"There's a great relief at the slowness of a novel. On the other hand, there's an even greater relief, if you stop halfway through a novel, and write a couple of short stories, they are so short, crisp and different. I think my novels have an awful lot of the short story in them. But I don't think short stories have much of a novel in them, except they've all got plots, they are all stories – none of your modern stuff, you know!" Read more in the Guardian.
Two of our graduates, Mitch Alderman and Ian Vazquez have been nominated for this year's Shamus Awards!
At stove, two ducks. (Cindy has solved the image problem, I hope.)
Can't get photos, but after many tries maybe a video of Slim Gaillard. Like Louie Prima, he makes you happy when you're screwing with your computer.
Since the switch to the Mac, Squarespace no longer saves images or photos pasted there. Not from the internet or from snapfish. They show up for a while on my page but not on anyone else's. And they drop from my page. If anyone has a suggestion, please let me know. I've written to the support page for both and get answers that don't work.
Fifteen reasons why should not go anywhere near McDonald's. (thanks to Richard in the Keys)
"Second, I'm going to report to the FBI any white person I overhear saying, in seriousness or in jest, anything of a threatening nature about President Obama." (Thanks to Jason in Barre, MA)
Novelist Julia Glass has some nice things to say about Love Warps the Mind a Little on NPR's "You Must Read This."
My expensive year-and-a-half old Sony Vaio desktop, all in one computer crashed, taking with it iTunes and Outlook mail. I no longer have anyone's email address, so if you want to hear from me, please drop me an email. My friend Neil is trying to get the hard drive working again. In the meantime, I bought a Mac. Back in business.
Sam Anderson on William T. Vollman: "I was sitting on the train one day chipping away at William T. Vollmann’s latest slab of obsessional nonfiction when my friend Tsia, who incidentally is not an underage Thai street whore, offered to save me time with a blurby one-sentence review based entirely on the book’s cover and my synopsis of its first 50 pages. “Just write that it’s like Robert Caro’s The Power Broker,” she said, “but with the attitude of Mike Davis’s City of Quartz.” This struck me as good advice, and I was all set to take it, but as I worked my way through the book’s final 1,250 pages, I found I had to modify it, slightly, to read as follows: Imperial is like Robert Caro’s The Power Broker with the attitude of Mike Davis’s City of Quartz, if Robert Caro had been raised in an abandoned grain silo by a band of feral raccoons, and if Mike Davis were the communications director of a heavily armed libertarian survivalist cult, and if the two of them had somehow managed to stitch John McPhee’s cortex onto the brain of a Gila monster, which they then sent to the Mexican border to conduct ten years of immersive research, and also if they wrote the entire manuscript on dried banana leaves with a toucan beak dipped in hobo blood, and then the book was line-edited during a 36-hour peyote séance by the ghosts of John Steinbeck, Jack London, and Sinclair Lewis, with 200 pages of endnotes faxed over by Henry David Thoreau’s great-great-great-great grandson from a concrete bunker under a toxic pond behind a maquiladora, and if at the last minute Herman Melville threw up all over the manuscript, rendering it illegible, so it had to be re-created from memory by a community-theater actor doing his best impression of Jack Kerouac. With photographs by Dorothea Lange." Read the whole review here.
To be visible all the time--to live
in the swarm of eyes--
surely that leaves its mark on the face.
--Tomas Transtromer, "Solitude"
Writer's emergency phone service. "Dial 8 to kill a character!"
Today's short story waiting to be written comes to us via Craigslist: "I am looking for a trucker who I dated last year. I broke up with him because my 6 yr old and I were real sick and we got him sick too. He was admitted into a hospital while he was in the middle of a transporting something in new mexico I think. After he got out he wanted to come by to help me while we were still sick. I broke up with him so we would'nt infect him again with klebsiella. It took us about 4 more months to find the right doctor to give us the right medicine, anyway I was going to explain to him my actions as soon as we got better but I lost his number and cant find his house. I remember meeting him at of twenty four fourty nine and 0ne fifty six corner at that closed coffee house. I followed him for about 5 mins maybe 10 at most. We pulled into a housing track of newer houses and then in the back there was a dirt road with some very old houses. He lived there with his teenage son and an aunt or sister. If you can get me there please contact me." Klebsiella, by the way, is a nasty bacterium. (thanks to Joe in Cheese)
Tristan's oldest friend, Alex, made the news this morning, and so did some of Hollywood's finest. Now we're going to hear about bad apples, not systematic corruption.
From left around the table: Nikki, Vicki, Me, Jane, LaDonna, Karima, Tommy's laptop. Tommy, himself, is behind the camera.
Alice Munro's new short story in the current Harper's.
"Always remember that when a man goes out of a room, he leaves everything in it behind," her friend Marie Mendelson has told her. "When a woman goes out she carries everything that happened in the room along with her."
(thanks to Joe in Cheese)
