They Were In Love. Fuck The War.

Wait, no shit?  There’s a new Thomas Pynchon novel coming out this spring?  And it’s about a private detective?  Sold!  And if you’re not sold we’ve got a handy bite-sized non-exclusive excerpt from the said novel, entitled Inherent Vice:

“She came along the alley and up the back steps the way she always used to. Doc hadn’t seen her for over a year. Nobody had. Back then it was always sandals, bottom half of a flower-print bikini, faded Country Joe and the Fish T-shirt. Tonight she was all in flatland gear, hair a lot shorter than he remembered, looking just like she swore she’d never look. ‘That you, Shasta? The packaging fooled me there for a minute.’ ‘Need your help, Doc.’”

Speaking of Country Joe, here’s Today’s Vibe:

Enjoy in good health!

Pass The Stuffing

Happy American Turkey Day from all of your Patriotic Pilgrim Pals here at the Fort Saint Davids Dinner Table. This is our third — holy feck, third — Thanksgiving as a working, written Internet Magazine. Here’s our 2007 greetings, Happy Super Turkey Day and here’s our thoughts from T-Day, 2006, where we commanded you to eat FOOD.

Honestly we can’t believe it either, that we’ve been around over two whole stuffed w./giblets years now. We’re thankful for one thing and one thing only: you, our reader.

Love,

Your Friends at the Feast, the Daily Miltonian

Autumn III

These days, these unbelievably perfect days. You started with the sweater, you added the scarf. Now for the jackets. Autumn III is firmly upon us, an often underrated season that most people don’t know extends well into December (Winter I begins on Dec. 21st this year). Our kind of day is a day like yesterday, grayblue sky, Degas weather, coffees in hand, tramping around downtown among the crowds, a discussion of authors (from Brodkey to Berryman, Lewis Hyde to Lewis Lapham), an exchange of ideas. Head down to the river, ride the Willamette Greenway Trail, on bicycles, over damp leaves past flowing water. Baguette and cheese along the reedy banks, seagulls circle and cry overhead while geese tamp and peck in a nearby patch of wet grass. Boats tethered to docks. A sailboat, heading somewhere. Discussion. Weather drifting. Ideas.

Or else just talking film, through the streets of Southeast Portland, past porches, under trees. The films of Nick Roeg, the work of Monte Helleman, the new James Bond: what interests you, these days? What are you watching in the comfort of your own home or in the theaters of your town, now that it’s Autumn III?

Speaking of film: here’s the new trailer for Star Trek.

It’s late at night, the wind whipping through trees, the highway wooshing nearby, and baby it’s cold outside. What to do? How about a little jaunt down the hill, in search of neigborhood cats hiding in the shadows, waiting to purr? At the corner store we purchase chips and Perrier in a plastic bottle. Paris is wherever you want it to be.

Read stuff. Chris Ware’s latest Acme Novelty Library is out, we’re still on Augie March and we’ve also started Mao II, the Believer is readable again (we always change our mind about this) and there’s a new n+1 out any day now — yes, we’ll get it, they always get one more chance from us. Wrath of the Lich King is high on our Entertainment List these days, a long overdue revisit to Lost Season 1 (we can barely wait for Season 5), joy from the current season of the Office (never fails), a Wings documentary (yep!), and we’ll be enjoying a big ole’ tub of buttery popcorn along with a box of Goobers and a jumbo Coke when we go see the new Bond film one of these nights. As always, you’re more than welcome to join us.

Thanks to everyone who came out to our Three Stories event at Valentine’s last week. As Mister Strickland himself noted, “You could tell, there was definitely something in the room that night.” That something, it should go without saying, was you, and without you we’d have felt nothing. As always, keep making it Miltonian, and we’ll see you next time.

Literary Gamers: George Plimpton

There’s No Other Way

We’re in this.  Mid-November 2008 in a Brand-New America, and the days — surprisingly, thankfully — have been full of light, cider-wine light, and no matter how many leaves fall there’s still enough to cover the entire street with them.  It’s like every day is the day after Chinese New Year.  So Happy New Year, Miltonians.

Today’s photographic content continues to be from our Oct 21-28 East Coast Sojourn, words about which have been said elsewhere.  Today we’re looking out a window and what we see is: color, created by the sun.  We’re happy about this.  We’re reading novels, as usual, no Major Winter Projects yet (perhaps Gaddis, perhaps the new Bolano), just good healthy slabs of fiction, by authors we admire.  Are we reading poetry?  Not at the moment, but we plan on it.  So much so, we plan on bringing our Your Daily Poem of the Week feature back to these pages.  People missed it.  So did we.

