Michael Stutz's Blog

A new poem video of my new work, The Long Goodnight of the August Night.

Cape Cod has been on my mind lately. So I recently visited the Cape by way of Thoreau, in the NewPages blog.

This is one of several short book essays I’ve written this summer — I’ve read about 18 books since the last week of May.

My mind has also been on the future replacement of this site, which I’ve been thinking of for years, and see that it’s probably about time to do.

Recently put aside the behemoth manuscript of the novel started this summer — and from the same source came a dozen new HEAVEN songs.

I don’t believe in politics. I never really did — I’m of no party whatsoever and I have no interest and I abjure myself entirely of all of it. It’s all a tired LOL and not for me. I just don’t care. Almost nothing could be more boring. Sure, I’ve been tricked and conned and fooled and pulled like anyone else, like almost everyone. The only answer is to simply ignore it. Just like ‘social media,’ which is one of the biggest boring jokes and cons of this wreckéd age. All real friendship, life a...

In the course of going through and making sense of my sprawling and unwieldy vinyl collection, I’ve been sharing what I find by DJing at clubs. When I started, I wondered why I hadn’t done it sooner. So I’m spinning at Porco Lounge and Tiki Room again this month — mostly vintage lounge, and inevitably this night will end up as a kind of tribute to Doris Day. A decade ago — almost to the day — I stayed at her place in Carmel. I knew her passing was inevitable, but it was still sad when it happ...

William S. Burroughs often suggested that one’s dreams are a valuable target for the writer to plunder. But what he never said, nor made explicit, was how the dreams of others might provide a writer with direction and material. And yet it happened to him: the dream of a literary character, as it occurs inside a novel of the past, appears to have given Burroughs a massive treasure cache.

The dream is Raskolnikov’s, in Crime and Punishment. And it brings William S. Burroughs to life. His whole...

I will never get over it, and that’s all there is to it.

So I have about five Kurt stories. Maybe six. Here are two of them.

The Weather of My Youth

Kurt Cobain Doesn’t Know Much Of Anything

Tim May died last month. We hadn’t spoken in at least a lifetime, but he was a daily voice on my screen at a certain time back in the 90s, in the day when the cypherpunks list was not only required reading but a required place to be — a time when at least a few of us at Wired held serious to the idea of Marshall McLuhan as the magazine’s “patron saint.” Those were the days when the net came to me through the full-screen pine mailer inside a Linux shell, at the speed of an ISDN line — one that...