M. David Hornbuckle

Author: mdavidhornbuckle

  • Bed-Stuy Reflections

    It is interesting to me how much New York is segregated by race. Having grown up in Alabama, I saw a lot of this, but I want to think New York is so much more civilized. Of course, I know it isn’t. I saw “Do the Right Thing,” which takes place in the neighborhood where I live and paints a fairly accurate picture of what the neighborhood is like.

    I live in a neighborhood of Brooklyn called Bedford-Stuyvessant, or Bed-Stuy. It is a very large, mostly black, mostly lower class neighborhood. One of the main drags, which runs about four blocks south of my block, is Fulton Street, which was apparently one of the main thoroughfares of the Underground Railroad. In fact, there is a movement afoot (getting resistance from some of the other neighborhood) to rename the street Harriet Tubman Boulevard or something of that nature.

    Friends of mine tell me that lots of people, by which they mean white people, are moving to Bed-Stuy these days, but still I rarely see another white face. When I do, they seem to disappear into their apartment buildings quickly and silently as ghosts. Sometimes, I do get strange looks when I walk down the street, probably due more to the way I dress than the color of my skin. But I can’t help wondering if it’s just because I’m white, and I’m walking around as if I live here. And I do live here, at least for the time being.

    Once, walking down Fulton Street, I passed three white cops. I saw one of them point at me, and I’m sure I heard him say, “There’s a pioneer.” I understand that this is the local vernacular for white people, especially young people and artists, moving into questionable neighborhoods, typically neighborhoods that are mostly poor and black or Hispanic. But the term caused me to reflect on its several meanings. I like thinking of myself as a pioneer. It suits me.

    The pattern of gentrification appears to begin with artist types looking for cheap quarters. The next step is that since a neighborhood has started to fill up with artists, art events start happening, followed by bars, restaurants and nightclubs. People start buying up and renovating property. The hipsteratti (I just made that up – cute, right? I think it’s clear whom I mean) move in. Before you know it rent is as high as in the Village, the artists start looking for another ghetto, and the pattern begins again. This is something that everyone in New York knows and accepts as part of life.

  • Topless Tapas

    I had a funny idea for a story location: a business called “Topless Tapas.”

  • Form and Function

    I have found myself lately fascinated with the epistolary form. As a form of narrative it has few pretenses, being a natural evolution of the use of language to relay information from one person to another when oral language is not an option or isn’t as convenient. Subconsciously, I think my approach to keeping this journal is informed by that form as well. It could well be interpreted as a letter to a person I know well but seldom see, a way of communicating and preserving my daily mundane thoughts.

    I also like the dialogue format for similar reasons – a simple transcription of oral transaction. Again, it’s a very natural way to use language as a method of preserving a moment. I wonder then, why I don’t incorporate these forms more into my own fiction. Instead, I tend more toward methods that attempt to contrive narrative without much structure, like trying to make buildings out of wind.

    This question has been a tension for as long as I have had any ambition to be a serious writer and one of the reasons that I virtually stopped writing for a few years. There is a sense of alchemy about making a story come to life from the void of an empty page, which I think adds to the desire to remove any semblance of “form” from the story. Break it down to the essential symbols that create the characters, the setting and the action. But when you do that, you have before you the virtually impossible task of making something recognizable from things that are unfamiliar.

    There is an aspect of this same attempted alchemy in some of the music I was composing a few years ago, things I was recording at home with primitive instruments and substandard recording equipment. I was trying to create soundscapes using only what I happened to have lying around the house. I had ambient microphones placed around a room, plugged into various effects – delay loops, pitch shifters, distortion pedals. I now have the means to make this experiment a lot more interesting.

  • I had a dream last night that involved going to a sushi restaurant/tavern that (in the dream) was near M’s apartment. M was friendly with a bartender there, and the bartender was the pimp for a bunch of neighborhood hookers. I think the dream starts in the restaurant, and the bartender keeps leaving his post at the bar to come hang out with us at our table and give us drinks.

    Then later, I’m in an apartment, only separated from the apartment next door by a curtain. The girls who live there always pull back the curtain to talk to me. They have a bunch of rocks with random words scrawled on them with a sharpie pen, and the rocks are scattered everywhere and spill over into my apartment. They also have a large dog that never seems to move, which is fine with me. I don’t like large dogs.

    I’m having problems with my cell phone. My voicemail messages are going to some government agency. I did get one message from my mother in Alabama telling me that Liam M. was trying to get it touch with me. I thought it was odd that Liam would call my parents in another state to try to reach me instead of just emailing me. Also, I couldn’t figure out why Liam would call me in the first place, since we’ve hardly ever even spoken to each other. I figure he needs a banjo player or something for a show he’s doing.

    I go to this subway station, and it’s got tracks in it that cross over each other. Trains frequently collide, but they don’t crash. They just go right through each other, like ghosts. Everybody in the station is standing on piles of dirt or sitting on the ledge next to the tracks. It kind of looks like the inside of a coal mine, this subway station.

    I don’t get on a train, and I decide to take a bus instead. But the bus is going the wrong direction, and the bus driver offers me a beer. As it turns out, I’m sitting in a seat right next to the driver as if it were a regular car, and there is a cooler full of beer at my feet. I finally get off the bus, and I’m trying to find my way back to the restaurant. I ask some random people on the street if they know a bartender who hangs out with a bunch of hookers, and they point me in the right direction.

    So I finally get to the restaurant/bar and M is involved in a sushi tasting event, so I go to the back of the bar and get a beer. Then we’re back in the apartment with the curtain and the girls next door. I go over to my computer and I see that M and Janice have been playing some sort of internet role-playing game together, and I sit down to read the narrative. Then I woke up.

