Adrian Khactu
Excerpt
You might think this his hardest song to record. Just ten days at Hitsville for the whole album, and that damn session player Jamerson already stretched flat on the floor in drunken glee, picking C major chords on the electric bass cradled between his legs.
But the singer, gruffer and bearded, only concentrates on the handwritten lyrics on yellowed paper. A social justice song.
Far from the gilded and prettified “Hitch Hike” and “Stubborn Kind of Fellow,” far from the smooth-skinned brother with the nice wave to his hair and the dapper suits. No more masking his apostolic blues with cooing falsetto.
And how it all opens:
Two Detroit Lions lifting on reefer and giggling at the bottom-heavy bongos. “Solid.” “What’s up.” Eli Fontaine noodling a silver alto saxophone, slipping up and down the register, his reed not yet wet before he’s dismissed by this skinny Nat King Cole wannabe hippie. “You goof exquisitely. Thank you.” And the hook never repeats, the sax vanishing and ephemeral as Tuesday’s sunset over the Seine, as volatile as Martha Reeve’s career. As immortal as sin.
The crooning “mother, mother” of it all.
There’s too many of you crying.
-- from "What's Going On"
Bio
Adrian Khactu is a doctoral student in film and literature at the University of Pennsylvania, and he holds shiny, though not entirely profitable, creative writing degrees from Stanford and Temple Universities. For one brief, shining summer in 2002, Adrian also wrote with some great friends at Clarion West. He would like to accomplish great things this year during the Clarion West Write-a-thon!
Publications
“The Laundress” (poem) Peregrine, Spring 2009.
“5 Dead at Dong Xuan” (poem) Peregrine, Spring 2009.
“The Dead Girl” (fiction) In/Vision, Spring 2005.
Writing Description
I write what the kids today call Slipstream. Or is it still Magic Realism? Interstitial? Mundane SF? New Wave Fabulist? New Weird? I adore the work of J.G. Ballard, Octavia E. Butler, Angela Carter, Ted Chiang, Robert Coover, John Crowley, Samuel R. Delany, Karen Joy Fowler, Ursula K. Le Guin, Jonathan Lethem, Kelly Link, Ian R. MacLeod, China Miéville, and George Saunders (to name just a few), and those are the literary gods I aim at when I write.
Goals
I'm going to write every day, and I'm going to finish, revise, and submit EVERYTHING in my "trunk." Also, a story a week!
Story a week. Nice and simple. Support me, and I'll name characters after you!!! And let you read my work!!!
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