We’re happy about it, about this, about all of everything, right now, at the moment, and problem for a long time to come.  Every night we’re out there, in quiet streets, walking across shadows that splash and slide down streets like the leaf-boats that ride the gutters in the rain.  Cats, moonlight, birdsong: our quiet evenings, our sleepy street.  It makes us happy, and we’re happy to experience it, explore it, enter it.  We’re in it.

What about you?  Where’s the final weeks of your Autumn taking you?  Are you up there, on the mountain?  Out in the meadows where the elk rut and bugle?  Are you still in Philadelphia?  Well when are you coming out here?

We’ve sort of refrained, lately, from captioning our photos — we sprinkle them like sweetener, dash them like spice, through our little narratives — but the above one should be accompanied by the note that it was taken on the campus of Burlington County College, in Pemberton, New Jersey.  Those facts are important.

What’s next?  Our event at Valentine’s was nothing less than a success, and as we’ve previously stated, it’s just the beginning.  Is there anything in particular you’d like to see, anything you want us to share?  Let us know.  After all, we’re doing this for you.  There’s not enough in it, just to do it for ourselves.  It’s a community we’re building here.

Ok, we admit it: as much as we want to continue on in our semi-serious/professional tone, the above photograph is making it pretty damn hard to do so.  We’re dropping our guard here.  Gameface: off.  Apologies.

No, we haven’t said much about the economy.  What is it, exactly, that we are supposed to have said?  Or that we should be saying, right now, right here?  If we had a few million we’d buy a huge home, stock it full of pets and books and friends, and publish everyone whose work we love, so that their writings can be read by everyone everywhere, on recycled paper pages instead of screens.  But we don’t and we probably won’t and there’s nothing wrong with saying that’s OK.  Since when was accepting the beautiful, bountiful and endless world around us with all it has to offer — for free — as some kind of “defeat”?  Who needs hope when the neverending is now?  Breakfast was toaster pastries, lunch is a salad, and dinner — this should go without saying — will be delicious.  We’ve got it all, man.  We don’t want a plane ticket to an expensive hotel room in Paris.  We want to watch the rest of the leaves fall off of the big tree right outside our window.  You wanna put a price tag on that?  No worries, we can afford it.

Your Host, Fort Saint Davids

You heard correctly: FSD is hosting an event.  This Wednesday, the 12th of November, at 8pm sharp at our favorite downtown location Valentine’s, there’s a scene going down.  THREE STORIES is what we’re calling the thing, and like a red wheelbarrow, it is the thing that it is.  The full package that we’re presenting to you (for free) includes FSD co-founder Erik Bader reading a self-contained (thus short story) excerpt from his 2006 novel True Jersey, Volume One.  Matthew Korfhage, a writer whom any casual reader of these pages is already well-familiar with, will read a short story that we all agree is a fine short story, and Garett Strickland, who was recently made an honorary Miltonian without his knowledge or permission, will kick things off with a piece of fiction which he has composed and of which he is fond.

This will be the first of a proposed Trilogy of events, the 2nd which will be insanely fun, tentatively entitled Thirty Stories (About Towns In New Jersey We Haven’t Been To) is basically our stab at those clever and generally self-absorbed writing projects that smug young men tend to invent, and by stab we mean with a pen so that it says ouch and bends to our will, at which point we will rescue the concept and make it Fun and Inclusive and definitely 100% in the interest of You, our Reader and our closest Friend.  Three writers, writing ten extremely short stories a piece, about ten towns they’ve never been to, all in New Jersey, which we chose because it just made sense.  Cool, right?  Our final event will be titled Three New Stories, because we’re all writing new ones right now, and by that time they’ll be done and we want you to be the first person we share them with, so we’re scheduling an event so you won’t miss out.

To be honest, we really can’t wait to see you on Wednesday night.  I mean, there’s excited, and then there’s us.  Rah-whoo!

Get Back To Where You Once Belonged

Haunted Weekend here in Portland, as we offer you up the first clutch of photographs fresh from our 302/215/609 Excursion.  It’s a mistymoist morning here in glorious Portland, Oregon, dampyellow leaves crowding the sidewalks, fogs exploring the nooks of the West Hills above, the air fresh and full as the day wakes up and puts on its costume, ready to trick, eager to treat.  Still, it’s hard to forget the crisp snap of the East Coast air or the loud crack of the homerun bat, as cheers erupted through those old streets that we keep with us for life.  Life, we all sigh here in the FSD Offices today on the first day of November, it’s Life we’re talking about and it’s all we’ll ever be talking about for as long as we’re able.  We’re just glad we’ve got you to talk about it with.