In an earlier post, I presented the synopsis of my novel in progress, Housebreaking the Muse. As noted, the novel is haunted by the figure of Jacques Rigaut, the French Dadaist, gigolo, addict, and suicide. Though I'd long had an interest in the Dadas, I didn't hear the name "Jacques Rigaut" until I stumbled upon…
“Sound of Slack” – New Track from April 25
Check out this weekend's madness: the new April 25 offering, "Sound of Slack." This song was inspired by a friend who applied the title phrase to the sound of the hundreds of flip-flop clad folks roaming around our town, mouths agape or distractedly texting, oblivious. The video isn't meant to be anything other than a…
Our Night of Long Knives
(spam poem by Edward Desautels) we looked with cold eyes on the little men standing in our gardens and gravely offfered these phantoms every consideration and kindness on the opposite side of our little town doctors made their discoveries and shut the dark neighborhoods that had taken leave of their senses we believed ourselves perfect…
Craft Notes: Mind Mapping My Work, Then and Now
Before I knew what a mind map was, I was mind mapping. Using scrap paper and pen I worked out some of the more difficult lines of association comprising the worm hole structure of my novel Flicker in the Porthole Glass. The following artifact shows a mind mapping exercise I completed sometime in 1993 over…
Craft Notes: Waste Not, Want Not
Years ago I took my first writing course, an undergraduate intro fiction offering taught by a high-strung, tenured loon whose own aspirations as a playwright had burned out along with his ability to comport himself civilly in social situations. His over-the-top insistence on a kind of Victorian propriety, combined with his inability to suppress his…
Ed Desautels' Maximum Fiction 