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Civil Coping Mechanisms
"Those who are creating the modern composition authentically are naturally only of importance when they are dead because by that time the modern composition having become past is classified and the description of it is classical."-- Gertrude Stein
"One hundred years from now everyone in this anthology will be dead. According to Stein that means Alt Lit will finally be considered ‘classic.’"-- Christopher Higgs
Featuring work by Sam Pink (1.), Chelsea Martin (2.), Megan Boyle (3.), Beach Sloth (4.), Diana Salier (5.), Guillaume Morissette (6.), Jordan Castro (7.), Gabby Bess (8.), Alexander J Allison (9.), Janey Smith (10.), Michael Heald (11.), Juliet Escoria (12.), Jereme Dean (13.), Noah Cicero (14.), Mike Bushnell (15.), Tara Wray (16.), Spencer Madsen (17.), Laura Marie Marciano (18.), Jackson Nieuwland (19.), Carolyn DeCarlo (20.), Heiko Julien (21.), Stephen Tully Dierks (22.), Lucy Tiven (23.), Timothy Willis Sanders (24.), Ana Carrete (25.), Chris Dankland (26.), Oscar Schwartz (27.), Steve Roggenbuck (28.), Luna Miguel (29.), Crispin Best (30.), Lucy K Shaw (31.), Andrew Duncan Worthington (32.), Frank Hinton (33.), Sarah Jean Alexander (34.), Willis Plummer (35.), Keegan Crawford (36.), Richard Chiem (37.), Tao Lin (38.), Mira Gonzalez (39.), and Scott McClanahan (40.)
Also included—“Poetry and the Image Macro” by Michael Hessel-Miel and an Afterword by Christopher Higgs.
Excerpts
from Alt Lit Gossip
Frank couldn’t remember the time of day. This was a period of minimal responsibility, marked by the ability to sleep and roam at will. Her ultimate goal in the last months had been to achieve a kind of life wherein the cycle of waking by day and sleeping by night was broken down into meaningless, unstructured scenes. This, coupled with her lack of debt, was freedom. She peered through the window and ascertained it was some part of the early afternoon. She opened the bathroom door and paced the hallways on her phone. She scrolled through a series of Facebook photos, semi-consciously judging her friends and their activities, noting and cataloguing each of their physical weaknesses against her own. Every flaw was a necessary compartment in her mental arrangement of the universe. Although she presumed herself to be something of a “good” person, her vast array of judgments about other’s physical and mental states (mostly negative) seemed to buoy this air of confidence she had. Her ability to judge others, collect their flaws and arrange them delicately within her world concept had increased a thousand-fold since the inception of her Facebook account.
Frank Hinton
Both of my feet are cold through the shitty boots I’m wearing and I like the way the snow is coming down more now; there is maybe a few inches on the sidewalk area.
I imagine a man coming out of an alley and stabbing me a number of times until I die.
Face-down, mouth-open in the snow.
What would that change about me.
Would I love it.
Would I think that the stabbing was painful and that I didn’t like it.
Does it actually hurt or is it great.
I see my killer being given a wreath and a box of candy by the mayor of Chicago at some kind of ceremony (a ceremony for killing me, you see).
And people are cheering for him.
I see myself stab-holed and crawling out of an alley to joining the periphery of the celebration.
Then I hold one hand over the stab wounds and with the other hand I give the thumbs-up sign to my killer as he accepts the wreath from the mayor.
Sam Pink
One night when we were drunk and failing at buying drugs from somebody in another part of Brooklyn, we lay down together in the park and looked up, because they were there, at the stars. We didn’t know anything else about stars, besides the same things that everyone knows. Orion’s Belt. The Big Dipper. Ursa Major. Ursa Minor. And we were in New York anyway, so we could see only a handful of them, and very faintly. But it was quiet and we were alone, and there was something comforting about being in close proximity to him, because he seemed to have a similar kind of sadness to the one that I had.
