A Good Cafe, Delmar

Several have asked about my recent reading at the Mashuggah Cafe in St, Louis last week, so I thought I'd drop a line and share my perspective of the crime scene at Noir at The Bar. Now mind you the reading part was less important than one might think in comparison to actual space and time occupied at the little cafe on Delmar in the University City part of town that night.
I should point out first, that I had my reservation about going at all. I don't like readings. They're usually so fucking pointless and boring. But this one seemed more along the lines of, I don't know, "my kinda folk," and that's what convinced me to do it. Still, the reading part nagged me, worried me a little, not fear of public speaking but a worry along the lines of lost in translation. Something changes when fiction is read aloud, a certain dynamic, or delivery that might best be suited best for actors rather than writers, Never the less, I went anyway, for reasons, at first, selfish, I suppose, like any other unknown writer would justify the acts of performing and wagging their little tail for the treat of applause and acceptance. "I need this, it'll be good for me, get out there and meet some people." Is what I told myself. And that's what I did.
Now I won't go on about geography, travel, and hotels, because anyone whose driven the length of Illinois, or width of Kansas or Nebraska, or Texas, as I have will know, there's not much to say about it, externally anyway. But the time and space I will entertain.
The space, The cafe, Mashuggah they call it, and I don't know what it means and don't really care, but it's good cafe, with wear and character that probably comes from generation of students that passed across the wood floors with their shoes full of hope and possibilities, that only the youth can understand with all their limitless passions and certain hopeful beliefs of a world that only exists for that short 4 year, ok, maybe 5 or six year period, maybe longer because some never leave that comfortable nest. I'm wandering away here. The cafe, was a tiny little coffee bar, with patina and an assortment of beers I gathered from observation. And really good coffee.
There was art on the walls, some local, some good, some not so good. I noticed some good photography and a sketch by Picasso that caught my eye early on arrival. It looked original, although I'm sure it wasn't, in the company of the Boulevard of Broken Dreams poster upstairs and flowered water color that might have come from a child.. Maybe though, one never knows anything for sure. A hand made Bob Dylan discussion group sign, of wood, I think, hung proudly above the quiet patrons focused on their laptops. I spied a few screens and most were writing something, word doc pages, and reminded me of my own twenty something days in university town cafes like The Deadwood in Iowa City, only then, it was a pen, notebook, pitcher, and an overflowing ashtray at the table.
The tables were unstable, and the chairs an assortment. Posters of local bands and other events were cloaked in the mystery from their designs and clung to a cork board outside the surprisingly clean restroom. This I took in, in the afternoon, the reading was at seven, but I wanted to case the place and neighborhood first, so I did and felt very old and out of my element among the afternoon crowd of students. But that's alright, I was there once upon a time, in a different space and time, but I was there all the same. I get it.
Seven PM, maybe a little after, because I'm never too eager to make a mistake these days, so I plan my arrivals and departures carefully and for effect. The effect being one of never being around one place too long, so as your presence lingers longer than it should. Another is, I know myself, and I can can come across as a bit gruff and intimidating sometimes, but I'm actually pretty passive and accessible when you get to know me. Anyway, my wife and I left the hotel at seven and we walked the the three blocks or so. It was a warm, balmy evening with rain in its future, and the atmosphere was a little different. Gone were the students, and learners and their plans, replaced with doer's and worker bees of the community and the writers that I'd be reading with, and wanted to meet. No. I really did. For the writing business is a lonely one, and I was aware of some of these writers and their activities over the years. I was hungry for stories, not from their pages, but from the trenches. The real stories. In all honesty, I don't think very many writers really give a shit about another writers work, when their in the same but opposite trench together. Under that somewhat equal and level playing field. they want to know about each other, the writer.
So here we are, all smiles and hand shakes, a group of wordsmiths' on their way somewhere. To where? who knows, but on their way in their, our, minds anyway, and that's always a good place to be. All were younger than me except one veteran of the biz, and all were full of giddy and life for the moments they were allowed to wave their achievements. Our host for the evening, Scott Phillips and Jed Ayres, were already there. Scott, a man of notable writing achievement, seemed quiet and reserved and that most likely comes from years of stupid questions asked by writers of lesser notoriety. Writers who want something form him, most likely help, help from his coat tails to his shoulders. Help he probably has no desire and very little power to give and I don't blame him, for he knows, as I know, and every writer eventually learns, that at the end of the the day, it's all about the writing and the writer, and nothing else. There's not anything anyone can do for a writer outside an honorable mention here and there and among the right people. That's all, but you can't ask for that, no, no. You have to earn it. Again, it's all about the writing.
Jed, in my opinion and that's gathered in short, but seemed like a man of infinite kindness and generosity and good man to have for a friend. I knew this when he insisted on paying for the books I brought him as a gift and his manners toward my wife, and the way his eyes saw you, listened to you, in conversation. I knew he either had proper upbringing, and by proper I don't mean money, but proper as in good parenting. Or, a really shitty up bringing that mixed with his intelligence, made him humble, honorable and reliable, for through some freak of nature it happens sometimes that people become the very thing they we're denied as a child. Either way, a gentleman and a scholar, probably of the street, and og his own doing, but that would be even better.
The reading, I won't say much about it, because it's one of those, ya had to be there things. The guys from KC, fine writers and fine young men, full of enthusiasm and good intentions, and read some fine and impressive copy. The kid from South Africa, another, good man, and I'm always pleased to meet a foreigner traveling abroad. The local guy, was about my age but had written for more than I and seemed very at home and use to it all. I on the other hand had stopped writing in the early nineties to focus on a more "tangible, profitable and realistic career," so I thought, but that didn't pan out either. So I returned to writing, around 08, feeling like, fuck it, if I die broke, at least I die rich with leaving something behind other than a tombstone. Writing is what I've always wanted to do. To be a writer, at some point meant a lot to me, and I wanted that feeling for love of what I do back in my life and it is.
It has nothing to do with fame and money, and I don't know why people insist on putting those two together, because they're not same thing and very rarely, accompany on another and even more rare is that the accompany a writer. I mean shit, it is a very very small club, of rich and famous and writers, face it. What I brought home from this trip is this; I write, and I came to read, because I'm on a road with fellow travelers, passing by, a road home, so to speak. A road to a place I want to be, a place warm, and satisfying. A home where I've never been, where I belong, where their's a warm fire and comfortable cat purring on the hearth. A cozy home after a long jounrney through the winter of life, and the slipperss fit and the coffee is good, and there's art on the walls and in my heart and in my mind.                                                                                                                                                 Home, like a good cafe

