PUBLICATION IN THE AGE OF NEGATION Vol 2 Part 1

HAVE YOU EVER RENTED A ROOM

I had to stop saying ‘yes’ to things, especially to appearing at the sort of events for which there was no material reward. But there was rarely any material reward for what I did, and if I declined every unpaid engagement I was asked to participate in, then I wouldn’t get to do anything, and wouldn’t even be rewarded with the occasional love of strangers that is the accustomed compensation for a so-called poet’s trade. It is an accepted and unquestioned fact of life in the arts that poets are not to be financially rewarded for their work. Their rewards lie elsewhere, apparently, in a more rarefied sphere. Why would they need money anyway? They’re already poor.

Unless, that is, they put their words to music. And I had agreed to pay tribute to a poet who had made the smart move of putting his words to music, and accordingly received a lot of respect... for being a poet. Then he killed himself, and his reputation as a genius was sealed for eternity.

Much as I liked David Berman’s work, I made a decision not to prepare for the reading until the last minute. On the night of the event I combed through his one book and a sheaf of unpublished work. Then I got out of the bath and checked my phone. One message had arrived:

“Hi,
I had told you that I was going
to sell this house
on 12/ 29/24.
And, I said that the same thing
that I was going to sell on
1/2/25 2nd time.
I have to fix this house to sell
so you have to
leave this house by
1/31/25.
And the rest of everything
my attorney will work on that.”

This message was not entirely unexpected but it still sent cold, sharp shivers through my so-called system. Over the last few weeks my landlady had been showing up on the doorstep in a semi-hysterical and virtually incoherent state. After more than forty years she had discovered that her husband was—as she repeatedly wailed in broken English—“a bad man.” Those forty years would now feel like a waste of time. That was a shame.

With her marriage over, she had no further reason for remaining in this city, or this country, and was planning upon returning to Korea with her sister, a cheerless, fussy, fearful little woman who accompanied her on these unannounced visits.

My landlady seemed to be under the impression that I was going to pack up over twenty years’ worth of possessions and find a new home within the space of a month: a new apartment that were it comparable to my current abode, would rent for at least twice as much as what I was currently paying—adapting to current extortionate market-rate rents would be challenging, to say the least.

It was ludicrous, of course, not to mention classless, unprofessional and illegal to treat a longtime tenant in such a discourteous manner. My landlady had lost her marbles and was going to drive me mad as a result. The cold chill continued to course through me. This thing would be taking over my entire fucking life.

There was probably a lot more to it than my landlady was letting on about, and most of the time I couldn’t make out what she was on about owing to her limited grasp of the English language but now, despite her perpetual moaning about money, she would be paying off an attorney, who would presumably have a clearer understanding of the law than she did.

My landlady was clueless on the subject of tenant’s rights but who knew what kind of devious tactics an unscrupulous attorney might resort to: This talk about fixing the house up before selling it was a ruse, probably the first of many. The house didn’t need fixing up. In the twenty years I’d lived in it repairs had only been made when desperately necessary, most notably when I had to open a case with the housing board in order to force them to finally fix the roof after it leaked catastrophically during an unprecedented summer rainstorm. At the time it would have been easy to sue for property damage and willful neglect, but I didn’t go in for that sort of thing.

My natural tendency would be to just roll over. I didn’t want to have to go to war, but there was no reason to be accommodating with these people, and now, although it ran against my nature, action would be imperative. The thought of suicide flashed through my mind. But I couldn’t do that either. There was still a lot to enjoy, and there was still so much of me for others to enjoy. I didn’t have time to do anything about the situation or even to think about it, or to compose myself. It was Saturday night, for fuck’s sake, and I had to go out and entertain the public at the Berman event.

“Hey...”

As I walked up a merry voice hailed me from the surprisingly large crowd gathered outside the venue.

I recognized the familiar and attractive face of a young woman named Marina.

“I’m excited to see you read,” she said.

“Don’t get your hopes up.”

“Aren’t you excited?”

“I’m just reading Berman’s stuff,” I said, taken aback by her enthusiasm. I had to remember that some people did get excited about this sort of thing.

“That’s cool,” she said.

“Why should I read his work in public,” I rejoined. “He’s not going to read mine.”

“He’s dead,” she said, flatly.

“I know,” I said. “Can I have my joke back?”

