sub-scribe

Today I have two pieces up at the "Recovery" issue of sub-scribe. This is very appropriate for me, I'm going to venture to say.

One, "Rainy Season," is another poem from my Pale Red series that I blogged about recently, here.

The other is a short story, or, basically, a piece of non-fiction, called "Glitter." I blogged about this occurrence as well, when it happened.

The journal - which comes from the University of Colorado at Boulder - is definitely worth spending some time checking out. I was impressed by presentation and the variety of work. The visual art section. And the "Voices Recovered" piece by Lois Kent. And Christi Krug's "Stroke of Red." And lots of other stuff too.

One thing that makes me feel good on a personal level as well is that this is newer writing of mine. The "Glitter" story only happened in April, and I wrote the poem after that as well. I like it when (not too new) - but newish work, is published. Otherwise I see something I submitted two or three years ago turn up somewhere, and sometimes it can be good, but other times it can induce panic, nausea, fear, revulsion, confusion....

So well done, sub-scribe, for getting all that up so efficiently. And looking great as well.

The pic: as in my post below, my thoughts, it seems, are turning to locations other than where I am. This is Vegas, naturally, in the Freemont Street Experience. It's about a year and a half ago now that I was last there.

It is of course red, and kind of glittery. The Pioneer Club hasn't been a casino since 1995, according to Wikipedia, but "Vegas Vic" lives on.....

Taddle Creek

I'm fairly certain my blog doesn't have a lot of Toronto readers. Apparently there's a way to check this, on Blogger, but I don't know how to do it. Maybe I'll work that out someday. Last night, with the help of instructions from a friend, I managed to "fix" my USB ports! So now I can: recharge my I-Pod, which doesn't really work, but still - and, more importantly, back up my writing onto my memory sticks again, which is a big relief.

Anyway, the point of this post is in any case what's happening on December 3, in my old hometown (9-10 years of my life there) of Toronto:

TADDLE CREEK

The Rolling Stones. Elvis Costello—Nathaniel G. Moore!
On Thursday, December 3rd, el Mocambo’s Legends of the Stage trilogy finally comes full circle when Taddle Creek launches its Christmas, 2009, issue. The evening will begin with a dramatic reading of letters to the editor (starring Paul Bellini as the voice of Taddle Creek), then slowly build momentum with a slideshow by Terry Murray and readings of poetry and fiction by Lindsay Zier-Vogel and Stacey May Fowles, finally coming to a bloody conclusion as the magazine presents the Main Event: a literary smackdown featuring Toronto’s favourite son—ladies and gentlemen, no longer defending his title as Taddle Creek’s most-rejected author, the one, the only, Nathaniel. G. Moooooooore!
The address is 464 Spadina Avenue, just south of College (second floor), and the doors open at 8 p.m. Admission is free. There will be door prizes of recent books by Taddle Creek contributors. Entry to win is one canned-good donation to the el Mo’s Serving Charity (one can equals one chance to win; please give generously to thank the el Mo for graciously providing party space).
The one and only item on sale for the evening will be the above-mentioned Christmas issue, at the usual non-literary-magazine price of only $5. The issue (which features a lovely wraparound cover by Maurice Vellekoop) contains a comic by Jason Kieffer on the local legend Zanta, an essay on the sculptor Merle Foster by Terry Murray, alleyway illustrations by Michael Cho, a thoroughly bizarre art project by R. M. Vaughan, Dave Lapp’s People Around Here, and all-new fiction and poetry by Chris Chambers, Evie Christie, Dani Couture, Cary Fagan, Stacey May Fowles , Heather Hogan, Rose Hunter, Lindsay Zier-Vogel, and, of course, Nathaniel G. Moore.
Don’t miss the action! (And don’t forget to visit the Taddle Creek Facebook Page on the Facebook.)

As I've mentioned in a previous post I think, Taddle Creek is dear to my heart not only because it's a great magazine, but because it was the first magazine or literary journal to publish a short story of mine, back in December 2002 (my first publication of anything at all, except for a few reviews years earlier in university newspapers and things like that). So, seven years later (where did all that time go?) I'm honoured to be showing up in their pages again.

The El Mocambo is also a very cool venue. So if you happen to be in Toronto, go! I'm sorry to be missing it.

If not, check out the mag via the links above.