Lucy K Shaw
I remember the junkies. The way their words seemed to slide from their slanted mouths, slimy and slurred or coughed up and short. The way their legs bounced anxiously as they waited—always waited—for Jason to come through with Opana or oxy or heroin or whatever they could find that day. The way their zombie-like eyes shone through eyelids like slits, pupils small as pins. The way they scratched their skin obsessively, like there was something underneath it.
The way I too eventually spoke from the side of my mouth, tapped my foot to that haunting, inaudible rhythm, hung pictures of past with the pins of my eyeballs, scratched unendingly at that incessant, incurable itch.
Jordan Castro
Megan Boyle: NEW VIDEO OF STUFF
Lucy Tiven: Quiet Lightning
Gabby Bess: A Reading
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Megan Lent: I just skimmed through a bunch of your stories (some I’d read before, some I hadn’t, they were what Google gave me), and you mentioned New York a few times, and Nancy Drew twice. Also, you wrote in one story that you “hate ice cream sundaes.” Why are New York and Nancy Drew important? And what did ice cream sundaes ever do to you?
Andrew Duncan Worthington: My sister read Nancy Drew when I was a kid. I read the Hardy Boys. I think I mention Nancy Drew because it is something that has always been close to me but which I have never read/understood.
The significance of New York is that I live in New York. I went to 3 years of college upstate at Bard, then I lived in Bed-Stuy for a year, and for the past year I have lived in Harlem. I like to juxtapose Ohio (where I’m from) and New York in my writing a lot. Some might call it played out but I like to call it a rich tradition.
Ice cream sundaes are okay. I think when I wrote the line “hate ice cream,” I was having a weird thought about the ice cream shop near my house growing up. It used to get held up all the time. I think I was thinking that what if those people who robbed it weren’t robbing it because they wanted the money but because they hated ice cream. I thought that was poignant and funny.
ML: Physicists have proved that a “god particle” exists. This happened recently. Is this sad or is this beautiful? Do you like science? What was Galileo like in bed, do you think?
ADW: I didn’t bother to google “god particle” because I don’t care. Even if there was a god, I know it wouldn’t give a shit about me.
Galileo was probably a monster in bed, because he was under house arrest forever, so he probably had a bunch of stored up desire or was sexually desperate or something. Other sexually desperate people would walk past his house and the guards outside would point inside and say, “Fuck that guy.”
ML: You are the useless red piece in Tetris. Tell me all about your sad digital life.
ADW: I am not sad, I am just to easily able to be sad, because if someone turns me on I know I am here, but if someone turns me off then I don’t that.
Civil Coping Mechanisms
'This is the debut of a major new talent. Straightforwardly brilliant writing. This book is so honest, so American, so true to what it is like to be young in America today. At moments Worthington reminds me of Fitzgerald, at other times of Salinger, and then, at other times, of Beckett. One more big name: If Knut Hamsun were a young American writing Hunger today, this is the book he would write. The subjectivity of the contemporary experience of our crazy, drug, text and PlayStation-fueled culture is perfectly described. ‘I had been out of the mental ward for almost six months. My goal was to return to college down in Athens…’. If Worthington can continue to write as well as he does in this novel, he will be one of the greats of the start of the twenty-first century.'-- Clancy Martin
'Andrew Duncan Worthington’s debut novel, Walls, is a book about jobs and boredom, Playstation and needing to poop, daydreaming and girls, planes that never leave the tarmac and Ohio. This book will make you feel like you’re stranded in Ohio and you can’t get away. Of course, it might be that you don’t want to leave. It has a strong attraction, a strong pull. Walls is a strong-ass book.'-- Scott McClanahan
'Noah Cicero, Jordan Castro, Andrew Worthington, me: What do we have in common? We’re all from Ohio. We all smoke cigarettes; one of us has the outline of Ohio tattooed on our neck. Rt. 8, Applebee’s, the Browns, Bud Light, Coors Light, hallucinogens, throwing snowballs at trains while high on shrooms, Best Buy, Target, Marlboro Reds, Camel Blues, the Cuyahoga… this is a novel about Ohio, and to a lesser extent, Taco Bell. Also NYC and Kent State and mental hospitals and CNN and Iraq… if you’re not sold by now: Fuck you.' -- Elizabeth Ellen
Excerpt
from Vice
I spent most of the time during that week thinking about those things. We split into groups to follow one of the instructors on hikes, and when Julia wasn't in my group I waited at the intersections of trails hoping to glimpse her baby-blue jacket. I sat in my top bunk in the camping lodge, slowly humping the mattress. I had seen it in the movies. Wet patches showed up on my underwear. I noticed in the morning, but I was too tired to care, because I hadn’t fallen asleep until two hours before.
