After a heavy rainstorm last night, we woke up to the sun. If there's a heaven, we agreed, it would alternate between a rainy Friday night and a cool, bright Saturday morning.
The promise of a walk in the garden got everyone's attention, although we still felt some reluctance to throw off the covers. Saturday morning offers a seemingly unlimited amount of time to get all of the fun and creating things accomplished, despite the certainty -- as a survey on the advertising screen in the elevator at my office building confirmed -- that this time will pretty quickly disappear without accomplishing more than a small fraction of them at best. In the least surprising results ever, the survey informed its captive audience that over 90 percent of the people who work Monday through Friday feel some form of "Sunday night blues." Mostly I try to avert my eyes from the elevator messaging -- there's nothing more demoralizing than reading shallow "management tips" from leading business Tweeters: "Every day when you wake up, make a list of five things you can do to improve the customer experience and then tackle three items on that list" (I'm paraphrasing but I'm sure you get the idea) -- but it's sometimes difficult not to look at a screen. I recently read something about the time most of us spend watching television or looking at the internet, and it occurred to me that whatever longevity gains we've made in the past few centuries have all been given to passive entertainment. Maybe it's a good thing: I certainly watch my share of television, and find it very comforting at times. (The same could be said of heroin addiction, of course.)
Downstairs, the tulips were also straining to reach the morning sun. They weren't going to make it, but it was nice to let them believe.
I tried to decide if the candle added or detracted from the image. I squandered precious minutes of my Saturday morning fussing with the arrangement!
I finally made it outside, which had been bleached of color by the heavy rains and, well, nine months of temperatures below freezing. One benefit of a hard winter is that April doesn't seem so cruel this year; as long as it doesn't snow, I'm going to be very happy with the weather. (Sometimes poor behavior can result in more realistic expectations, in other words.) In important news on the block, someone bought the long abandoned house next door to us, which means that it will be inhabited for the first time in at least forty years. We met one of the new neighbors and he quickly dispelled our fears that he had oozed up from a nearby hellmouth with plans to torment us with curses and other forms of evil witchcraft. When you don't have neighbors for a long time, you get paranoid when people -- who are really the cause of so many problems, when you step back and think about it -- finally move in!
If the pin oaks can make it, then so can we.
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04/05/2014
ORDER HERE
A RADICAL NEW MYTH ABOUT SEX, FAITH, AND THOSE OF US WHO WILL NEVER DIE
A young boy wanders into the woods of Harlem and witnesses the abduction of his sister by a glowing creature. Forty years later, now working as a New York City homicide detective, Gus is assigned to a case in which he unexpectedly succumbs to a vision that Helen is still alive. To find her, he embarks on an uorthodox investigation that leads to an ancient civilization of gods and the people determined to bring them back.
In this colossal new novel from the author of The Metropolis Case, the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice collides with a new religion founded by three corporate office workers, creating something beautiful, illogical, and overwhelming. Part sex manifesto, part religious text, part Manhattan noir—with a dose of deadly serious, internet inspired satire—#gods is a sprawling inquest into the nature of faith and resistance in the modern world. With each turn of the page, #gods will leave you increasingly reborn.
Praise for #gods
“#gods is a mystery, an excavation of myths, an index of modern life, a gay coming-of-age story, an office satire, a lyrical fever dream, a conspiracy. One of the most ambitious novels in recent memory—and a wild, possibly transformative addition to the canon of gay literature—it contains multitudes, and seethes with brilliance.” —Mark Doten, author of The Infernal
“Matthew Gallaway’s #gods is a novel so brilliant, so funny, so full of strange and marvelous things, I couldn’t stop writing OMG WTF I <3 THIS SO MUCH in its margins. It’s rare to find a novel that so dazzlingly reinvigorates age-old meditations on faith and f&!*ing, art and eros. Luminous, enterprising, and sublimely cheeky, #gods tells the story, the myth, the dream of the human soul in all its glorious complexity.” —Suzanne Morrison, author of Yoga Bitch
“Matthew Gallaway’s storytelling manages to be both dreamy and serious; lean and luxurious. His words carry an incantatory power of mythic storytelling where beauty and savagery wrap around each other like bright threads in a gorgeous tapestry.” —Natasha Vargas-Cooper, author of Mad Men Unbuttoned: A Romp Through 1960s America
“If the ancient gods were just like us, only more so, then the same could be said for this strange, wonderful book, in which the mundane sorrows and small triumphs of very ordinary lives glow ever so slightly around the edges, sometimes quite literally. At once an oddly romantic send-up of dead-end office culture and an offbeat supernatural procedural, #gods is terrifically weird, melancholy, sexy, and charming.” —Jacob Bacharach, author of The Bend of the World
'It’s to the credit of Matthew Gallaway’s enchanting, often funny first novel that it doesn’t require a corresponding degree of obsession from readers, but may leave them similarly transported: the book is so well written — there’s hardly a lazy sentence here — and filled with such memorable lead and supporting players that it quickly absorbs you into its worlds.'
-- The New York Times
Music: Death Culture at Sea and Saturnine
Listen or download songs and records from my indie-rock past with Saturnine here and Death Culture at Sea here.
Music Video: Remembrance of Things Past
Watch the rock opera Remembrance of Things Past written and performed by Saturnine and Frances Gibson, starring Bennett Madison and Sheila McClear.
Video: The Chaos Detective
The Chaos Detective is a series about a man searching for 'identity' as he completes assignments from a mysterious organization. Watch the first episode (five parts) on YouTube.