#fast machine

[dekenag]

Principles of cultivator manufacturing

[lilasoundscape]

[mybrotherbecamedependent-blog]

Once, when I was little

There are questions you find after you have the answers. What is the best one-two successive combination of songs on an album that aren't the first or last songs? I'm listening to Built to Spill's There's Nothing Wrong With Love and for me, right now, that question's answer is "Big Dipper" and then "Car". Midnight drives home over the West Seattle Bridge, up 35th with the street lights spilling down the hill in the rain. Those songs remind me of home. Of night love. Of laughing with windows open, alone on the street.

I am halfway through Chloe Caldwell's collection of essays called Legs Get Led Astray put out by Future Tense. I say Chloe read at bookthugnation in a Williamsburg I'm sure she said something about it being way different than when she lived there before. She read "That Was Called Love" and I fell a little bit in love with her that night. The story finishes on a fire escape, but in Seattle, Chloe on the phone with her New York life living outside her but not without her. I was going to try and talk to her about Seattle, but then my friends left and she had a lot of her New York friends around her and why would she want to talk to me. I am reading her stories now in the morning, listening to Built to Spill and these essays, fuck. They're here. Read them:

"But. This was life. And I preferred hurt to ignorance. And it definitely hurt like a smack in the face to see my mother's annoyances with me and her hardships and unhappiness. But it also made me feel less alone. And I simply loved the words. I saw beauty in them. I saw beauty in truth. Truthful words moved me. Choked me up. I cried each time I read a new entry. In my gut I always knew I wanted to be a writer. But sometimes it takes people along time to admit the truest things about themselves."

Chloe Caldwell and Elizabeth Ellen went on a book tour together. If I were to pair two books right now, I would pair Legs Get Led Astray and Fast Machine.

I want to see movies of my dreams.

There is a Excel spreadsheet somewhere in my computer that lists every story in Fast Machine (Short Flight/Long Drive), and then in the following columns, different aspects or classifiable elements: age of narrator, age of other characters, animals (?), themes, locations, happy/sad (?), types of sex, etc. See, I wanted to do a book report, but instead make different mix-tapes using 15-20 stories. See, I sent a message to Hobart promising that I'd write a review if they sent me a copy. I never wrote that review. Until now, kind of, maybe.  See, when I read Elizabeth Ellen for the first time, it wasn't really my first time. She came out with a chapbook on Future Tense called Before You She Was A Pit Bull. Many of the stories in the chapbook are in the big book. I was rereading a part of my life when I was happy, ensconced in a Seattle forbidden to me previously but now/then open and bleeding like warm concrete in summer. Elizabeth's stories dance with each other. I was reminded of William Gay and Sugarbaby. My idea of making mix-tapes of the stories was almost more for me to figure out who these people were. Like Chloe, like herself, Elizabeth writes truths.

"Adam would say this was what I sought out: the uncertainty of the situation. I had a hard-on for it. Also it kept me from facing long-term goals, like writing a novel (or getting married). My focus was much more myopic. It was one-day-at-a-time mentality. It was at-9 o'clock-when-my-daughter-goes-to-bed-I'll-drink-and-smoke-and-listen-to-sad-songs-on-my-iPod-in-the-basement-until-I-passout mentality. It was ever-happy-person-is-the-same-and-boring-and-every-miserable-person-is-miserable-in-an-interesting-way logic. (Except miserable people are boring, too).

Bottoms up and this time/ Won't you let me be?

I didn't finish Fast Machine twice. Too many notes. Life. The Atlantic Ocean getting inside my computer. But I would. Especially after reading Chloe. Because sometimes two separate things vibrate harder when they're next to each other.