Most of the guys wanted Samantha Terry, as I had expected from the start. Initially I was intrigued to hear them vocalize it in a really roundabout way, through games of truth-or-dare and other recess excuses for gossip and disclosure, although eventually I became annoyed for the same reason. It was also almost exclusively guys who announced their likes. Brian, the most talented basketball player and the presumed prince of our grade, had pronounced his like for Samantha Terry, the presumed princess of our grade. Unfortunately, his best friend, Kyle, had the same crush, and he decided to announce it soon after Brian. I offered what I considered to be risky hints about Julia Darrows, but everyone was so lost in their dawning pubescent terror that what I considered a big deal didn’t even register for them.
They had us play a game every day during free time. It was called scouting. It was like hide-and-go-seek, except that the seeker had to stand in one place, and the hiders could only hide in a certain area. Most of us hid behind trees, and the goal was to sit still and not be seen. I don’t know how any of us lost. CVEES was the week that we learned more than ever before about nature: our own nature. None of us went home that week feeling that we had gotten what we wanted.
In the weeks after CVEES, I began writing my first journal. At first, it consisted mostly of inane lists, and poems inspired by Will Smith. Eventually, I dedicated a page in my journal to Julia Darrow. I titled it “The Julia Page.” It was actually three and a half pages long. I wrote about my previous likes, including one to our fourth-grade teacher the year before, as well as a detailed history of my thoughts on Julia. It restated much of what I have already said, but as I saw those thoughts on the page—“The Julia Page”—they stopped bouncing around my skull. I kept the journal under my mattress, but I knew I would let someone see it. I showed it to Nicole Delmedico, who worked the same crossing-guard shift that I did, and whom I considered to be a close, nonsexual friend. I approached her locker, where she was putting on her crossing guard uniform.
“What is this?” she asked.
“It is something I wrote,” I said, “I would just like to hear what you think about it.”
“OK…”
She stood there reading it. She didn’t make a facial expression the entire time. She seemed to be concentrating. I wanted her to smile or frown or raise her eyebrows or grunt a laugh, I didn’t care which, but I couldn’t stand the blankness. When she finished she folded the pages and held them at her side.
“This is crazy,” she said, and she placed the pages in her hoodie pocket.
“Give it back.”
“No.”
“What are you doing?”
(cont.)
#kendamalife
#kendamalife
cole conti skate
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'Robert Vaughan explores addictions and the dark crannies of basements in his collection, Addicts & Basements, which assembles a variety of his works from flash fiction to poetry. There’s a disturbing symmetry in the obsessive nature of the characters, each piece a syringe of distorted desire injected directly into the nerves of the brain to disrupt synaptic cohesion. Vaughan’s words act as amphetamines and depressants, a lyrical brand of verbal inhalants that capture moments, or as in the story, “Fallout,” a man “hopes to capture their essence (seed pods), as if by shooting them, freezing them frame by frame, he might see his own life oozing before him, undulating like festering wounds.” Many of the stories feature a wound, analyzed, inspected, then ripped back open. The opening story, “The Femur,” is about a strange collection of artifacts the narrator has garnered, from pubic hair given by an ex-girlfriend, to his grandfather’s titular femur. Through the recounting of his history, the femur becomes an anchor and a focal point around which his life is chained. Even as an external joint, he depends on it like a crutch, a thigh enabling locomotion: “Through the years, and multiple moves later, I’d grown attached. It was as if we shared bone. Cartilage. Nerves. Connective tissues.” His addiction is sewed into his muscles and he’d suffer an abasia without it, explaining, in part, his resistance to his wife’s attempts to get rid of it. ...
