Barry Graham's Blog, page 39

Christmas Viewing for Grinches and Communists

My friend M.V. Moorhead once compiled a list of 12 twisted Christmas films. He included Beavis and Butt-Head’s It’s a Miserable Life, which I recall watching with him many years ago. I recommend watching it back to back with the film it parodies, It’s a Wonderful Life, which W. Andrew Ewell sees as a critique of capitalism, a reading I agree with. By watching these two films, I think you can get a concise and accurate look at the U.S. pathology in the 20th Century, and a look at where we are...

Toru Takemitsu: Confronting Silence

My writing is rarely influenced by writers’ ideas about writing, but more often the ideas of visual artists and musicians. I’ve been reading Confronting Silence, a book by the late Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu (whom I had never heard of until Daishin introduced me to his music and writing a few weeks ago). Much of it articulates what I’m trying to do.

A friend visited me, bringing with him his rough sketches—white space filled with notes, all bound by a rubber band. How do those sounds ge...

Self-Centered or Life-Centered?

We learn from our past experiences only if we’re life-centered rather than self-centered. It’s like learning geography; after taking a wrong turn and getting lost, the life-centered person now knows where not to go, but the self-centered person seethes about how “I got lost"—and blames self or others for it.

Who are you when no one is looking at you?

Christopher Knight went to the woods in Maine and stayed there for 27 years, never talking to another person. Of that time, he said: “I lost my identity. With no audience, no one to perform for, I was just there. There was no need to define myself; I became irrelevant. The moon was the minute hand, the seasons the hour hand. I didn’t even have a name. I never felt lonely. To put it romantically: I was completely free.”

But, now that he has to interact with other people, it’s clear that he’s ba...

Keeping It Simple by Barry Graham

Keeping It Simple by Barry Graham:

New story by me in Shotgun Honey

I write what I don’t know

“Write what you know” is a maxim preached to aspiring writers.

I get emails from single fathers who tell me that The Book of Man captured their experience. I have no children. I get emails from people who’ve been hospitalized for depression saying the same thing about the same book. I have never been depressed and have never been hospitalized.

I have also never been a young Dutch woman, nor a Mexican-American drug-dealer and murderer, nor a murderous pedophile, nor a female ex-cop from an upper...

Statement

Barp. Barp. Foot tube. Barp.

Foot tube, foot tube,

Barp, barp barp.

Wanting something from someone with nothing

I’m waiting for a bus on a chilly evening in Portland. A young man walks along NW Everett, barefoot, shirtless, wearing only jeans and a hat.

“Sir, can you help me get some shoes?” he asks.

I almost ask him what happened, why he’s half-naked, but realize just in time that it’s none of my business. My stupid, cruel presumption that he owes an explanation.

My recommended reading for Halloween

Of Darkness and Light by me. “Bram Stoker…M.R. James…Stephen King…Now there is Barry Graham.”—Scottish Field

Blood and Kisses by J.T. Blackfriars, perhaps the best vampire tale since Salem’s Lot.

The Night Before Christmas of the Living Dead by M.V. Moorhead is hip, funny and disturbing.

The Least of My Scars by Stephen Graham Jones is a disorienting tale of alienation and blood lust.

Fragments of Horror by Junji Ito, a collection of shorter tales that might be even better...

One Thing

Doing zazen in a city park on a warm autumn afternoon, seeing that life is one permanent thing with so many transient manifestations—the trees and the shrubs and the bushes, the excited dog trotting and wagging its tail, the buzzing gnat, the man walking with an impatient look on his face, the bird, the squirrel. Separate and one.