“This is my friend, Will,” said Marina, tolerantly changing the subject, and referring to the pleasant-faced young man who was standing beside her. “He just got back to town. He’s been traveling for the last two years.”

“That’s nice,” I said. “Where did he go?”

“He went to twenty-seven countries,” she said, exhibiting pride in her friend’s achievement.

“I must try that sometime,” I said.

The pleasant-faced young man stood there, gawping at me. With distressing recent developments stampeding through my mind, I wasn’t really in the mood for striking up a new acquaintanceship with somebody I’d probably never see again, but he seemed to be expecting me to make conversation.

“Did you go to Africa?” I asked, at a loss for anything else to say.

“No.”

I felt a sickeningly urgent desire to get away from these attractive young people whose carefree dispositions were contrasting sharply with my current state of mind. What did my landlady mean by “the rest of everything”? Despite having lived in this country for almost her entire life, her English skills were limited, but...

“He was on five continents,” said Marina.

“Huh... Africa?” I said again, jolted out of free-falling morbid stupor.

“No. I already told you what continents I was on,” said the pleasant-faced young man, unpleasantly.

“I’m sorry, I wasn’t listening,” I said. “I have to go in there and kiss David Berman’s ass.”

“Can you put us on the list?” Marina burst out.

Obviously, they had the dough. The guy had just been around the world, which must have required a certain amount of expenditure. It didn’t make any difference. People were always willing to pay fifteen dollars for a watered down cocktail but were stubbornly resistant to forking out a comparable sum to support their friends’ endeavors.

“There’s no guest list,” I said.

“How are you doing?” asked another young acquaintance when I entered the theater’s adjoining bar. “You doing all right?”

“I was doing all right until half an hour ago, when I received a text message from my landlady telling me she wants me out of my apartment by the end of the month.” I was too shaken by this fresh horror not to mention it. So I mentioned it, and immediately regretted having done so.

“Well, if I don’t make some money this month I’m going to get kicked out of my place,” she interposed, as oblivious to my plight as she was to her own privileged position. In the unlikely event that she was actually struggling, she could always move back in with her parents in Santa Barbara.

There was no point in unburdening myself. I needed to get away from people and brood over my misfortunes in peace, and this clearly wasn’t the time or place.

“You’re reading tonight?” Said Danny G. Arce, a writer who presided over the Collective Narcissism reading series and who threw hot literary parties at his wife’s house in Silver Lake.

“Yeah, reading Berman’s stuff.”

“You don’t like him?” Said Danny, apprehending my tone of voice..

“I like him a lot but I couldn’t find much that was suited to oratorial purposes, honestly,” I said.

“Really?” said Danny, skeptically.

“Berman’s a great songwriter, not a great poet. He’d probably agree with that. Twenty percent of his stuff is good, and that’s a strong showing, even for a great poet. Even the very greatest, take Shelley or Keats. Eighty percent of Shelley is expendable. But you probably don’t read that sort of thing.”

“Are there any exceptions to this rule?” Danny asked, scoffingly.

“Shakespeare has an eighty percent strike rate. My stuff, seventy percent. Weldon Kees, about fifty percent.”

“Never heard of him.”

“I didn’t think you would have,” I said. “He disappeared or killed himself when he was quite young. It’s a bit of a mystery. So he didn’t write much, that’s crucial. The more somebody writes the more there is that can be discarded.”

“Curmudgeon,” said Danny, softly. “You don’t like anything....”

“Here we go again,” I said, stifling a familiar groan. “I suffer, in fact, from precisely the opposite problem: I like everything, or I try to. I’ve spent far too much time exploring and enjoying other people’s work at the expense of doing my own.”

I had hoped that Danny might be above the common ruck who make facile, misguided and insulting assumptions based upon their own limited frames of reference and general myopia, and that he might even be capable of enjoying a little harmless banter. But once again I was sadly mistaken, and disappointed.

“When’s your novel coming out?” he asked, changing the subject to something I’d presumably warm towards.

“This spring,” I said. “I’m considering....” But there was no point in mentioning that I was planning on starting a Substack. Would Danny be prepared to contribute five dollars a month to my cause? Of course he wouldn’t. I excused myself and took a seat in the theater. There wasn’t an empty seat in the house.

“Most of the proceeds will be going to charity,” stated the MC as the festivities commenced..