'Miscommunication and misunderstanding can be another addiction, an albatross dictating the invisible creeds we often cling to. Age, time, desire, lust, and a cacophony of suppressed urges are intimated at in, “The Lost and Erasable Parts of Us: “My identity tied up in a bottle. I craved my smell back, my decency, my shameless will. I grew gills, slithered up the stairs, fettered away, toward some desert city, in undulating waves.” When identity is so intertwined with a bottle, an addiction, or a basement, it’s easy to get lost. In Vaughan’s symphony, those weaknesses are a path back to self-discovery, a melody, however distorted, to guide listeners up into revelation. This isn’t a AAA meeting though as addictions lead to other addictions and there’s no permanent egress, only leaps into oblivion. I’m a Robert Vaughan junkie now. You can find me drowning in his basement.'-- Peter Tieryas Liu, Entropy
Civil Coping Mechanism
'Drawing its energy from society’s underbelly—the dim corner booths of bars, the stalls of public bathrooms, the thickets of unkempt parks—Vaughan’s book is part prose poem, part fractured sonnet, part Whitmanian love-cry. 'What were your last thoughts, Ophelia? Were / you loved enough? Will I ever know when I am?' When this poet speaks, we are compelled by the plaintive urgency of eros in his voice. On the edge of a low-lit Interstate highway somewhere between Los Angeles and New York City, Addicts & Basements yawps and pivots and veers, praising its own wreckage.'-- Dorianne Laux
'Robert Vaughan’s poems are peopled with painfully human characters, depicted with an unnerving authenticity and irreverent compassion. In ‘Turkey Town,’ a young man working a wedding banquet sneaks out back when the father-of-the-bride dance begins because he misses his own father: 'The cold hurt my lungs, made it hard to breathe.' In ‘The Patio,’ patrons are ‘sucking down margaritas’ and ‘gnawing chips’ at an outdoor restaurant when there’s a car crash and they become witnesses to the scene. In ‘Bonus Question,’ a woman calls into a late-night radio quiz, but instead of giving an answer, she asks, 'Will you love me?' The deejay is unmoved, but the poet says: 'Somewhere, lying in the darkness … someone who has never seen her face whispers yes.' These are poems to break your heart, but Robert Vaughan is always whispering ‘yes.’'-- Ellen Bass
Excerpt
The Femur
When my ex Fed-Exed me a small box of her pubic hairs it ranked right up there among the strangest things I’d ever received in the mail. But the oddest was my grandfather’s femur. I was away at college when he passed. Shoved in front of a train by his third wife while visiting Berlin. My mother’s theory.
Then Dad decided to send along the package. When I opened it, I wasn’t quite certain if it was a joke. No note, no return address. Just the bone, suspended and fused inside a rectangular plastic frame, like a tarantula my kid sister had. I placed it on my dorm room closet shelf.
Robert Vaughan reads "The Dead Woman" by Pablo Neruda
Robert Vaughan reads "Sun Bear" by Matthew Zapruder
Robert Vaughan reads "Woman in a Bar" by Dorianne Laux
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Janice Lee: What’s your real name?
