move to western kansas last week – provisionally. i have business in colorado, drive there, my car explodes, and now i live on foot in the mountains. reach me via general delivery, larimer county.

submitting poetry to the magazine IMPERIUM in 1989 i must have included that glittery confetti in star shapes inside the submission. from the archives:

12-1-89

Dear Josh B. Axelrad,

Thank-you, sorry we cannot use your poems. You stars fell all over the place. Nice personal touch.

Sincerely,
Paul Cohen
IMPERIUM
PO Box 13077
Gainesville, FL 32604

errors, if any, are from the dot-matrix original.

came across a number of short stories i wrote in the late 90s. they are unreprintable by a person of conscience. but the following critical letter from a colleague in one of the writing workshops to which the stories were submitted demonstrates a certain consistency between my work then and now – a consistency, if not in quality, then in effect:

Dear Josh,
Apparently you have an abstract design for this stylish piece, stated perhaps as A Sardonic View of America. There is no beginning or middle to this piece, only an end. Lew is a victim of American culture, and [of] his own excesses, which are allowed to flow almost unchecked. You give us Vladek, the publicist, who is infuriated because his designs did not work out. You use character as a symbol, not as a reflection of people. Your symbols are of bleakness, cynical, caricatures of America. You give the ironic market report. You give us stylish metaphors such as German toilets. Your narrator is indifferent to your characters except where he can use them in his stylish flourishes.

[signed]

Salvatore

yeah, there is this move coming next week because of an Inner Voice who likes to say you can’t bleed your days away in brooklyn forever, and new york is too small of a city; a man needs breadth for his heart to expand. anyhow i’m going through boxes. generally i don’t go through the boxes, i just move them to the next place, so consequently some of the gear here has been lugged from mrrrningside heights to madrid to 3rd ave and 24th st to 125th to 79th and amsterdam to carroll gardens, back to 54th between 9th and 10th, back to carroll gardens on a different street, then up to willliamsburg or “Class City,” where i’ve lived for six years: personal lifetime record. i am going through the boxes now. among the enigmas is a computer-printed letter from my mother and addressed to a pet product manufacturer in southern california. why i possessed this ever, much less for a decade, 1 year and 4 months, is unknowable. it says:

February 22, 1999

Ideal Pet Products
24375 Ave. Rockefeller
Valencia, CA 91355

Please send one replacement medium size doggie door replacement flap to me at the above address. A check for $17.00 is enclosed to cover the cost plus shipping and handling.

Thank you.

Sincerely,
[signed]

errors and redundancies (if any) are in the original. i find it strangely moving. i can’t imagine a letter quite like this being written again in the world. i hope she got the flap she was looking for.

“Toku-san (780-865 CE) used to swing his big stick whenever he came out to preach in the hall, saying, ‘If you utter a word I will give you thirty blows; if you utter not a word, just the same, thirty blows on your head.’ This was all he would say to his disciples.”

- D.T. Suzuki, An Introduction to Zen Buddhism

SMITH Magazine has posted a correspondence between Lewis Schiff and me. Topics include dogs, Colorado, posturing, and the last time I passed through Las Vegas:

I was last in Vegas for two days in September of 2006. It was a bleak mission for me. As you know from the book, having sold to Penguin Press for a startling sum a memoir about my five years of high times and glorious achievements in the world of professional blackjack, I proceeded to have a mental breakdown while trying actually to write the book, and as part of that breakdown I began gambling pathologically and ingloriously on the Internet, playing poker, which had never been my game, and I effectively spent one year locked in psychic horror, doing this, day in and day out, frequently for multiple straight days uninterrupted by sleep, isolating myself socially, not writing anything, wrecking myself and my story and my reputation and my self-respect, ruining the premise of my book (and to a large extent, life) while going from flush to cash-poor.

Doing Cleveland radio tomorrow. The hosts are apparently monks – monk talk radio (Jesuit?). It streams live here.

My Amazon wishlist is current. It is a great place to select gifts for me.

There is a review in The Plain Dealer: “A phantasmically told first-person account.” Phantasmically is just what I was shooting for. The review also cites “personal doom” which is a sure sign my book was understood. I endorse this entire review, the objections it makes in particular.

I feel I should write something more here now. Lest I look whorish. There was a long night tonight I could tell you about. (I’ve been awake for 22 hours.) All I want to do is read, though. Sometimes when I think about setting private time aside so I can read, and when I dream about living in solitude, I think back to a particular Twilight Zone episode that seemed to me when I was a young kid to equate solitude with misanthropy. This idea bothered me. I identified very much with the Burgess Meredith character in the episode. I still do. But it’s not other people I loathe,  I know now; it’s me when I’m anywhere near them…

is admitting that you posed for this photograph. It is at least not photoshopped; fingers got burned during one take. The article accompanying is good.

(The Times (of London))