Somehow all these days have slipped by and I forgot to update. Shame! Shame! But I am enjoying my summer job and stretching out the days before teaching starts again. And writing after a long break. Two new essays are online as of this week…

#1 is my essay on our cultural fascination with Bob Dylan’s love life. I’ve been marinating on this topic for several years, since I teach Dylan’s Chronicles as part of my underground music class at Berkeley (Dylan was underground once, darlings), and one of the main questions students have is why he never says the wife he’s talking about in part three is not the same one as in part two. He’s a man of mysteries. Thanks to my friend Alex Green (an excellent writer — check out his 33 1/3 book on The Stone Roses) for running it in Caught in the Carousel. 

#2, “A Radical Leaps”,  is the kind of personal essay I used to write a lot, but backed off of while I was working on Slanted and Enchanted. Thanks to the folks at Busted Halo for giving me space to figure out the connections between indie and spirituality. Yes, you read that right. I’ve never written about spiritual matters before, except for a tongue in cheek thing about the papal election, so this is uncharted territory. Oh look, you can rate it and leave comments. Sweet. I have to give special thanks to my friends with a line to the higher power for their help with this one. 

Jeremy Hatch was also nice enough to plug my book in his blog at The Rumpus. I kind of figured I wasn’t cool enough for The Rumpus, because the night its editor Stephen Elliot threw a beer at Howard Junker at the Literary Death Match, most of it actually landed on me, which may be why I’ve never read at the LDM *cries*. I thought I was tainted, but this at least makes up for the beer stinking clothes.

Jeff Chang has a list of California Budget Disaster Band Names over at Can’t Stop Won’t Stop that are, shall we say, uncomfortably familiar. At the moment, I, along with tens of thousands of University of California faculty and staff, am about to face a pay cut. It’s not going to kill me, but the rumblings about increased health care costs, layoffs, and 8% pay ins to the decimated retirement fund might be the pound of flesh I apparently owe my employers of the past decade.

For those who don’t know, I’m one of the many non-tenured faculty members whose ranks have increased as tenured positions become a scarcity in America. I accept this as the way things are, and nine out of ten days, I love my job enough to deal with the fact that my colleagues and I are underpaid. We do get benefits, which is more than adjuncts at most schools receive, and we are lucky to get to work with the best students I’ve ever had the privilege to teach. My students made invaluable contributions to the research and writing of Slanted and Enchanted, both in terms of working for me doing transcription and research (because I do not get sabbaticals or research funding, I paid them out of pocket, just to clear that up), and through the many discussions we have every semester about the topics in the book. Since I’m in a position that will never become tenured due to the way job titles work at UC, I teach on three year renewable contracts (again, better than most adjuncts) which are subject to termination at any time. I receive a merit review once every three years which is my only chance at a raise, and it’s almost solely based on course evaluations, so that one student who dislikes my class has a fair chance of costing me any additional salary.

The reason I want to say these things publically is twofold. One, because I think some readers have made the assumption that I’m one of those priveledged academics who gets time off to write. No. I did work half time for a year while researching and writing S&E, but my advance was typical for a first book (first book with this publisher, anyway) during a recession. So, because I was on a reduced salary due to half time work, I went into debt. I worked on Kitchen Sink and wrote my first book while working full time, sometimes taking on additional classes at other schools to help make ends meet. I think this experience is pretty typical for people who work on indie projects, and I’m not complaining. I wouldn’t trade those years, or the experience of writing this book, for anything. But I am bothered by the commentaries that assume I and other UC employees can afford these furloughs, especially in light of what we know about the amounts the top administrators are paid. When we also factor in the tuition increases our students are about to deal with, it means that we are working the same amount for less money, and that students are stuck with fewer available sections and larger classes for more money. The problem is that we’ll never know the real numbers behind these cuts. We’ll never know how or why the legislature came up with this budget. It’s all innuendo and rumor and in times of secret dealings behind closed doors, it’s the people outside who get screwed.

