The More You Know...About Kierkegaard

Kierkegaard rarely left his home in Copenhagen. Once he went to Sweden and four to Berlin. That is all.

Rereading

So I'm rereading Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, for the third time, which is impressive for me because I so rarely reread a book. To be fair, I'm rereading this one because I'm teaching it in a class on the Western. So many books, so little time. Blah, blah. Add in the fact that I'm a slow reader...so, so very slow. And I can see just how finite my lifetime reading list really is. Which could lead some people to ask: why do you keep buying all those books then? To which I reply: stay out of my private business that I just happen to be airing in this public forum, you nosey jerks. Point being, Blood Meridian is an amazing novel, which you probably already knew because you happen to read at a faster rate than I do and have consumed David Copperfield while I was reading over this for typos. Point being, it's good to be trailing the kid and the judge again, at whatever pace.

Sick

I have been sick. But not badly sick. Sick in the way where mucus leaks from your orifices...okay just the nostril orifices because otherwise that is sicker than I am at present. I am also annoyingly fatigued. So all that stuff I have to do, all that stuff that my mind keeps enumerating and ranting about, pacing around its brain pan, yelling to itself because the body just can't seem to get it together. Sick used to be fun. Sick used to be abandon-all-responsibilities fun. But now it's just all the same responsibilities plus the mucus.

Me on storySouth

My poem "Dinner with Family" is up on the superb storySouth, Issue 27, an issue packed with wonders, like stories from George Singleton and Daniel Wallace. And yeah, my piece is a poem...what of it? I can write poetry. I'm very poetic. With the poetry. My only regret is that it didn't come out in April, so I could say it was in celebration of NatPoMo.

There's a Sale at the McSweeney's Store

Just saying...

That I bought a lot of books.

I have a problem.

Coming Soon: XX Eccentric

The next Main Street Rag Short Fiction Anthology: XX Eccentric is coming soon. You can pre-order here.

I Am a Bad Person

So I was reading the essay The Unfinished: David Foster Wallace’s struggle to surpass “Infinite Jest.” that's in The New Yorker, and I couldn't get enough. The portrait of Wallace, the writing. The sadness. And in the back of my mind, I was wondering about when Pynchon and Salinger go, will there be essays like this. Surely, I thought, and when there are, I want to read them. That, I suppose, doesn't say much to my being "a fucking human being." Or maybe it says it all too well.