MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS

Forsaken readers!  Please excuse the long silence of a C-list writer who has spent the past few weeks in a dark, dark place. Not only was I immersed to an Orwellian degree in the life and work of you-know-which master of the Kafkaesque (hint), but there was literally an enormous cloud sitting on top of my house.  Honestly it’s a mystery to me why I still live on this godforsaken mountain.  At least it was a mystery until I realized it was probably so I could convert Friday to Christianity.  Now I can say, with the immortal Crusoe:

when I reflect that, in this solitary life which I have been confined to, I… am now… made an instrument, under Providence, to save the life, and, for aught I know, the soul of a poor savage, and bring him to the true knowledge of religion and of the Christian doctrine, that he might know Christ Jesus, in whom is life eternal… a secret joy runs through every part of My soul, and I frequently rejoice that ever I was brought to this place, which I so often thought the most dreadful of all afflictions that could possibly have befallen me.

Friday, as you can see, was able to find great comfort in the knowledge of our Lord and Savior:

I too am slowly returning to normal life and, as a first step, I am happy and honored to report that I will be a guest tomorrow (Friday) on “Common Threads,” an open-mic show hosted by esteemed reader and San Francisco beat poet sensation Diamond Dave Whitaker.  Those who are in the neighborhood and not gainfully employed should please come at 3pm to the Pirate Cat Radio Cafe, 2781 21st Street (between Florida and Bryant); others are warmly encouraged to stream Pirate Cat Radio live or download the podcast.

(more…)

Dear readers!  I am still greatly chagrined about having to miss not only the Chicago reading but also the visit to Redlands University, where I had been enormously looking forward to meeting Alisa Slaughter, Joy Manesiotis (author of a very beautiful and apropos poem about lamenting women), and their students, whom I thank for their interest in The Possessed, and whom I very much hope to meet at some point in the future.

In the meantime, tolerant readers, you may or may not be filled with admiration to learn that I was able to spare a moment from my rigorous program of swamp-related activity in order to deliver a 200-word opinion on the future of evolutionary-psychological literary criticism, for which purpose I temporarily assumed the form of a miniscule talking head:

The original of that tiny photograph was taken by super-chef Musa Dağdeviren and, in its uncropped version, shows me holding a bunch of greens known in Turkish as “snake’s pillow” or “heathen’s beet.”

(more…)

Many thanks to all who ordered The Possessed,which has, at the time of writing, edged ahead of the greatest novel ever written to #1 on the Amazon Russian bestsellers list! After a long, hard week, my interns are finally enjoying some R&R.

Enjoy, guys—you deserve it!

(more…)

I recently received some back copies of Vice magazine, kindly sent to me by Vice magazine, because I might write something for them. I had never previously read Vice magazine, and although I had heard of it, I had somehow imagined it to be called Vise magazine (as in, “we really know how to grip our public”).

Youthful readers! As you apparently know already, Vice magazine is actually full of pictures of naked girls doing some crazy stuff.  Naked girls in the 2008 fiction issue alone included, but were not limited to: a naked girl running through a supermarket aisle; a naked girl doing cartwheels around a bonfire; and an otherwise-naked girl wearing pasties and a thong made out of pizza. (Apparently it was the model’s own pizza.)

To learn more about Vice magazine, I consulted the Internet, which is famous for its sober and balanced treatment of controversial subjects. There I found the recent Vice magazine interview with Brazilian sculptor Zé Carlos Garcia, who reconstructs pig heads to resemble human faces:

Q. And then you started to turn pigs’ heads into human heads. Do you have any experiences in plastic surgery? It’s completely different to work with flesh, isn’t it?

A. Yes, but as I said, I did sculptures all my life. Also I just love animals, so that wasn’t a big problem.

Sculpture by Zé Carlos Garcia	Photo by Jamie Taete

(more…)

As someone who once wrote a whole dissertation on writing as a physical process in space and time, I’m always interested to learn about the spaces where people write things.  (Plus is it me, or is this an almost-inherently comic premise?  I think Proust in the cork-lined cell is really close to already being funny.)  So just imagine, dear readers, how excited I was to learn about Desk Space, a beautiful site devoted to the desks of various obscure writers whom nobody has ever heard of… now including me!

I spent at least an hour there looking at every single post, and was both touched and impressed by the great variety, within certain actually sort of narrow perimeters, of workspaces favored by my fellow D-list writers.  David McGimpsey, for instance, likes to confront the blank page armed with 2.5 computers, a Colonel Sanders piggy bank, a 1994 edition of Gun Digest, and a television (top)… while the poet Souvankham Thammavongsa prefers a workspace to say, and I quote: “I’m in trouble and I’ve been sent away” (bottom).

(more…)