The Blank Engine

Metaphysical quicksand, here:

The latest issue of Lowestoft Chronicle contains a fascinating interview with Randal S. Brandt about his discovery of a lost manuscript by the author David Dodge, whose 1952 novel To Catch a Thief was made into a film by Hitchcock in 1955 that’s a very early example of postmodern hyper-cool.

If you aren’t familiar with Lowestoft Chronicle, head on over there. They publish, on a consistent basis, excellent fiction, poetry, and non-fiction. And my story from Issue 7 “Supernova,” was nominated for a Pushcart this year.

“And that is where I found myself now, across the slate table from a man with such a deep and long scar down the left side of his face that he looked permanently creased.” From “The Evelyn Variant,” a new story over at 3:AM Magazine.

“I’ve arrived late to Nicholas Rombes’s A Cultural Dictionary of Punk: 1974-1982, a smart, sweeping, ambitious piecing-together of punk culture and history in the form of alphabetical entries. . . . Rombes has written a lively, powerful, important book. A Cultural Dictionary of Punk belongs on the shelf with Jon Savage’s England’s Dreaming, Greil Marcus’s In the Fascist Bathroom, and Clinton Heylin’s From the Velvets to the Voidoids, other books that smartly excavate the chaos of late 1970s/early 1980s punk, and its precedents and aftermath.”

Thank you to author Joe Bonomo for the lovely review of CDoP, a review that captures the spirit of what I was hoping to achieve in the book.

A knife fight. Love. The supernatural. Another knife fight.

Here, altered:

This experimental project is now archived.

The story, here.

(One of) Blue Velvet‘s black frames.

Is something from 2011 old news?

Is Drive old news?

Is the scene from Drive through the concreted-over L. A. River near Reseda old news?

There is so much love in Charles Bukowski’s Los Angeles, and so much love in Drive’s Los Angeles. You wonder, being from the Great Lakes region, about that light. There is an element of crime to it. The perfect crime, committed in the perfect light. It’s no wonder that D. W. Griffith—while making movies for Thomas Edison’s Biograph films—traveled in 1910 from the home base in New Jersey to Los Angeles, and eventually to Hollywood, which would later become “Hollywood.” You could import a thousand miniature suns and never achieve the quality of light from these few minutes from Drive.