What about the rest of them? I wondered. Naturally, none would be dispersed among the performers: we were all doing it out of the goodness of our hearts, for the love of Berman. I didn’t ask him to kill himself, for fuck’s sakes. He deserved the attention, but he would have appreciated it more while he was alive, and from what I knew of his character, having been slightly acquainted with him, he wouldn’t have wanted to become this hallowed figure that nobody was allowed to criticize, and he wouldn’t have cared much for the over-reverential nature of this event. How he scraped by was something of a mystery, and he didn’t have to scrape very hard. There was no way that he could have subsisted on the proceeds of his recordings, but he seemed to live quite comfortably - on a material level. Now, with the threat of upheaval hovering, I’d be envying anybody that was more securely situated than myself. I would have to be on my guard against bitterness. No longer could I freely indulge in the luxury of resentment, and I resented being deprived of that sweet liberty.

A poet was earnestly reciting a Berman poem, and the audience was earnestly listening to her. I did my piece, then I sat down again and reviewed my exchange with Danny G. Arce. His idiotic comment about my not liking anything returned to vex me, especially as it came from somebody that pretended to like everything and therefore didn’t truly care about anything: I could name a hundred books off the top of my head that you haven’t read and have never heard of. Just because I don’t ‘like’ the work of every cute girl that reads diary entries off a cell phone in front of a bunch of models and influencers at some ‘literary’ coke party for the independently wealthy, don’t assume that I don’t ‘like’ anything was what I should have said back to him. Why should I care about offending people anymore?

Another bearded reader took to the stage and I withdrew to the bar, where I let my thoughts run freely over an overpriced beer. Residential displacement could pose a very real threat to somebody’s mental health. I knew (of) three people that had killed themselves when faced with being booted out of their long-term living situations on no-fault evictions. There was the well-known art critic Floyd Boring, who flung himself out of his 14th-floor window when the building was about to be sold. Then there was the always charming and dapper Charles, one of the most sweet-natured men I’d ever met, who committed a violent and visibly spectacular death by hanging himself from the side of the downtown—‘Arts District’—apartment building of which he was a longtime tenant.

Without a safety net, clearly.

“Thanks, man.” A hirsute, plaid-clad young man reached out to shake my hand on his way back from the rest room. “You really nailed it.”

“Thanks, man,” I said. “Who are you?”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said.

“That’s good to hear too,” I said, and it was: Finally, somebody had the balls to admit it, and he seemed as eager to get away from me as he had been to compliment me.

Another eviction-hastened case of defenestration I had heard about was committed by an aging poet in Venice. This was the the steep price exacted upon some sensitive souls who were foolhardy enough to lead modest existences of unrepentant bohemianism in an unforgiving new age.

These suicides were all single. They were, in fact, all single middle-aged male writers...

“That was awesome. I liked your whole vibe.” Another young man saw fit to bestow a compliment upon me as the crowd filed out of the auditorium.

“Thanks.”

That would be my reward for the night.

The bar area filled up. People merged into interweaving groups and gushed about how successful the event had been; performers congratulated each other; conversations blurred into each other.

“Are you a poet too?”

“I wish you wouldn’t call me that.”

“Why?”

“It’s okay to be called a poet, if one is anything other than a poet.”

“Did you know David Berman.”

“We communicated a little by email, twenty years ago. How about you?”

“When my first book came out, I sent him a copy of it... and he didn’t write back. So I stopped listening to his music.”

“Respect.”

Through the crowd an attractive woman with short dark hair and pale skin smiled at me. I didn’t know her name or anything about her, but she always smiled at me in public. This time, however, she came in for the conversation and addressed me by name. If we’d met before, I would have remembered her, but not knowing what else to say, and yielding to her presumption of familiarity, I asked her where she was from:

“Uiopoiu.”

“It’s loud in here and I’m half-deaf. Where’s that?”

“Philadelphia,” she said, leaning in and smiling.

“How long have you been here?”

“Five years,” she said. “How about you?”

“Many years, many years.”

I changed the subject. She taught literature at a Waldorf school. “What have you been subjecting them to recently?”

“‘Song of Solomon,’” she said. “It’s my favorite book. I’ve read it nine times.”

“I just reread it,” I said, impressed that she read the Bible as a work of literature. “It’s incredibly short. I also just reread Ecclesiastes.”

“Huh...?” She seemed confused.

After some spluttering back and forth, the penny dropped: She was referring to a Toni Morrison novel.

“What’s going on after this?” I asked.

