The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin.

Always upon first boarding a large and populous ship at sea, especially a foreign one, with a nondescript crew such as Lascars or Manila men, the impression varies in a peculiar way from that produced by first entering a strange house with strange inmates in a strange land. Both house and ship–the one by its walls and blinds, the other by its high bulwarks like ramparts–hoard from view their interiors till the last moment, but in the case of the ship there is this addition: that the living spectacle it contains, upon its sudden and complete disclosure, has, in contrast with the blank ocean which zones it, something of the effect of enchantment. The ship seems unreal; these strange costumes, gestures, and faces but a shadowy tableau just emerged from the deep, which directly must receive back what it gave.

A great program that works with kids who would be the first in their family to attend college. Here’s a shot of them holding their copies of Mexican WhiteBoy (note the old, dumb cover).

I hope I get to meet a few of these folks at the Tucson Book Festival March 13 and 14.

The AZ Crew

Would you like to confess? said the priest.
I did it, said Suttree.
A quick smile.
I’d like some wine.
Oh you can’t have any wine, said a nursevoice.
The priest bent and opened his little leather case and took out a cruet. You had a close call, he said.
All my life I did.
He tipped winedrops from the birdtongue spout down Suttree’s throat. Suttree closed his eyes to savor it.
Do you have any more?
Just a drop. Not too much, I dont think.
That works, Suttree said.
Are you feeling better?
Yes.
God must have been watching over you. You very nearly died.
You would not believe what watches.
Oh?
He is not a thing. Nothing ever stops moving.
Is that what you learned?
I learned that there is one Suttree and one Suttree only.
I see said the priest.
Suttree shook his head. No, he said. You dont.

The lamps along the bridge winked on. Cryptic shapes of neon gas bloomed on the wall of the night and the city reached light by light across the plain, the evening land, the lights in their gaudy penumbra shoring up the dark heavens, the stars set back in their sockets.

Through the lens of unforewarned Norman, Sabbath saw what he looked like, had come to look like, didn’t care that he looked like, deliberately looked like–and it pleased him. He’d never lost the simple pleasure, which went way back, of making people uncomfortable, comfortable people especially.

Yesterday I got two copies of the brand new paperback version of Mexican WhiteBoy (hits bookstores January 10, 2010).

Personally, I’m not a big fan of the old cover. Seems like a 70s throwback cover (minus any sense of irony). Actually, lemme be honest. I pretty much despise it.

Take a look for yourself: Read the rest of this entry »

The first language humans had was gestures. There was nothing primitive about this language that flowed from people’s hands, nothing we say now that could not be said in the endless array of movements possible with the fine bones of the fingers and wrists. The gestures were complex and subtle, involving a delicacy of motion that has since been lost completely.

During the Age of Silence, people communicated more, not less. Basic survival demanded that the hands were almost never still, and so it was only during sleep (and sometimes not even then) that people were not saying something or other. No distinction was made between the gestures of language and the gestures of life.

The shop owner did not try to push the book on any of her customers. She knew that in the wrong hands such a book could easily be dismissed or, worse, go unread. Instead she let it sit where it was in the hope that the right reader might discover it.

And that’s what happened.

Once upon a time there was a boy. He lived in a village that no longer exists, in a house that no longer exists, on the edge of a field that no longer exists, where everything was discovered and everything was possible. A stick could be a sword. A pebble could be a diamond. A tree a castle.