PSA // rose books hotline
“it’s still dark out, but the contours of neon signs, streetlamp irises, spotlit canopies of gas station LEDs hue the winter fog a bit red, bit yellow, bit blue”
Checking in this week from the road, specifically the cross-continent jaunt zone in which I am spending all of June, having gotten laid off from the full-time gig just in time to plot and execute a giant early summer Subaru loop of the United States and some Canada, see friends, swim and camp, eat snacks, and grift WiFi passwords from fridges. What I’m saying is: I’m writing to you from a coffee shop in suburban British Columbia.
But I did still want to take a sec to file one of my little posts of the classic self-promo genre, because today the Rose Books Hotline published a piece of mine, namely a recorded reading of a fiction excerpt I’m calling “Daisy and Scifi at Calla Square.” It’s a tiny excerpt of a longer thing, set up as a three-minute audio track and read overtop of a song-in-progress from a musical project I’m working on, meaning the whole thing is a messy half-finished crossgenre experience intended in the vein of some of my heroes of weirdo spoken word. It was fun as hell to make and I’m very psyched that Rose Books--whose hotline is itself a major addition to the key lineage of experimental writing over the phone--agreed to put it out.
The piece will be up for one week, from June 3rd to June 10th, over on the hotline: 1-844-300-ROSE. After that, it will be archived on Rose’s site. Meanwhile, the text of the excerpt is below.
Clippings and newspaper ads for John Giorno’s Dial-A-Poem hotline, 1969–1970. Image appears in Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook by Lori Emerson, a book that I have (ahem ahem) previously mentioned which is available now.
The morning of the eviction, visible sunlight broadening across the bedside span of painted plywood, through memories of eyelids open then shut then open, in that time of day’s threshold nonspecificity, dim and muzzily achronological, Daisy locates herself in a fitful play of dreams and consciousness. She is surprised, over and over, to wake and find herself alone on her and Scifi’s old loft mattress, then turns, sleeps and misremembers again. Wide bands of voices outside the bedroom, sounds in the kitchen or on the couches ringing the dinner table, catch in her reveries and repeat, sliding in and out of her inertial revolve of images and associations, half-registering but shifting, reorganizing, speeding or slowing, becoming vastly sweeter or more sinister.
In one dream, she and Scifi are on the roof of the building, looking out onto a placid predawn rendering of Calla Square. The snow cover has gone gauzy and the air is idle, with this warmer, moist current all settled in over the street and no crowds, no protests or encampments offsetting the peaceful feel. It’s still dark out, but the contours of neon signs, streetlamp irises, spotlit canopies of gas station LEDs hue the winter fog a bit red, bit yellow, bit blue.
Scifi leans out, right leg cocked on the roof’s scalloped brick parapet, lighting a cigarette with shoulders hunched, instinctive, no wind to force the action. He makes a slow inspection at building’s edge.
“I’m thinking they’ll set up… there, there, and maybe there?” he says, emphasizing different points around the square with short juts of the cig. Corner window, rooftop, fire escape. “Once it gets light enough.”
Actually, even as he speaks, a further layer of illumination is announcing itself through the fog, lighting details of the view in a soft halo of distinction. Daisy can see that passing car beams are flashing on higher contrast lane-marker-yellow, the pedestrian pictograms orbing crosswalks in brighter offwhite.
“What do you mean, set up?” she asks him or anyway, sort of breathes in his direction. Her lips are moving, but the words are crudely overdubbed. She can feel the mismatch.
Instead of answering, Scifi holds one hand in front of the other, squinting into an imaginary rifle sight, and pulls a trigger. Kkkhhh. An echo seems to bolt through her too as, his barrel hand kicking back, the cigarette goes out.
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_(__ )/ /_/ /_ /_/ /(__ )/ /__ _ / _ / _ /_/ / __/
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