The pic: my old desk, in my old apartment in Toronto, with my old (even then, antique) cell phone, and my old favorite (NYU - no I never went there) mug. The only item in this picture that I still own is the computer, which I'm writing on now. The keyboard is much grottier these days. I remember the day I took this pic I was looking up something about Gothic cathedrals, after having just returned from Germany, where I'd seen some. I used to have lots of pics of my beloved apartment, but they seem to have disappeared from my computer, along with basically all my Toronto pics. Maybe they're in there somewhere though, in the deep depths of some folder I don't know about.

This photo reminds me of how orderly I used to be. My whole apartment looked like this; very arranged. I really loved that apartment. I loved Toronto in a lot of ways too. Hmmm.

YB Update

So I've been reading for my poetry journal YB (December issue), which has been lots of fun. I've received many wonderful submissions and as of today I've accepted great poems from David Prater, Sherry O'Keefe, Corey Mesler, Lindsay Walker, Jeff Crandall and Ryan Bradley.

I've made a number of goof-ups along the way however, including losing some of the submissions I was going to send nice rejection letters to. "Nice rejection letters" - is there a better way of expressing this? Most likely. Anyway, the important point is that somehow, I lost these submissions. I read them all carefully, and put them in a special folder, and then I moved the folder between my two email addresses a couple of times, in the interests of organization (!) and whammo! Dunno. Gone. So I want to apologize sincerely to those people. Anyone who has read my blog lately knows I've been suffering from a number of stupid maladies, the worst of which has been a tooth issue, so I'm going to use that as my (not very good) excuse.

I'm actually up to date in my reading for YB as of today (Saturday), so if you haven't received an ay or a nay from me by now, you were one of the people who wound up in that lost pile.

Really, really, my apologies. I know firsthand of course how submitting work can get tedious and time-consuming, and I really do appreciate everyone who took the time to submit.

So - a hundred lashes on my dopey head.

The pic: something that could be used to punish me for my bad conduct? Perhaps. It's also a piece by an artist called Maritza Vazquez, otherwise known as Blu. She is from (this) state of Jalisco. It's one of the many art pieces that line the malecon here in Puerto Vallarta. In the pictures I've seen of it in various tourist brochures, it's much less rusty. And it's usually pictured at sunset, rather than the harsh light of midday or thereabouts, which is evidently when I took this.

Re the tooth: yes there was more, after that last post about it. "Dry socket" was involved, or at least so my internet research would (strongly) suggest. Does that sound good? Well, it wasn't. I was going to blog about it, but now I don't even want to think about it, anymore....

Poem, in Juked

Today Juked posted a poem of mine, "He is No Pinkerton."

So excited to be in Juked! I love Juked.

There's always cool stuff in this journal, but this time I'm going to pick on Patrick Whitfill's "There's Something Easy About Oil." Wonderful. Check it out.

Re my poem, this is another one from my series, still / back to being called Pale Red. As I mentioned in a previous blog post, other poems from this series have appeared in the Burning Shore Review, Danse Macabre (2), and one more is forthcoming, in sub-scribe.

The series, really, I think is finished. It's twenty pages; about eighteen poems. I started working on it in February or thereabouts and have been chipping away at it off and on.

I am kind of in shock. I finished something!

Now what?

I guess I'll let it sit for a while and then see if anyone wants a twenty page manuscript chapbook about a relationship between two warring expats in Mexico: bad behaviour, sadness, black comedy, violence, injury, and a lot of vodka.

If not, I hope at least my hard drive enjoys it.

The pic: something red. It's a staircase that leads up to the roof of a hotel here in Puerto Vallarta.

All Quiet On The Northern (Or Wherever I am) Front

So after that last post, now no one is saying anything to their dogs. As far as I can tell, no one is even talking to their dogs, let alone yelling at them. I feel like maybe there are some people who I don't think read my blog - can't see how they possibly would read my blog - but then again, why the sudden silence (since Wednesday)? Very suspicious. I feel bad. Guilty. I'm certain the person I was referring to does not read my blog. So just let me clarify: I don't mean all you nice people who like to talk to your dogs and even occasionally raise your voices with your dogs. I just mean this one individual, who goes completely ape shit bat shit crazy about it.

On the plus side, it seems I was correct about one thing: the dogs bark themselves out much quicker if no one keeps screaming at them to shut up.

In other news, I am getting over the flu, or whatever that was I had. My cobblestone wounds are on the mend. My splitting headache is now just a dull drone. However the tooth/ gum thing is still drilling a constant hole of pain in my mandible. I could complain about this at length, and probably will in the future, but not today because I actually have some pressing matters to attend to for a change. Well - actually I often have pressing matters. What I mean is I'm actually going to try to attend to them today....