Edward J Rathke: I used to hate my real name. I used to hate it so much. I hated the way it looked on paper and I hated the way it sounded, rolling round my ear, those two stupid hard consonants just a few letters apart. I’ve made a thousand names for myself over the years and most of them nothing like mine. I lived in worlds that only existed inside my head and I made me new. For a long time I hated my face too and I avoided mirrors like they were plagued and I stopped remembering properly what I look like, and this problem persists. The person I see with my name when I close my eyes isn’t the one who smiles back in the mirror. Even my dreams stopped being about this name and this body. I became other men and other women and I dreamt in their bodies, with their names.
Now I’m comfortable with the name I was given so long ago: edward j rathke. I even have a supervillain name ready for whenever I fracture apart and try to take the world apart: Wrath Key.
But is edward j rathke the best at answering these questions? Probably not. He’s a very silly human, though he sort of writes the opposite of silly books. Sometimes he wishes his novels had more silliness, way more zaniness, but we suppose writing is where those heavier parts of him go so that he can go on living silly, lightly, while we write on, Deathly.
JL: What’s the story you always tell? What’s the story you’ll never tell?
EJR: I don’t know if there’s a story I’m always telling people. Probably there is, but the ones I feel like people are always asking me about are the ones where I almost died. Like the time I took a 60 foot freefall onto rocks or the time my appendix exploded while I was in Korea and I spent a week in a hospital where no one spoke English. Most of my stories involve me being lost and making bad decisions.
There are so many stories I’ll never tell but not because of fear or shame or regret. There are memories that are sacred to me. In many ways they’re all we have as humans. Our life is just a collection of memories, and memory is largely a creative process of stitching together misremembered moments. When you share a memory, it stops being yours. So when you speak your memory into new ears, that memory becomes theirs, and in that transference, the memory changes twice [first by making it into words and then again by the person hearing those sounds, stitching it to the fabric of their life] and becomes something new. If they share that memory, it again transforms, and so when your memory is shared with others, it stops being yours and becomes something wholly different than who you are, which is a body housing memories. And so I keep the best ones inside and I share them with no one. Not even in my fiction, and definitely not in interviews like this.
Most of them are about love. Those howling bits of time, fraying, hoping.
And maybe Noir: A Love Story is both. It’s full of the story I’m always telling—the unknowable humanity, the howling ache chasming between us, the sublime perfection of existence, the beauty of its ending—and the ones I’ll never tell. All those stories I’ll never tell, those are the ones at the center of Noir: A Love Story. I’ve given you the impressions of lives but told you nothing about what they mean to the people who lived them, and so the reader decides and discovers. In that discovery, they’ll probably find the many mes that I’ve been all these years.
Civil Coping Mechanisms
'In this novel of desire and doom, with its collision of voices and a femme fatale who dresses in the dreams of everyone around her, Rathke is the best kind of possessed writer—the kind who has the courage of his possession, whose exorcised words exist in defiance of their author.'-- Steve Erickson, author of Zeroville
Excerpt
Tom and Jerry were up all night but those aren’t really their names. Gomez had this huge party and just about everyone was invited, even Tom and Jerry. Tom and Jerry on account of one being tall and blue and the other being short and brown, blue as in sad and brown as in color, get me? Well, Gomez has this big old shindig and the whole town’s ready to show up and I think they all did.
It was to celebrate something, his daughter’s nuptials or something. Lots of champagne, anyhow. Big tents that filled the whole meadow, that one north of town where all the kids usually play till they’re too old to play but too young to drink, legally, anyway.