Suggestions for part-time jobs for an underpaid pseudo-academic who’s the author of two books are welcome. I’m thinking Starbucks, but their coffee sucks.

I’ve read at Litquake two years in a row now, in 2007 at 11AM at the SF Public Library, sandwiched in between an Iraq war vet and the Yale Younger poet, and last year at a pricey clothing boutique in the Mission with my homie Sam and a novelist who’s also a psychologist and Kent Zimmerman (who read from the unpublished biography of Seymour Butts). Litquake is kind of insane; unless you’re Michael Chabon, Dave Eggers, that guy who writes Lemony Snickett or Armstead Maupin, you get 6 minutes to read no matter where or when you read in the dozens of events that take place that week. And EVERY writer in the Bay Area reads. Every one of them.

When Laura Moriarty wrote me a week ago and asked if I’d read at the Litcrawl event for Small Press Distribution, of course I said yes. SPD not only sells my hard-to-find first book, but they do so many things for the local independent press community that I owe them big time (Laura, by the way, was one of the folks I interviewed for those chapters on small press publishing, and for years I lived literally next door to SPD until my evil ex landlords sold my house out from under me). So I was a little surprised to get another email just a few days later from the Litquake orgainzers also asking me to read, this time at the library event, and I pondered what to do. The library event is, I guess, a little more prestigious since that is where you find the Eggers/Chabon/Maupin types and they have snacks and books for sale and whatnot, whereas the crawl is more of the scrappy kind of events where drunk people wander in and everyone sits on the floor. So I was torn between not telling them I’d already agreed to read for SPD and greedily reading twice, or fessing up to it and doing the right thing. Because I have a big old bleeding heart, I did the latter, and told them to ask my friend to read at the library instead. And that’s why my book is ranked at 300 something thousand on Amazon!

Damn, I don’t know what I did to deserve all the Canadian and Quebeqios love (like spending every summer there from the ages of one to fourteen, ahem), but I’ll take it! Thanks to Ryan Bigge at the Toronto Star for the thoughtful review of Slanted and Enchanted, and to Ian McGillis at the Montreal Gazette for the equally thoughful essay about my book and graphic novels in popular culture. If this keeps up, I think I might have to see if I can get a Canadian book tour going. If anyone in Montreal or Toronto wants to have me, yes please! I am happy to come visit.

This is a note for anybody who hasn’t yet entered the Goodreads giveaway for 2 copies of the book that ends tomorrow: get off your cute rear end and enter! The prize package includes two issues of Kitchen Sink and a custom mix CD soundtrack for the book which I worked on yesterday, and it’s damn good if I do say so myself. It’s got everything from Allen Ginsberg to Bikini Kill.

Special thanks, additionally, to Moe’s Books for putting S&E on their recommended reading list. And to Vroman’s in LA for mentioning it in a discussion of BookGlutton and interactive book media.

I’m thrilled to be a part of the LargeHeartedBoy Book Notes series. This was great fun to write — I miss my college radio DJ days — and allowed me to flex in the first person, an indulgence I skipped for the greater part of two years of book writing. Thanks to a couple of friends who read this while I was drafting it and reassured me I didn’t sound like a pompous ass. I think this playlist will be the basis for the CDs I’m making for the Goodreads giveway (enter now! ends July 15, the day I’m picketing the UC Regents meeting, so your CD might be a bit late if I’m in jail), although there will be some additional tracks on that which are super secret. If you’re interested in a copy and you’re not the winner, drop me a line. Being from the indie community, I know everything is quid pro quo and if I send you a CD, you might, I dunno, write a review of my book for the New York Times? Wash my car? Sweep the yard? Something like that?

And to segue… for some reason, my late father was rather obsessed with all things Canadian: hockey, Robertson Davies novels, Leonard Cohen, Quebec City’s funicular and CBC radio theater. Plus, back in my Kitchen Sink days I actually had a Canadian fan club of two or three guys who wrote me nice letters about every essay I wrote. So for tonight’s wee lil’ update, I bring you a shout out from the land up north in a magazine called Straight (don’t worry — there’s a pro-transgender story on the front page, so it ain’t just for straight people), which recommends the book for summer reading and says Slanted and Enchanted is “a guaranteed conversation-starter”. True dat.