An Open Question

At the moment my pathetic woes include but are most likely not limited to: a sore throat, fever, an aching tooth (gum), a splitting headache, and an altercation with some cobblestones that I came out on the losing side of.So that's that stuff.

But what I really want to say something about here is: people (okay one person specifically but he sounds like ten) - who yell constantly at barking dogs, in an attempt (ostensibly or it seems) -to get them to be be quiet. Callate! Callate! Shut up! Blah blah blah! The person who is the primary offender in this respect is my neighbour but does not read my blog so I feel completely justified in saying this: I wish you would callate yourself.

Firstly because: this has NO effect on barking dogs. The barking dogs are not even that bad, but add your screaming raspy guttural emanations from the depths to it, and now we have something really, really unpleasant.

Can you not comprehend that your dog - and none of the other twenty in the neighbourhood - become quieter, not one iota, when you do this?

Or is that the point?

Now I'm going back to bed.

Dreamsnake

An advance warning: this post narrates a dream I had today / this morning. I'm giving warning of this because I know other people's dreams generally tend to be excruciatingly boring for everyone except the dreamer, so.

I'll try to cut to the chase with this one, if I have any readers left at this point.

Here's how it went: I woke up early - too early - but felt okay so I thought why don't I sit down at my desk and try to do something constructive for a while. (I haven't been doing much lately, due a relapse into dramas and damage of my own making, or at least my own initiating, which amounts to the same thing doesn't it. Anyway.) But after a while at my desk I started feeling not so good anymore. My tooth (or rather, the gap where it once was) - was also hurting afresh. So okay, I thought, hell, I'll go back to bed for a while. I'm not very good at going back to sleep once I'm awake, no matter how tired I am, but thought never mind - I'll just read for a while at least.

Anyway, I had a Time magazine I found lying around yesterday, and a few paragraphs into an account of California's hybrid car industry, I actually did fall asleep. I must have only been out for about half an hour or so when I thought that I woke up, feeling something moving on my foot. I shook my foot around. Ugh. What's that. Then I felt it move up my leg. Jesus, I thought. There's an iguana on my leg. The front of my place is open to the world and I've seen them running around on the roof just below me before, so I thought that must be it. Right - well I need to jump up and get this thing off me don't I. But of course (dream cliche approaching like a ten-tonne truck) - now I can't move. Then I feel the thing slither up my back, so now I know, this is no iguana, this is a snake, and a large one by the feel of it. The most scary thing about all this was that this was not just in my mind - no - as far as I was concerned I was asleep before, but now I was awake - this thing was completely visceral, completely on my skin; scaly and slithery; really there.

Of course now I'm frozen in abject terror - just squirming and quaking inside my own skin is all I'm capable of. Then I thought, it's moving; it's moving over me at least so maybe if I stay very still, it will move over and past me. This is a convenient thought for me in a way, since, as I mentioned, I actually can't move anyway. Then it's around my neck. I feel its tongue flicking against my neck. I try to lift my neck a little thinking move past, okay, okay, move past. Instead it starts to tighten around my neck. I'm choking. The air is going out of me. I can hear it hissing too. I'm trying with everything I have now to pick up my hands and grab this thing around my neck and throw it off, but I just can't move at all. More hissing. Choking. Both noises are in my ears like hacksaws.

Then a lawnmower starts up. For some reason this snaps me out of it and I jump up. I grab my neck. I rip apart my bed. I look under the bed. I search the apartment. Then I sit down, still breathing as though I've run a steeple chase.

I have several ideas as to why I dreamt this. The most mundane one is that I was having a conversation with a friend of mine yesterday who told me that he had a boa in his house once; I believe he said it was when the house was first built and there was more jungle around it. I said I'd only seen a snake twice in Puerto Vallarta; one near my house, and one a bit out of town, but they were both tiny (about 20 cm), and black. Apparently the coral snakes are the poisonous ones here. (The snake that was trying to choke me in my dream was brown. Don't ask me how I know this, but I do, of course.)

On a more psychoanalytical level I know exactly who (and what) that snake that I was perfectly willing to let choke me to death was / is. But that's not for here, or now, although I may keep it for the book.

The pic: a bit of the roof below where I have seen iguanas scampering around sometimes, although not for a few months now.