Yeah, I spent a lot of time in that meadow growing up. We all did. Everyone does. Nowhere else to go, if you want to know the truth. The town’s always had a lot of kids around and that’s the way we like it, little buggers running round and everyone kind of raising them together. I guess you could call it a commune in that regard. Everyone’s kids are everyone’s kids, but, no, our wives are our wives. We’re close, but not that close. Maybe some get by being less selfish, but there’s only so much a man can take. Anyhow, we all spent years down there playing tag, cops and robbers, dungeon, you name it. There’s this ancient Tree there, older than the town, older than the country. It’s about a hundred feet around if it’s an inch and it reaches up to the sky and cradles the clouds, the moon, and sometimes even the sun. People here, the old natives that we cast away and tortured in concentration camps, purebreds, they talked about that Tree as if the entire planet depended on it. If it falls or dies, the sky’s gonna come crashing down. It’s the last of an ancient breed, they say, used to have brothers and sisters in every corner of the globe, but the europeans, as is their way, burned them all down and made them into houses or forts and castles that barely last a millennium. They chopped down eternity just to leave ruins. Waste is all they know, all they’ve ever known, all they’ll likely ever learn. Me, yeah, I got some of both sides, the indigenous and the invader, the purebred and the Puritan. Sometimes, in my drunken revelries, I imagine my great grandparents met that way, she being tortured, him lashing the whip or cranking the crank, and she gives him this look and he realized that he lost, that she won, and that he loves her, will love her till he dies, whether as a traitor or hero, depending on the side he chose.
No one ever told me the story to that tale, but I imagine it was much simpler and less deranged. This place never had any of that, anyway. It was kept safe from the invasion and natives from all over the country found their way here. A kind of haven for the forgotten age. We’re surrounded by forest here but we have that big old meadow with MotherTree. Everything’s made from wood and we ask before we take and we only take what we need from the forest. We exist because of it, not the other way around. It keeps this place alive and has allowed us to remain unchanged for all this time. So, no, never had the kind of torture and all that that I sometimes imagine romantically. That’s a joke, you know? Even still, I am the King of the Mestizos.
The party, yeah, I went and it really was something else. Fireworks, drinks, gymnasts, dancers, bright colors and all that. The meadow was transformed from a grave for fireflies into this heaven of life and love and love of life. So many colors, so many faces, some masqueraded, some black tie and others just wandered in from work, from the nightshift because it really did last all night and half the next day. We don’t usually have occasion to act that way and many took exception because of it, drinking too much, eating too much, certain indecencies in the corners of the woods, other indecencies beneath the glow of the moon and the boughs of MotherTree. Such revelry, such excess.
(cont.)
Twilight of the Wolves--First Reading
Twilight of the Wolves - Dying Wolves
Twilight of the Wolves--Xhal and Sao
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p.s. Hey. ** Postitbreakup, Hi, Josh, ! ! xo ** Kyler, Hi. Oh, is that right? Interesting. Awesome and congrats about your book selling out over at Amazon. Sweet! Oh, I think the reason you're flying is your very own doing, man. I'm just one of the many who are directing their breath upwards. ** David Ehrenstein, Ah, true, and probably one of the explanations for goth's impressive stamina. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Oh, I actually watched that 2 hour video when I was putting the post together. I like how endless and confident it is about its own fascination. Well, yeah, Germany pulled it off. Oh, I don't about my 'anyone but ... ' thing. I was for Netherlands basically because the time in my life when I was most into soccer/football was when I lived in Amsterdam and would go see Ajax games a lot, and the Dutch really, really don't like Germany. So it's probably that, and I just don't like Germany's footbal-playing style for some reason. ** Nicki, Hi. Ha, on your plus one. You're a disgusting human being? Cool. Is the semi-colon part of the genre's givens or rules or whatever? Would abandoning it make your stuff seem uncool or something? Oh, wait, you say they're power-ups. That's interesting. I'm weird in that whenever I reach a semi-colon, I get stuck there. It messes up my internal rhythm. They're like potholes or something. I'm going to try to see them as, like, gas stations instead or something and see what happens. ** Sypha, Nice personal goth history story there, James. Hm, I guess I can see why that