“I’m just going to go over and play with my boyfriend’s new kitten,” she said.

“That’s nice,” I said. At which point we were interrupted and she drifted away, unsmilingly.

“Who was that?” I asked Warren Debris, a semi-successful musician and occasional poet, who immediately took her place.

“That was Gloria Calvery. She runs Passive Fist,” he said, referring to another local reading series. “She goes out with Billy Combest.”

“Who’s that?”

“He plays guitar in Vincent Drain.”

“Naturally.”

“What was that thing you read?”

“It was from a sheaf of Berman’s unpublished work that somebody passed along to me.”

“I loved it,” said Warren.

“Dude’s got a tight rap... for a musician. But if his reputation had to rest on the basis of his actual poetry he’d be languishing in abject penurious obscurity along with the rest of us,” I said, making a pointlessly mean-spirited observation out of envy.

"Who was it that said ‘All art constantly aspires to the condition of music’?" said Warren.

“I don’t know, but it’s true.”

“Does it though?” said Warren. “What about photography?”

“It’s not an art,” I said. “Or it isn’t anymore. Everybody should be able to take a good photograph. That goes without saying, just as everybody should be able to write cursively or sew a button onto a shirt, and now that everybody does it...”

“This is an amazing turnout,” said Warren.

“Yes, he was well-loved. My main takeaway from his death was that my death wouldn’t receive a fraction of the attention his received, and he’s not even famous. So there doesn’t seem to be much point in killing myself anymore. It’s good to take something positive out of that tragedy.”

“It was sad,” said Warren, putting me in my place.

“Of course it was sad. That’s why I’m laughing. You’d have to have a heart of stone not to laugh.”

“You should become a musician,” said Warren, unhelpfully.

“Too late,” I said. And it was. “And it would have been too easy.” And it wouldn’t have.

“When’s your novel coming out?” asked Warren.

“In the spring.”

“Well, that’s good.”

“Yes, and I’m thinking about starting a Substack in order to document the publication process and events surrounding it. I just received some rather distressing news and some additional income is going to be necessary. D’you think you might be prepared to contribute five dollars a month to such a worthy cause...”

“Hey,” said Carl Bringuier butting in and directly addressing Warren. “You should read at the next Social Engineering.”

“What would that entail?” asked Warren.

“The theme is rivalry. All you’d have to do is select a piece of writing on that subject and introduce it,” said Carl, ignoring me.

“I’d have to give a speech?” Warren asked, sounding appalled at the prospect.

“Yes,” said Carl to Warren, “a very brief one. Just pick something you like, preferably something funny. You’ve got plenty of time. I’ll be in New York all next month. We’ll talk about it when I get back.”

“What should I do?” said Warren, turning to me as soon as Carl slunk away to seek the next minor celebrity worthy of his pestering. Warren would never be able to pick anything without recourse to Google, whereas I could come up with numerous selections off the top of my head and deliver an entertaining speech... but I wasn’t a musician.

“I don’t fucking know,” I said, despairingly.

It was a night rich with dread, envy and exasperating moments of esprit de l’escalier. I didn’t dislike Carl Bringuier, I just disliked his attitude towards me. These climbers always assumed that everybody else was as impressed by other people’s credentials as they were, and they could sniff you out if you weren’t committed to playing the same game on their terms: you were therefore in the dismissible minority.

The room slowly emptied, and I didn’t want to be the last to leave. I sat in my parked car, brooding freely at last. The reality of my situation was sinking in more deeply. I had never realized how unworldly my landlady was. She seldom raised the rent, although it was in her power to do so in accordance with standard rent control rates. For over twenty years her ignorance had worked in my favor, but it was starting to get on my nerves. Her husband had always been at her side, doing the talking. He was a jaunty old Caucasian who wore shorts and Crocs, and seemed to spend most of his time propping up the golf club bar, while she was a slender, nervous Korean woman who had some sort of job that she had now retired from. Although she owned the house it was with him that I usually communicated, owing to the language barrier and her deference towards him in business matters. Now that he was out of the picture, the unbearable sister was clearly making the decisions, and it had been decided that the house was going to be sold and they were going to return to Korea together, which put me in a disturbingly awkward position.

It was not beyond the realm of possibility that I could get booted out of my long-time apartment at exactly the same time as my novel, which directly addressed the subject of gentrification in this very neighborhood, was about to be published. This bitter irony was not lost on me.