the hell you say
1/28/2004 @ 7:55 pm Comments Offso, I dropped by clevenger’s site yesterday to read some of the back and forth posted there and for once had a notion to speak up and answer a few long dangling questions about kiss me, judas - particularly the movie, which is in the early stages of full throttle - and about the lost phineas book which is currently creeping toward regular publication like some beautiful dead thing rising from the pit. nothing much, just hello and nice to meet ya. thanks to craig for the ever kind words. thanks to dennis over at the palahniuk cult site for propping up that interview, which as far as I know is still among the living there and can be found by navigating along the path of least resistance. thing is, I was feeling a hell of a lot smarter and more biblical and less like a car wreck yesterday, and had more to say. then as I’m decompressing after work and well into my second glass of cheap red this evening I got a handsome invite from craig to represent as his guest blogger - not the most impure request I ever had but damn near - imagine those words coming from the lips of a fat man with bad prison ink named anthony… anyway. so now I’m wandering in like a blind guy in traffic. nothing else to say that I didn’t already spew over at craig’s site, but I will say this, some nights when it’s pushing 2 am and I’m working on the lost book or lately revising the judas script, it occurs to me that a little dialogue would be very cool, if only to get out of my own echoing head for a while. so I’m just gonna shut up now and see where this thing takes me.
if it walks like a duck,
-wcb
Comments Off
the velvet
2/25/2004 @ 10:15 pm Comments (3)yeah. word is I’ve been a lazy fuck of late. and on one hand I can’t so much deny it. but really I’m just not wired proper. it isn’t in my nature to maintain communication with anybody. I get email from friends and family all the time that ask am I alive or dead. so my relationship with a blog site is by definition sporadic. but I apologize. I want to maintain. the good news is that Phineas is getting the jaws of life from Macadam Cage. for those of you who lost track, the first two books (kiss me, judas and penny dreadful) were published by Viking Penguin, who, though longtime beautiful imprints, were in the early stages of the last century undergoing a buyout from Putnam that caused massive internal disorder and who respectfully declined to publish the third Phineas Poe book, calling it “too dark.” They said it was a 300 page suicide note. and maybe it was.. since then, that book has gathered dust. I put it in a plain brown box and forgot about it for a while. and I started working on something else, a book called Godspeed, which is now pushing 400 pages, and a screenplay of Kiss Me, Judas. (meanwhile, I tried to keep myself alive and well. it has been well documented that I have not fared well with drugs and alcohol, and my personal relationships have been a freaking hazard to life and limb.) but in the last couple of years, I have gotten back to being a serious psycho for discipline and managed to forest gump myself into a stellar healthy relationship. (truly, my wife is an angel walking among us.)
so, the news is this. Kiss, Me Judas the movie is happening as we speak. and I am stupid lucky to be in the position to control the script. meanwhile, Macadam Cage, publishers of my drinking buddy Clevenger’s the Contortionist’s Handbook, have agreed to release what they are calling the phineas poe box set… Kiss Me, Judas and Penny Dreadful will be rereleased in paper, while Hell’s Half Acre will hit the stores in hardcover in fall ‘04. sick good news, all around. especially considering that Viking has unforgivingly allowed the first two to fall out of print… maddening, considering that the French translation of Judas came out last summer, while the Italian rights sold just last week. I am just glad to know that Phineas lives.
Hell’s Half Acre is a book that has burned like a dying star in my consciousness for more than two years. to get it ready for publication in the fall, I have passed a somewhat polished draft of it to just four people so far: my agent dan mandel, my wife the sweet penelope, my new editor pat walsh, and the brutally meticulous craig clevenger. they all seem to love it, and all have given me excellent notes so far.
the best I can offer is to sacrifice page one here in the ether, and see if you like it.
one.
