Project for the Holidays – Make Facebook Personal Again

When I first joined Facebook in the early summer of 2007, only a handful of people I knew were using it. Unlike Myspace or Friendster (remember Friendster?) I was really impressed with the ways it actually could be used as a social tool. I found people I hadn’t talked to since high school or college, and I had meaningful communications with them on a regular basis. I was able to keep in touch with people I rarely saw as if we still lived on the same block, and to me that is the entire purpose of social networking. The “networking” aspect is misleading.  The “social” part is what I think is most important.

For that reason, at first I vowed to keep my FB “friends” only to people I was actually friends with, or at least had been at one time. But then something happened later that Fall that sort of ruined that. I published a book. Now that I had a product to push, I was willing to friend anybody and everybody on the offhand chance that I’d make another two dollars of royalties as  result. It’s ludicrous. I probably set status updates for 75% of them to “ignore” so I wouldn’t have to look at pictures of their babies or whatever else they had to say that had nothing to do with me.

I could still use Facebook to keep up with the people that mattered most to me. I made “friend groups” so I could filter status updates based on who I was interested in hearing from or interacting with at any given time. This is useful, but it’s gradually gotten to where I don’t know if anybody is really paying attention to anything anybody else does on there. Often I post hilarious status updates that go completely unnoticed, and I know I’m missing a lot of things that other people post because it’s harder and harder to separate the wheat from the chaff.

So this is what I’m proposing–between now and Christmas, I plan to leave a personal message for each of the 626 (and growing) friends I have on Facebook. Just a quick connection, which I hope will spur a lasting conversation. If it’s somebody I don’t really know, I hope to learn something interesting about them. If it’s someone I rarely see or talk to, I hope to reconnect in some meaningful way. If it’s someone I see all the time anyway, no harm in saying hello.

I guess I will approach this systematically, contacting my friends in alphabetical order. I’ll need to contact about 15 people a day to finish by Dec. 25. I don’t know if I’ll use the wall or send private messages. That may depend on the person. Anyway, I hope that this will catch on and others will have a desire to make Facebook about positive social interaction.

 

New Work: Blind Date

I have a new short story up on barebackmag.com. Warning to the easily offended (and to Mom): this piece contains explicit sex scenes, some of which are between two men.

This story is actually an adapted excerpt from a new novel that I’m working on. It is the first piece of that novel to be published.

My Short Story Collection in Paperback

The Salvation of Billy Wayne Carter (and Other Stories) is now available for sale on Lulu.com. It will soon be available on Amazon.com and in select bookstores.

Buy a copy now and have it in your hot little hands within days.

In addition to the title story, this collection also includes:

• The Office Party
• Funeral Music
• Bertrand Russell Sees a Man
• The Art of Invisibility
• The Year of Myself
• Backstroking
• The Boy Who Cried Wolves
• Pineapple Tie

Also, this edition has a new ending and other awesome improvements over the old e-book version.

Introducing Tritone Media

Well, it isn’t exactly new. Since PopCanon’s first album in the mid-1990s, most of the CDs I’ve released have been on the Tritone Music label, which is the label Ned Davis and I founded for the distinct purpose of putting out our own music. And my chapbook Fuck Cheese was also nominally affiliated with Tritone, as are the T-shirts that Marie and I sell through Cafe Press.

Now I’m reviving it as a paperback literary press, and the first release will be The Salvation of Billy Wayne Carter and Other Stories.  This will include a revised version of my e-book novella and several short stories that have all been previously published, including the award-winning story “Funeral Music” and the strangely popular “The Office Party.”

I’ve struggled with the idea of “self-publishing” for  a long time, and I’ve often equated it with giving up any hope of getting my books published in more traditional ways. BUT I’m thinking of this as a long-term business plan where I might end up publishing other people’s books if I like them enough (but please don’t send me any submissions just yet). Also, ALL of the work that will be in this book has been previously published by other people, either online or in print. Given these factors, and the fact that the traditional publishing industry dies a little more every single day, I find myself finally willing to take this leap.

I’m also considering putting out my unpublished novel Zen, Mississippi under this press in a few months, after I see how the experiment with the first book goes. Meanwhile, I’m still working diligently on two other books. I’ve sequestered myself in a bunker in an undisclosed location in Brooklyn to get them both finished as quickly as possible. So there may be even more books on Tritone’s roster soon. Though if some big evil corporate mainstream publisher decides they’d like to make me a deal, I’m still listening.

Hornbuckle and Rock

I played a show last Sunday with my old friend Mark Rock (aka Peter Markush) who is visiting me from Charlottesville, VA. Since most of you missed it, I put videos of the songs on the youtubes.

Just as a teaser, here’s an unusual version of an old fan favorite:

Researching My Tattoo

my tattoo

Several years ago, I got a tattoo on my forearm, and a lot of people ask me about it. It shows an iconic castle, a fish, and the letters “HR.” The fish represents Jesus Christ, and the letters stand for “Holy Rood,” the medieval term for the cross. The castle represents the Grail Castle, the resting place of the mythical Holy Grail.

I initially came across the image when I was doing research for my novel Zen, Mississippi, begun around 1992 and finished just recently (still unpublished, unfortunately).

The metaphor of the grail quest, borrowed from the legends of King Arthur, plays a major role in that story. The book where I found the image (The Holy Grail by Norma Lorre Goodrich” only said that it was a “medieval water-mark on paper” and that it represented the Grail Castle.