premise would feel grim to you, but, at the same time, all the more reason to go for it? But I say that as someone who has always not wanted to write autobiographical fiction who is currently trying to write a mostly autobiographical novel for the first time in my life. ** HyeMin Kim, Hi. It kind of is, yeah, I agree. Precious, I mean. My mind is pretty cut-up too, if the p.s. isn't already making that state of affairs crystal clear. It's a weird sensation. Not bad, but only if it's not forever. Ha ha, those dolls don't look at all like the writers they hope to resemble, I don't think. ** Aaron Mirkin, Hi, Aaron. Yeah, I look forward to your script. To reading it, I mean. Life gets slightly less crazy, or rather differently crazy and more home-oriented starting on Wednesday for a bit. I read about The Freaks. I thought of doing a supplementary post about that. Maybe I will. Huh. Thank you, man. ** Bill, Hi, B. Peter Murphy has a new one? And it's good? I never much liked Bauhaus for some reason. I don't know why. Probably something to do with the way they were introduced to me that I don't remember but whose resonance lingers for some reason. I liked 'OLLA' best of recent Jarmusch too. I did really like 'Broken Flowers'. Mostly for the sublimity created in it by Bill Murray. The fiddly parts are such a double edged sword. ** Steevee, Hi, I'll go read that article the first chance I get. Everyone, Steevee recommends an interesting discussion about what it means to be an independent filmmaker, between Alex Ross Perry and Joel Potrykus. I did listen to a sample from the James Blackshaw album. I liked it, although not enough to listen further or score it. I'll try it again. ** Kier, Hi! Oh, that's interesting, yeah, I would totally feel the same way if I was a visual artist. Strange. You should get that photo framed. Take it from someone who would share your antipathy were I more adept at making things that looked like more than just boring looking paragraphs. Congrats about the heat. We here remain in the endless rain-clouds-rain loop. Alpacas can live in Norway? Oh, wait, yeah, that makes sense. My weekend was mostly all film stuff. On Saturday we set up the set for the filming on Sunday, and on Sunday we filmed from early morning until dark. It went really, really well though. Otherwise, I saw my nephew a little. Bad timing on his visit 'cos I'm not getting to see him all that much. ** Misanthrope, Hey, bud. I'm writing a book that's kind of about a writer since I'm a writer and it's about me. Oops. I haven't been as busy with my nephew as I would have liked 'cos the timing of his visit sucks, but he's been busy with Paris at least. Okay, about your questions about the filming. I'll answer them in order, so consult your questions list for clarification. It's been more and better than I expected. What's come up that wasn't expected is needing to revise and rewrite and relocate and etc. the film at the last minute and in the moment a fair amount of the time due to things beyond our control, but I've really liked having to do that, and all of the changes have made the film better so far. There have definitely been frustrations with how our low budget prevents us from doing some of thing things we really want to do, and there have been frustrations with one person we work with who does their job well most of the time but is a real pain in the ass to deal with some of the time. No, I think I've loved everything about making the film so far. Sure, more money would have been a real help, but I'm very, very happy with everything we've done. It's exhausting but it's really invigorating too, and they balance out. Mm, well, it's been completely different from writing a novel, and it's pretty different from making theater, although there is more of a relationship there. Well, I guess it's the permanence of it, that what we film is what we have to work with and there can't be more shooting afterwards if we realize something's missing. That's really interesting. Thanks for asking, man. Don't think the World Cup win is going to revive the old Germany, no. ** Rewritedept, Hi. Nice weekend there. Don't know about those movies, though. Filming went incredibly well. Best scene yet. Well, everyone involved in the film goes away on vacation for two weeks except for me, which means I basically have to a ton of work and do all the arranging and preparing on my own except for email consultation should any of my collaborators decide to be kind and interact with me while they're away, so I'm not actually getting a break from the work at all. We just won't be actually filming again for about a month. It's been big fun to see my nephew, sure, but, like I said multiply up above, I've been too busy to see him as much as I would have liked. ** Okay. Happy Bastille Day! There are the latest batch of books I've read and loved, all from the mighty press CCM. Fish around in the post and find some great reading material, if you like. See you tomorrow.