Shakespeare Was A Genre Writer- Guest Blog with Proffesor Josh Mark on genre vs literary

Author and Proffessor Josh Mark stopped in The Write Room Cafe, Sunday morning for a cup and a dark corner to contemplate the boundries of writing fiction.

"Morning Josh, what's on your mind?"

`Shakespeare Was A Genre Writer'

"Yes, of course, I'll be right back that for ya."

There is this wonderful passage in the Cornell Woolrich novel, I Married A Dead Man, which I believe refutes the bigoted `literary' claim that genre fiction is not truly `literature'. For those who don't know, Cornell Woolrich (who also wrote under the name William Irish) was a well-known and highly successful writer of `genre fiction', crime novels in the 1940's and beyond. His story, It Had To Be Murder, was the basis for the famous Alfred Hitchcock film Rear Window and many of his stories, or plots derived from them, have served to provide writers with ideas from 1938 to the present. It would seem, then, that Woolrich should be regarded as a `writer' and not as a `genre writer' and, further, neither should `genre writing' be counted as less than `literature'.  As a human who has spent much of his life in the academic world, I have heard from fellow professors, countless times, that there is a definite distinction between `literature' and `fiction' with particular disdain accorded to `genre fiction'. Yet, when pressed on the question of what makes one piece `fiction' and another piece `literature' I have never received a satisfactory answer from any of these professionals.  Cornell Woolrich's work was, then, and is, today, considered `genre fiction' as it falls into the category of `noir crime fiction' but it is so much more than any label can hope to define. This is true of so much `crime fiction' or `YA fiction' or `horror fiction' that I think it's time we re-evaluated these tags we give to pieces of writing and try to approach them honestly and without labels.  The whole of this Woolrich novel is brilliant but this one passage stopped me cold when I first read it and I had to stare into space for a while thinking on it in the exact same way I have done when reading Shakespeare or Plato or any of the other greats. It goes like this:

"What makes you stop, when you have stopped, just where you have stopped? What is it, what? Is it something, or is it nothing? Why not a yard short, why not a yard more? Why just there where you are, and nowhere else?

Some say: It's just blind chance, and if you hadn't stopped there, you would have stopped at the next place. Your story would have been different then. You weave your own story as you go along.

But others say: You could not have stopped any place else but this even if you had wanted to. It was decreed, it was ordered, you were meant to stop at this spot and no other. Your story is there waiting for you, it has been waiting for you there a hundred years, long before you were born, and you cannot change a comma of it. Everything you do, you have to do. You are the twig, and the water you float on swept you here. You are the leaf and the breeze you were borne on blew you here. This is your story, and you cannot escape it; you are only the player, not the stage manager. Or so some say."

Not only is the passage beautifully written, it asks a central truth about human existence: Do we have control over our choices or are those choices dictated for us by some higher power? Whether that `power' is Fate or God or simply the sum total of all of our other choices or our upbringing, are we really free, in any given moment, to choose to turn right instead of left? Did we actually choose to become who we are today or was that choice dictated long before this moment by some factor far removed from our own freewill?