Pink and gray sky, the color of muscle. The truck screams past and its exhaust drifts into dark flowers that hang on the air and fade away like I’m staring through a mirror stained with my own fingerprints. I saved a guy’s life just now and I think it was a mistake. I didn’t recognize him, not at first. I jerked him back from the edge by pure thoughtless reflex, like I was saying god bless you to a stranger sneezing beside me on the bus. Then I got a shiver fast scope of the his face and in a far corner of my brain came a sunspot flare of recognition, like glancing up at a passing cloud and thinking wow, that cloud looks exactly like a girl on a bicycle. Blink, and the flare is gone. Even now the particulars of the guy’s face are dissolving into a thousand others, but I remember he had blond hair and mercury eyes. The slow spin of echoes and I realize I have seen this man before, and I believe him to be a monster. I think he is one of my own monsters come home. This is how it begins.
-okay. see you in the fall. keep the faith.
wcb
letters to phineas
2/9/2004 @ 11:24 pm Comments (4)the truth is I got no idea who’s out there anymore. or who gives a shit. I had an okay dialogue going with some folks over at clevenger’s site, but he got fucked royal by his server and has now been off line for more than a week. meanwhile I was working pretty furiously to finish the rewrite of hell’s half acre, which I’m happy to say I stuck a fork in last friday and sent off to my agent. who is so pretty in pink freaked he’s about to wet himself and intends to send it out to macadam cage and presumably others within the week. pray for me, neighbors. still I remain terribly out of touch. with good reason, maybe. soon as I sent off that lost phineas book, I started working on something new and very different.
I have a standing arrangement to meet craig for a drink on sunday nights but this past sunday I found myself in the wrong bar with laptop in front of me and a glass of tequila listening to the grammys on tv and madman typing away. whole new characters and story. phineas no more. phineas fucking gone.
and felt like I got handed a ticket to disneyland. no lines for the rollercoaster and the ice cream was free. and I realized I have a twisted very unhealthy relationship with phineas. judas was published in ‘99 or so, which means I’ve been tangled up with poe for more than five years. and as much as I love him, I’m just as sick of the motherfucker. I don’t know where I go with him as a narrator, but when I was reading over various chapters of hell’s half acre.. let’s just say I felt completely insane.
like I was on acid, and not in a good way.
so I’m happy to cut him loose and start on something new. make a clean slate and all that. but for some reason I keep remembering the summer I started getting letters to Phineas. two or three years ago, I was living in the bay area. penny dreadful had been out for maybe six months and I had just crashed back to earth after a disasterous job teaching english lit and creative writing at a school up in washington. one of my best friends from high school just died from a heart attack and I was working on the first draft of hell’s half. and I got a call past midnight from an unknown caller. straight out of the blue.
ring, ring.
hello? I said.
female voice, whispering. will baer?
yes, I said. who is this?
this is Jude, she said.
I held the phone away from my face like it might bite me. did a fast calculation and came up with two or three friends who might have put some stripper up to this. and relaxed.
hey Jude, I said.
the caller turned out to be not a stripper. nor somebody’s drunk girlfriend. she was just an obsessed dental hygienist from san francisco who had read kiss me, judas like fifty times and wanted to quote certain lines to me and tell me about the rubber underwear and various sexual props she’d recently purchased and was really hoping she could meet me soon for lunch and who said she had called every baer listed in california, including my estranged ex-wife, in order to track me. I talked to the woman for thirty seconds and realized I was dealing with a stalker.
but didn’t know what to do. seemed like if I hung up, it might make her angry. and angry tends to boil down to dangerous. I gave her my p.o. box and finally begged her off the phone and changed my number to unlisted the next day, and the postcards started coming within a week.
scary shit.
dear phineas, what did you do with the rabbits. I’m dying to know what you’d look like with no feet…. and worse.
I ignored her and finished the book, but a nasty voice in my head said believe what you want boy but you’re writing it for her. then I had a falling out with my publisher, and the book went into storage. I started working on other things. screenplays, and other books that went nowhere.
and now that lost phineas book is coming back to life.
my dental hygienist is out there, I know. she’s cleaning somebody’s teeth or prepping them for anaesthesia, and she’s thinking about phineas and jude. she’s thinking about phineas and what she’d like to do to him. and as much as I wanted hell’s half to be a hopeful book, the final version is darker and creepier than it ever was, and much nastier than the other two. and I wonder if she’s going to come out of the woodwork and call me again.
hello, this is Jude.
no wonder I’m working on another book that has nothing to do with phineas poe.
tender is the night.
-wcb