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July 13, 2020

Corona Virus Thoughts #9

I am trying not to write about current political events because it undermines my soul when I do. I considered writing a polemic titled “The New American Dick,” about the young white men I see defying the mask order in indoor public places. They are self assured, stupid-looking, smug, spoiling for confrontation and endangering others, particularly those working the front lines and ringing up their shitty food purchases. It is the height of arrogance and narcissism and…okay I wasn’t going to write that polemic.

The writing these days feels almost useless. Writing doesn’t change anyone’s mind anymore. Did it ever? Can anyone reading this cite a recent example of changing one’s mind after reading something? It feels like everything people read these days, at least as far as nonfiction goes, exists merely to confirm bias. Of course, when press released from the White House are totally fictional, who knows what to make of anything. I just wrote that and it didn’t make sense to me. But why try to edit it?

About the only thing making any sense to me these days is my friendship with chipmunks.

I’m reading Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm. I can’t say it’s holding up very well, but he was taking a run at the urban miscreant underclass during his heyday. The subject I would love to take on is the rural miscreant underclass of today. It’s all around me. Maybe that book would matter and change peoples’ minds.

One wonders if the President would admit the Corona Virus is something to take serious if he was just about ready to give up the ghost after contracting it?

No. He’d blame Obama for poisoning him.

More people on the move cross my path. They seem like they have no idea why they are moving.

Almost everyone I know outside my family doesn’t return phone calls.

I have exactly one pressing priority—shave.

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The Old Crow

Book Club

$11.99 + $3 Shipping

In December of 2020, author Matt Love moved to Portland to care for his elderly father.

Returning to the Rose City jolted Love after 23 years residing on the Oregon Coast. In the Sellwood neighborhood where he lived, Love met a homeless man named Mark. They formed a friendship over literature and the unforeseen magical discoveries in street libraries. They created The Old Crow Book Club, and yes, sometimes that involved drinking Old Crow on a sidewalk.

The club also included several other Sellwood homeless men and women cut from John Steinbeck's Cannery Row cloth.

In due course, Love learned the members' stories of homelessness and how they survived. He wondered what happened to his beloved state of Oregon and attempted to help Mark get off the streets only to run up against the seemingly futile policies to address the crisis.

Along the way, he had the best conversations about books in his life and wrote The Old Crow Book Club, where he recounts his interactions with the homeless people in his neighborhood and offers some suggestions how to alleviate what he considers the greatest man-made American humanitarian disaster of his adult life.

The Old Crow Book Club is available for purchase here and select independent bookstores in Oregon.

Choice Cuts

of Oregon Fiction

$22.99 + $3 Shipping

Choice Cuts of Oregon Fiction by Matt Love contains 20 stories, all set in Oregon. The cast of characters includes a depressed Santa Claus, Steve Prefontaine, Jack Ramsay's fast break offense, socialist squirrels, a clearcut, a dead deer, a junior high football team, a high school tennis player, a dissipated teacher, a man who evolves into a beaver, a homeless vet, a jilted preacher, a double date to a prom, rural degenerates, a wily caterer, and much more.

The publication of the collection culminates a quarter century of the author's writing about Oregon and rambling around the state.

Choice Cuts is available for purchase here, through Amazon, or select independent bookstores in Oregon.

The Savage

of State Street

Nestucca Spit Press is proud to present The Savage of State Street: The Thieving and Literary Lives of Smoky Epley. He is the greatest unheralded writer in Oregon history and also one of its more mediocre, colorful and persistent thieves.

$19.99 + $3 Shipping

In 1973, Oregon State University Press published Men in Exile: An Anthology of Creative Writing by Inmates of the Oregon State Penitentiary. Twenty-two of Smoky Epley's pieces appeared in the book.

Smoky spent most of his adult life in state and federal prisons for robbery. In 2008, during one of his brief stints of freedom, Smoky became friends with Matt Love, an Oregon author and publisher. They met after Love discovered Men in Exile and wrote a newspaper column about the landmark book. Smoky read the column and reached out.

He returned to prison in 2009 after forging a check. Upon his release in 2011, Love encouraged Smoky to write a memoir. He completed half of Auto before dying in February of 2013.