The composition of the first draft of The White Album happened over three days, in the summer of 2008. The three days caught me in the middle of the move I was making between two flats in Logan Square. Once the hard drive was set up in the new place, I was able to let loose there. It was, in fact, cathartic to write The White Album; I was, for real, letting loose. The writing was informed by a kind of white heat, owing to a physiological sense of being pressurized. This, because I felt the much lower ceilings, and much more squat space, were closing in on me. The lightning bolt of the three days had some sense of desperation in them, as though time were running out, as reflected in downsized residency. In 2008, such turned out to be the case very much. I also remember the summer of 2009, when The White Album appeared, much differently. By 2009, there was a gravity and formality to the desolation of the streets. The party was over, and that was that. Awful, but easy to pin down. At the Last Drop, the social hi-jinx turned ugly, and the standardized Aughts Philly laissez faire transformed into everyone-get-in-line. I kept running into hob-goblin people from my past. The book came out; got linked at a bunch of the right places; did some somersaults on Goodreads; that was it, for then. Books take forever, right? But that sense of the squalid, built into The White Album as a literary construct, and owing merely to low ceilings in Westminster Arch as a contingency, works, I feel, as a synecdoche for what the late Aughts were about in Philly, and the East Coast. I also credit Ungovernable editor Lars Palm for keeping the site, and the pdfs, clean, sturdy, cared-for. And the flat I’m in has higher ceilings now.
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