For years, that was basically all I knew about the image. I got it tattooed on my arm for all kinds of reasons, none of them particularly religious in nature. The image struck a chord with me mainly because of my identification and fascination with the knights-errant who search for the grail. It just so happens that the symbolism of Arthurian legend is intricately tied in with the symbolism of Christianity. Also, I liked having a tattoo that tied in with the novel I’d then been working on for several years (and would continue to work on for several years after that), and I just liked the way it looked—castles are cool; most people I think would agree.

Just this week, I happened upon some more information. It turns out that the image originated with one of the most infamous heresies of the Middle Ages, the Cathars who lived in the South of France in the 12th and 13th centuries. The Cathars were a Gnostic sect who believed the Catholic church had corrupted the original message of Christianity. They were also vegetarians and possibly sodomites. Many of them were massacred by the Church in the early 13th century.

Enthusiasts of the DaVinci Code and its “nonfiction” predecessor Holy Grail, Holy Blood may be familiar with the Cathars as the Gnostic sect that evolves into the Priory of Sion, the group at the heart of the grail conspiracy, according to those books.

Conspiracy or not, the Cathars did use a lot of Arthurian imagery in their symbols, and they put these symbols in all kinds of places—tapestries, pottery, etc—trying to spread the word about their beliefs. Many of the Cathars were also some of the earliest manufacturers of paper, and that’s why Cathari symbols were often used as watermarks during that time. The Cathar watermarks were also precursors to the images associated with the Tarot.

In full disclosure, I have not read the DaVinci Code (or seen the film), and I don’t particularly care to. And I’m not a believer in that particular conspiracy. I also can’t say I share many of the Cathars’ specific beliefs—or even understand the. But I do like the fact that I can now identify my tattoo with an interesting and esoteric historical event, and like the search for the grail, my search for information about this image continues.

More will be revealed.

New Work, “The Art of Invisibility”

Three warnings about this:

1. It’s in an “erotica” anthology, there are some dirty parts, but I still think the story is more literary than erotic. Otherwise I’d have published it under a pen name.

2. It’s print only. You can’t read it on the web (yet).

3. It’s published in Britain, so it might cost you a little more for shipping than you were thinking.

If you still want to read it, go here. I really like this story. I tried and failed to get it into a bunch of American literary magazines before condemning it to sex slavery overseas. Their loss. If you are a fan of my writing, you will want to read it.

New Work: The Boy Who Cried Wolves

The new issue of Fogged Clarity just came out, and it features a short story of mine called “The Boy Who Cried Wolves.”

This issue also features an interview with author Benjamin Percy, fiction by Harvey Havel, and a bunch of other multimedia coolness. This is one of the nicest looking literary/arts magaizines on the web, IMO, so please check it out.

Also, check out the highly pretentious “Statement of Intent” that I submitted to them along with the story (one of their requirements for submission).

One of the things I’ve been interested in exploring with my fiction is the way that a new story can be affected by a an old one that is already deeply imbedded in our consciousness. In this case, only the title is a play on words from a traditional fable, and the rest of the idea flowed from the slight change in the wording. But because of that small wordplay, the reader’s experience is colored through the association with the traditional story even though the two actual stories are actually quite different.

I Am a Literary Upstart

As a semifinalist in the L Magazine’s “Literary Upstart” contest, I was asked to read last night at the Slipper Room. There was a sizeable and enthusiastic audience and three other semifinalists reading. At the end, the four of us were critiqued by a panel of judges, American Idol style, and one reader moved on to the finals. That one reader was not me.

I wish I could tell you the names of the other readers or of the judges, but I don’t have that information easily accessible at the moment. Maybe I’ll update later to include that. In any case, the judges’ comments were mostly superficial, and they clearly had not understood one of the major points about my story–so I really couldn’t take the whole thing very seriously.

So here for your enjoyment, is my performance from last night, which one of the judges said reminded him of a “city council meeting.”

The Last Dead Man

I was digging through some papers, looking for a particular piece of sheet music I thought I had. I couldn’t find it, but I found this poem that I wrote in 1994 after I saw a man get hit by a bus. The Latin quotation is from Ovid’s version of the Orpheus story, although I don’t know how I knew that in 1994. I wish I could find more of the poetry I wrote during that period, but I think this might be the only surviving relic, other than some things that eventually became song lyrics. I tended to not type them up or save them on my computer because I wasn’t submitting them anywhere, so they were just written by hand on loose leaf and then stuffed into random crevices and mostly lost.

The Last Dead Man

The last dead man I saw
Sang the strangest dirge

Between his moans:
“Umbra subit terras.”

No wind to fight the heat,
I only wanted to know

If he was alright.
“Umbra subit terras.”

It was in the paper the next week,
And I could see it again:

The wobbly, white bicycle
On the wrong side of the road

His wife left town afterward
With her sixteen cats

I grew interested in her
Tarot cards and her poverty

He’d had to make a phone call
About a job and scraped up change

He was eager
He was afraid

And when the sirens faded,
I had to tell the police and lawyers

What I had seen:
“Umbra subit terras.”

And the bus drove away
With his blood on the fender

And the concrete too recorded
What I had seen

In bland reflection, a moaned melody:
I am suddenly an earthly ghost,

Slightly interested,
Slightly ashamed.

—M. David Hornbuckle
9/1/1994, revised 4/18/2008