My summer job starts next week, and since I got home from the Northwest I’ve been hunkering down, doing some writing for myself, chillaxing with the cats, watering plants, reading a lot, and generally being a boring person. Since these kinds of weeks only happen once or twice a year, it’s meant I don’t have much to blog about especially re. the book. But there should be an update tomorrow. I’m wondering, though, if I should just turn off commenting here since it only seems to attract spammers and the blog doesn’t have much of a readership on my site (more people comment on its Facebook syndication than here). As you can see that’s just meandering space filling thought #2,375,465.

The book will be a month old this week, and now that publicity hoo hah has died down for the time being, I did something I was warned by smart friends not to do: I looked at my Amazon sales ranking. AJ Jacobs has a funny bit about this in The Year of Living Biblically where he vows not to covet but cheats regularly by peeping at his Amazon page. He’s a best selling author so I don’t know what he’s worried about. As a person who’s trying to be more accepting of mystery, I find this exercise facinating. For example, last night the book was ranked at something like 300,000, way below the edition of Gerard Manley Hopkins I was thinking of ordering from one of their independent sellers. This morning, it’s surged to a more respectable 60K something or other. But how does that happen overnight? Is it like yeast bread and it just swells if the temperature’s right? Does that mean two or three people ordered it over the weekend?

And then there’s the issue of Amazon reviews, and right now I have none, though I have the feeling one or two might appear soon. I’m pretty active on Goodreads, mostly because I read a lot of books (my summer count since late May is now up to almost twelve titles, sheesh) and like to catalog them somewhere, and people write pretty snarky things there too, but the cult of Amazon reviewers is so weird. Kevin Killian, a local poet, did an entire book of his own Amazon reviews which are pretty amazing, but generally they tend to be written by people who seem to have a maniacal need to review every book ever written. It’s amazing how many reviews people can write! I find the same phenomenon happening on Yelp, where people seem to get really into reviewing every hot dog, nail shop, Big O Tires and ice cream store they visit. As a person who gets exhausted by minutae, I get tired just scrolling down the page.

And I’ll try to remember all of them! Book tour wrapup, radio, news and links to follow:

• Thing the first is that I’ll be on KALX today from noon - 12: 30 for Arts in Review with Greg Sharpen. KALX is the best college radio station ever. Streams online if you’re not in the Bay.
• Powell’s was amazing. What a great, interested, informed crowd, awesome staff, great ambiance. It’s really Carnegie Hall for writers. Special thanks to Kevin Sampsell for hosting and writing the best introduction ever (comparing the book to an indie version of The Tipping Point); my sister Betsy Oakes for putting us up and bringing so many friends; my mom for flying up and clomping to the store with her foot in a cast; Douglas for taking us to the Bosnian food cart and for sending this cartoon, which explains the whole hipster phenomenon better than I can, and Sage for being my media escort (which involved a lot of patient dealing with my tantrums over being cold and lost in Seattle).
• While I was in Portland, I did an interview with Jeff Baker, the books editor at The Oregonian, which is online now and will be in the paper on Friday.
• The Cleveland Plain Dealer gave the book a swell review on Sunday, which has led to some good discussions about why some cities’ indie scenes fall off the radar while others get tons of media.
• Speaking of media, if you’re interested in the future of magazines, I highly recommend checking out this discussion on Jeff Chang’s website. Malcolm Gladwell has some comments about the issue of free versus paid media in this week’s New Yorker as well. Suffice to say it appears that all magazines will soon be in pill form, which is a depressing thought for someone who watched her own indie magazine die a painful death not so long ago.
• Speaking of depressing, I’m puking sick of hearing about the California Budget Meltdown. What a mess. I still have a job (for now), but like all teachers I will be doing more work for less money come fall semester. Something’s got to give before we really do sink into the ocean.