    This is a typical sort of dream for me – with me doing relatively mundane things, but extraordinary things are happening around me. The settings, circumstances and incidental characters are always different. Frequently old girlfriends replace each other at random. Sometimes I’m still friendly with people that I haven’t been friendly with in years.

  • Bertrand Russell and Poetry

    I’m trying to understand what Bertrand Russell means when he talks about alternative ways to break up the world into nameable particles. For example, instead of looking outside and seeing trees, cars and blue sky, we would see… something else. This is where I get stuck.

    Let’s try a different example. Instead of a room with tables and chairs, we would see some other arrangement of shapes and textures. Maybe we would see the legs of the tables as extensions of the floor. Unfortunately, this all seems very two-dimensional and unpragmatic. We break up the world in more ways than just visible shapes. Also, this view involves denying that we know anything about how tables work.

    The advantage that I can see is that it adds poetry to our experiences, makes them less concrete, and lends mystery and wonder to things that we might take for granted under normal circumstances. This isn’t Russell’s intention, of course. He’s just trying to explain how reference works. But if I apply this technique to something I actually don’t understand, like the way a train is built or the structure of a molecule, I can easily create my own systems of understanding what I see. Perhaps, this is how we can now find God, by continually looking at things we don’t understand and trying to describe them.

  • The Project

    As time wears on, the project of being or ever becoming a “great writer” seems more and more a narcissistic and romantic fantasy. It’s true that my commitment to the project has had lulls and spurts over the years, and even during periods of my most intense application, I accomplished little – a small collection of short stories and poems, some unfinished plays, two and a half novellas. I’ve been moderately satisfied with a few of the finished products and thoroughly disappointed with most of the rest.

    This is not to say that my life so far as an “artist” has not had some successes, although “success” must be measured on an appropriately small scale. I have written and performed many styles of music and dabbled in other mediums such as graphic design and video. But all this time, the project at the forefront of my mind has been literary.

    In the past year, I turned thirty years old. It’s mere superstition to think that my age is really any kind of barometer or landmark with which to measure artistic accomplishments, but it does seem to be a convenient time to turn somewhat away from the distractions of youth and focus on adult goals. In other words, the time is right to dedicate myself as fully as possible to the project.

    Over the course of the past year, I’ve taken a few steps toward immersing myself in the project. I’ve attempted to follow the literary market more closely. I’ve edited and re-written some of my older work. I printed “chapbook” versions of some of my work and distributed it around. I started writing the elusive “third novella” of my planned trilogy. I started writing several smaller pieces, distractions mostly. A handful of these distractions are finished in a sense, but I’m not inclined to try and publish any of them. Of course, and perhaps most significantly, I also moved to New York.

    And another step into immersing myself in the project is to begin to identify myself in the mindset of a man of letters. Thusly, I begin this latest attempt to keep a “writer’s journal” of sorts in order to leave some kind of trail of my thought processes. As I usually do with these things, I’d like to maintain the conceit that, in addition to serving as a tool for organizing my thoughts and staying in the practice of writing when I can’t keep my mind on any particular story, this notebook will someday be of scholarly interest. For some reason, this conceit encourages me to continue.

    With that in mind, one goal that I have with this journal is to create a document that one might read in order to discover the definitive answer to the question, “who is M. David Hornbuckle?” Toward that goal, I will incorporate, as I deem appropriate, a few sparse autobiographical musings I have written over the past few months, as well as others that I may compose in the future.

    I also have in my possession another “writer’s journal” that I began about two years ago. Like this notebook, I also approached that journal with the conceit that one day it would be of scholarly interest. I recently re-read the journal and determined that no one should ever read it under any circumstances. I found that the writing was, on the whole, mundane and lifeless – at times downright embarrassing. After reading it, I then added, more than a year after the final entry, yet another entry.

    Despite its downfalls, there are a handful of germs of thought that I would be remiss in dismissing forever. Most of the entries concern a young woman whose acquaintance I had made just before beginning the journal. I added the additional entry because even though I have moved a thousand miles away from that little Southern college town where I met her, she also now lives in New York, and that is obviously not entirely a coincidence. However, the precise correlation/causation is not at all obvious. I’ll explore that idea more as this document continues because there is some deep drama in the story of my friendship with this young woman, and the drama goes on. I have a strange feeling that it will continue for as long as I live.

    So – who is M. David Hornbuckle? This begs a series of other questions along the lines of “why should I care?” For the moment, I’m going to work under the assumption that you have your reasons. In case this document should somehow become the only fragment of evidence of my life, here is a very short summing up of some mundane things that have to be gotten out of the way.

    I was raised in Alabama, sometimes in Birmingham and sometimes in a smaller town further south called Dothan. In junior high I started to develop interests in creative writing and music. By ninth grade I was writing songs, as well as singing and playing guitar in rock bands.

    I went to college for two years at Mississippi University for Women (there’s a story there, but not as interesting as you might think), then got married and finished my degree at the University of Alabama-Birmingham where I received a B.A. in English with minors in philosophy and music. I was drawn to Gainesville, Florida by what seemed at the time to be a vivacious music scene. There was also a respected creative writing program there at the University of Florida.

    I didn’t go back to school, but I did play in several bands. One of those, PopCanon, became somewhat popular regionally, but several key members of the group (including myself) were prohibited by day-jobs and mortgages from committing the time and energy required to really be successful in that business. In the meantime, though, we made a few albums, toured a little bit, made the most we could out of the experience. It was great fun when it wasn’t grueling work.

    While in Florida, I got divorced, became a bit of a drunk, had some adventures and some mishaps. Then I moved to New York, and here we are now. Good enough? Intrigued? Bored? Well, that’s enough of an introduction either way. I’m pleased to meet you as well.