Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Allow Me to Re-Introduce Myself . . .

Hello folks. Your friendly neighborhood DanMan, here. And this is the re-boot of my blog after a few months off, during which time I’ve been recharging the ol’ batteries, getting ready for another chapter. I turn 33 this year – same as the number I have tattooed on my right arm for a certain underappreciated basketball legend – so I figure now is as good a time as any. Time is arbitrary anyway.

This is the official launch of a project that has been brewing for years, but for one reason or another has been continually back-burnered. There’s no need to be cryptic; I’ll just get right to it. In November, I will release my second novel, Gadfly, through GaluminumFoil Productions, the arts collective started by Chris Cubeta and me nearly ten years ago. I will also simultaneously release my second spoken word record, tentatively titled Coming Back. I’m fortunate to have musical friends and a performance background that allow me an outlet to promote my novel, as well as experiment with a mostly unexplored genre. Trust me. This ain’t your father’s, finger-snapping, toe-tapping, spoken word. (I really hate that expression, but it does fit here.) We’ve got electric guitars, a cajon and lots of anti-Bill O’Reilly vitriol. Fun stuff.

The idea behind all this is that new writers are being shot down again and again by the realities of the business. If there’s a way we can circumvent all that, a way to get the work out there for people to read and hear without hoping for the help of industry types, whose motives are often dubious, then why not just do it? This is not to say that everyone in the publishing game is bad news; it’s just to say that I don’t want to wait around for ten years (as many of my writer friends have) to get the words out there. As Stephen Wright (not that Steven Wright, but the great novelist) says, “Writing is an act of communication and that act isn’t completed until someone else reads the book. And if that act isn’t completed, then the work is unfinished.” Well, I don’t want to be unfinished anymore.

For those of you who know me, I can be a pretty caustic guy. But I think that’s more persona than anything else. I believe in art. I believe in community. I want writers who are genuinely trying to say something to have the opportunity to say it. I don’t know what the inherent merit of my work is, or if that is even quantifiable. I just know I have to try. When I was 19 years old, I read a bunch of excerpts from Jack Kerouac’s diary in an educator’s magazine lying around my parents’ house. I was so moved by Jack’s simple ache to communicate his experiences on this planet, I wanted to do the same. Despite all the change of the intervening years, that desire has not wavered. To quote yet another terrific writer, Steve Almond, literature is simply “an ongoing discussion about what it means to be human.” Words for all artists to live by, I think.

I toyed around with a few new names for the blog, but ultimately I think I’ve landed upon exactly the right title for two reasons: 1.This is, indeed, a “place for my stuff.” It will contain my words, my thoughts, my ideas, my dreams, my secrets, my longings, my insane and/or inane ramblings. In other words, all the “stuff” that is most dear to me. 2. Perhaps more importantly, the title is a tribute to one of the men who remains a daily inspiration, a man with more faith than all the fundamentalists combined. Ol’ George Carlin, the disappointed idealist, who stayed true until his death, who was convinced that everything on earth – all the love and beauty and ineffable truth we can feel and taste and imagine – was reason enough to believe, and was pissed off when humankind kept fucking things up in the name of religion, or patriotism, or pride, or any one of those false cloaks human beings use to protect themselves from the essential agnosticism of being alive.

I’ll post the first few chapters of Gadfly on here in the coming months for those of you who didn’t read them the first time around. Along the way, there will be some creative detours. Hopefully. Sometimes I like to break away from fiction. Wax poetic. Or eschew lyricism altogether to directly address something on my mind. I even hear there is some Professor fellow by the name of G. Daniel who may want to get in on my action. That’s fine. I’m ready for him.

I have so many wonderful and talented friends who are working at a similar task as the one I have undertaken. Their integrity and intelligence and willingness to expose themselves at the risk of embarrassment and ugliness and disappointment are the fuel for this entire endeavor. I hope that when all is said and done, this will be about so much more than me. Because there are people who deserve to be heard and read and acknowledged a helluva lot more than I do, people who have paid more dues, had their hearts more hopelessly mangled than I have.

And so this is a call to arms. Facebook is nice and all, but 140 characters (or whatever the limit is now) can’t possibly capture the complexity of our common struggles – the good, the bad and the ambiguous – and so why wait around for the agents and publishers and all those well-meaning folks who simply don’t understand the urgency? It’s a new era, a new time.

Let’s fight to get it back again.

Danny

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