"A small truth in all of this is that I've always wanted someone to invade my privacy. I guess that's another essay in itself—one that I am not sure I'm capable of writing yet. I am sorry, Lover, and sorry, Mother, for ruining our trust and straining our relationships.    I can accept that all I've ever wanted is not very special—all I've ever wanted, liked most people, is proof of love."

xo

[prochaintrain-blog]

FAST MACHINE

FAST MACHINE is short stories.

i'm always impressed by the way certain writers circle around the same ideas and themes and even words/phrases. repeating character names and repeating parts of scenes and so on. i think bolano does this a lot. and elizabeth ellen does this in these short stories.

which actually makes them a little tough to read one after the other - they need to be well spaced. 

ellen writes violently and honestly. sometimes whilst reading i would grimace. the stories get inside of you and grab at you.

i have a lot of favourites from FAST MACHINE, but i tended to prefer the longer pieces. so: 'halfsies', 'trucker', 'xenia, ---', 'the loyalists', 'winter haven, florida, 1984', 'the last american woman' and so on and so on. all of these stories.

one sentence that i like: 'It might be true what they say, that you catch more bees with honey than you do vinegar, but what sort of masochist wants a fistful of bees anyhow?' (p. 299)

[othernotebooksareavailable]

Some books have a colour palette. Certain colours tinge the prose, or give the impression of appearing in the furniture, scenery, shadow, across the spread of tales. This occupies a bleed zone between poor remembrance of detail and a synesthetic approach to these details. I know, for example, that not every story in Fast Machine features a rusty, 70s orange colour. And yet, it’s there carpeting my head. And, too, I see pinkish blood stains. I see the particular shade of brown which occupy themselves with breeding in dingy motel rooms. This feeling, this back-of-the-mind consciousness, in response to Ellen’s work, is I think a tribute to the unity that exists therein.

My review of Elizabeth Ellen's Fast Machine is up at PANK

[mybrotherbecamedependent-blog]

I've Only Seen Bing Crosby's Face On A Sculpture in Spokane

I emailed Hobart and in return was sent (through the FLESH AND BLOOD mail) Elizabeth Ellen's Fast Machine.

Things I liked right away:

+The epigram is a quote from Blake Butler

+The table of contents is so long it looks like a poetry book= lots to read

+It can fit in my back pocket

Today I felt (BLAH BLAH BLAH) buoyant without a place to float, not like I was going to float away, but that I was (blah) without something. But then I found an empty baseball diamond, took off my socks, and read "Bing Crosby Dreaming at the Lamp Post Inn". Just listen to this first line: "You slow for a light and your husband springs from the light."

Ellen, if I can call her that, took away my hunger and put me in a place of confusion, responsibility, kindness, loss, and Bing. I've never seen White Christmas. I don't know the scene she references when the you of the story watches the movie in a hotel room that "smells like the living room of the house your lived in college," nor have I been the you who "pulls her in close and feel your body relax with the let down of your milk." (sorry for the verb confusion). But I do know:

"The light turns from red to green and still your foot remains on the break. The streets are empty and messy with snow and unfamiliar to you. This is his city, not yours. You have driven this way only once before, in daylight hours, with him sitting beside you, directing you through this ghost town. Now it is dark and silent and frozen. The houses on either side of you stare back at you, abandoned and afraid. Their windows are bleak and unadorned. No trees shine through to illuminate the night. No plastic reindeer graze from these roofs or lawns. Christmas does not bother to come where only ghosts and forgotten men roam."

Read that paragraph again. It's crisp and haunting and completely balanced on its own two feet. That internal roil of scattered thoughts when you're lost, not of your own volition, but because of someone else. You can't move. You can only submerge into the setting, which gets creepier the more you look at it. "Now it is dark and silent and frozen." So so so so good.

In a story with little dialogue, it's amazing how much voice is packed into three pages. And voice is a stupid word, but I don't know how else to describe what's going on here. So far the collection has pitched in some reoccurring themes, which helps maintain this confused-by/with-life feeling, but "Bing", as well as everything else so far, works (another bad word) by its lonesome.  I'll write more about this later as a whole, but I just wanted to extend my gratitude to Ellen for writing this story specifically. Specifically the story and specifically for me. I think I would want to watch that movie with John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart with Ellen while trying to not smoke or be in idol love with her.