In the novel I Married A Dead Man, just before Woolrich writes this passage, the scene is this: A young girl has been deserted by her lover in a strange city. She's pregnant, which is why he's left her, and all she has is something like seventeen cents in her pocket and the train ticket back to her home town he bought for her. She gets on the train, tired and depressed, hopeless because she's returning home in disgrace, and lugs her suitcase down the aisle of the car. Worn out, she finally just stops, puts down the suitcase, and sits on it directly across from a young couple. That moment, when she stops there, defines the rest of her life.

Isn't this true for all of us at one point or another? It's the simplest thing, or seemingly the simplest, which leads to the greatest and most important times of our lives and which, actually, can come to define us. Who is to say, then, that genre fiction is not `literature'? What is literature but the story of what it means to be a human being? However one chooses to tell that story, it is a story we all need to hear repeated from time to time.  It lets us know that we're not alone.  I don't believe there should be any such designations as `crime fiction' or `noir fiction' or `YA fiction' if, by so designating a piece of work, one may then smugly dismiss it as `not literature' and, therefore, not worth reading.  The poets of today speak to us through the radio and off CDs in our stereos and, just because Springsteen or Gerard Way are not included in a college literature book, does not make the impact of their work any less. We should expand our understanding, and definition, of `literature' to include the totality of what goes to helping us all be more human and stop defining and trying to devalue those works which don't neatly fit the accepted understanding of what is `literary' work. Before he became `Shakespeare', Will was just a guy who wrote plays to entertain and, along the way, enlightened people to what it is to be a human being. So called `genre fiction' provides us with precisely the same experience.

My Muse Plays Hard To Get, by Kevin Lynn Helmick, Pulp Metal Magazine

Piece a flash? from a few years ago in Pulp Metal Magazine

http://pulpmetalmagazine.wordpress.com/2010/07/20/my-muse-plays-hard-to-get-by-kevin-lynn-helmicks/http://pulpmetalmagazine.wordpress.com/2010/07/20/my-muse-plays-hard-to-get-by-kevin-lynn-helmicks/

Pluck You, the history of the middle finger, a guest blog and wisdom by Johnny A

The History of the Middle Finger
Well, now......here's something I never knew before, and now that I know it, I feel compelled to send it on to my more intelligent friends in the hope that they, too, will feel edified.
Before the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, the French, anticipating victory over the English, proposed to cut off the middle finger of all captured English s...oldiers. Without the middle finger it would be impossible to draw the renowned English longbow and therefore they would be incapable of fighting in the future. This famous English longbow was made of the native English Yew tree, and the act of drawing the longbow was known as 'plucking the yew' (or 'pluck yew').
Much to the bewilderment of the French, the English won a major upset and they began mocking the French by waving their middle fingers at the defeated French, saying, See, we can still pluck yew! Since 'pluck yew' is rather difficult to say, the difficult consonant cluster at the beginning has gradually changed to a labiodentals fricative F', and thus the words often used in conjunction with the one-finger-salute! It is also because of the pheasant feathers on the arrows used with the longbow that the symbolic gesture is known as 'giving the bird.'

And yew thought yew knew every plucking thing.

Blogging Sucks

Blogging

I absolutely fucking loath it, blog, blooog, sounds like a flat tire or something. I'd prefer "essays," but it don't quite fit. I'd even take "flash fiction," but that ain't it, because my flash fiction is usually flash because it couldn't float. Who came up with the term "blog" is that the best ya could do? Is it short for something? I don't know.                                                                                                                          

This is sometime how write through a tough spot, bitch and write at the same time, and maybe the muse will come up from the vast depths of my creativity and grace the page with that certain unattainable magic that happens in moments of heated composition of projects when all the cylinders are fully injected and firring away at fifty fuckin thousand rpm's.

See it kinda works, but it's late, I'm beat and I get up at hit the keys not long after the haunting hour of the night, when dreams, the story, the characters, and reality are only separated by a thin veil that only thickens with the rise of the household occupants pulling me out into the world, where I obviously do not belong.

I doubt if anybody will even read this first real blog of shit, and I don't blame ya, I wouldn't... just based on the title. I mean it has no cool links, cuz I don't know how to do that. It has no advice, cuz I don't like sounding like one those an ass clown blowhard, who just can't help from spouting advice every time they open their mouths. In fact, it has no useful, informative content what so ever.

But I got it out of the way all the same. Maybe next time I'll have something to actually talk about. I do have a few biographical adventure I'd like to share, mostly about bar fights, close calls, famous people run ins, and shit like that.

So stay tuned if you really have no life at all, cuz this ain't gonna be pretty, and everybody loves a train wreck.

An interview with Kevin Helmick, On-Heartland Gothic, a Rural Noir

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/gelatisscoop/2012/01/07/kevin-helmick-drops-by-to-discuss-his-upcoming-novel