spark Park

"Uncle Sam's Decline": An Excerpt from Spark Park, The Airgonaut, September 2022

"Persecuting the Poet": An Excerpt from Spark Park, Malarkey Books, June 2021

"Night Shift": An Excerpt from Spark Park, Revolution John, April 2021

Auggie's Revenge

from Part I, Chapter 3: "Be Patient, Rover" at American, British and Canadian Studies

Part I, Chapters 1-3: Auggie's Revenge Sample at Beating Windward Press

Part I, Chapter 9: "Uncle Sam's Blood Money" at When Falls the Coliseum

Fight for Your Long Day

N/A

Persecuting the Poet

Back at the office, a fanless Wrent passes from solid to liquid to gas, drenched in summer sweat and nostalgia. It’s all in the past now. At fifty, he finds himself a tortured man, a tired man, more a tortellini than a taco man. This last morsel resists definite sexual content. Food or sex? Indeed, the old two-pronged problematic engendered his fertile ballpoint in the early years. By sixth grade, Roger was the angry young writer par excellence, dishing out guzes and doles of vulgar Pop-Tartery, layer cake glued with cheesy verbiage, often heavily iced with suckatash smut. The stuff of which famous literary agents are made, in words, epaule de dogfood. A fool for pastry coincidence, he cut many a young rhyme in the school cafeteria. Neatly sandwiched between the hot dinners and the cold deli, he spied on the world, waxing loquacious over its steamy beefs, jerky adolescents, both gawky teen girls and geeky boys. For love of verse, he spurned the occasional heraldry of paper-triangle football or three-penny table hockey. His first poem, perhaps premonitory of future interest or investment, rented limerick form, with a couplet addendum, for a no-nonsense theme.

~~ from Spark Park: A Tale in Two Parts

"Night Shift": An Excerpt from Spark Park

I was excited to see Sheldon Lee Compton's Revolution John publish "Night Shift": An Excerpt from Spark Park.

National Novel Writing Month 2016

In November 2016, I am participating in National Novel Writing Month. Although it's easy to recognize that novels don't get completed in a month, some famous rough drafts were written in a literary sprint. Jack Kerouac's original scroll for the On the Road is said to have been written in less than a month, and Paul Auster's novella-length memoir "Portrait of an Invisible Man" is said to have been written in two to three weeks. It's possibly only rumor that Thomas Pynchon wrote a full draft of The Crying of Lot 49 in a few weeks.

For Fight for Your Long Day I used a period of significantly less than my usual workload combined with less access to the internet to write the full 90,000-word rough draft from late June through early August of 2004. Substantial editing was required before it was contracted in early February 2010 and then published on October 1 that year. Spark Park's 125,000-word rough draft was also written "on a roll," and I wrote many short stories that way years ago. Auggie's Revenge was written on and off from December 2004 through final edits in July 2015 without a sustained period of uninterrupted writing of more than several hours each day.

For #NaNoWriMo2016, I already have 37,000 words (135 double-spaced Word pages) for the sequel to Fight for Your Long Day, and my goal is to create a complete rough draft by November 30 and a good rough draft (something I could show a friend without too much embarrassment) by January 1. According to #NaNoWriMo's website the goal is a 50,000-word novel from November 1 through November 30, so what I am doing is similar, if not exactly the same.