Me on Hobart

My story "Giant Panda Monster" is in the August Issue of the online Hobart. It's a story straight out of my fascination with giant pandas, big monster movies, and love. And according to my wife, it's an allegory for my marriage. Many thanks to Andrea Kneeland for including it in such an excellent issue.

Here are my favorite lines from fellow contributors:

Lauren Becker, "Do You Know Jesus Christ?": "Jed and Lark started to make out by the refrigerator and I talked to a cute guy and watched the lonely hot dogs move slowly around the cooker."

Rachel Lyon, "The Whale and the Waterslide": "'Whales don’t like the same things people do, Dale.'"

Matt Mullins, "Arion Resigns": "typing my own ransom memo for the corporate pirates who pay me in somnambulistic days."

Kristine Ong Muslim, "We Figure the Leaves": "In time, the leaves learn to take our postures, to talk, to make themselves look beautiful in the eyes of other leaves."

Justin Taylor, interviewed by Matthew Simmons: "And what about Michelle Trachtenberg?"

Check it out.

The Indomitable Jason Jordan

So my title just came to me, and I fear it's because of the Robert Jordan book The Indomitable Conan. Okay, a quick Google check and it turns out that actually Steve Perry wrote Conan the Indomitable. Stay with me a second, I'm still going to say it makes some sense since Jason is clearly a Conan of the literary world (for god's sake, look at that picture...that's clearly a literate badass), slaying his enemies and whatnot, not with violence but with his scimitar sharp writing...okay, I'm pushing this, but here's why:


Now out for your reading pleasure, Jordan's new story collection Cloud and Other Stories and a new version of his earlier collection Powering the Devil's Circus: Redux. Jason Jordan is a widely published writer of powerful stories and the editor of the literary magazine decomP. These books contain his stories, stories full of dark absurdism and compassionate realism. These are stories that make you feel the primal essence of life, like Conan screaming over a battlefield.

All right, forget Conan. But read Jason Jordan's new collections.

Me in Thumb Smudge Java

I brag a lot--mainly because I'm a braggart. But in this instance, though I am bragging, it is for others.

Two of my students (former?) Joel Ferdon and Josiah McGinnis have started their own literary magazine called Thumb Smudge Java. My piece "Coming This Fall: Stuff Posted on Facebook!" is in the premiere issue with some other great (probably better) stuff, stuff that has not been posted on Facebook and in fact has to be read in print (unless they put it on their Web site, in which case check it out there).

So please support them by submitting your work (they're reading for Issue 2 now) and by getting the first issue (give them your money).

Me on Dogzplot 2

You remember last time I had a flash fiction piece on Dogzplot. Ants...Sermon on the Mount...well, you get it. Anyway, this time I have another "religious" (that's right I used quotation marks) piece called "Pre-Revelation Coffee with Ex-Girlfriend."

P.S. Dear ex-girlfriend(s), this is not about you.

Me in Knee-Jerk

So my story "We Sin Like Wolves" is in lucky Issue 13 of Knee-Jerk magazine. It was a great experience working with Jonathan Fullmer, who made me see the story in a whole new way. So you should probably see it now.

This issue also includes a cool interview with Print Ball organizers Fred Sasaki (associate editor at Poetry), Nell Taylor (founder and executive director of the Chicago Underground Library), and Sarah Dodson (director and managing editor of MAKE: A Literary Magazine). Plus there's exceptional work from Alba Machado, Amanda Marbais, and Robert Repino.

What's in an Epigraph?

So as you will recall, totally, I am reading The Red and the Black. You know what's great? No? According to the translator Raffel, Stendhal either misquoted or made up most of the epigraphs at the beginning of the chapters: "Professor Jean-Jacques Hamm has concluded that only fifteen of the seventy-five epigraphs in The Red and the Black are correctly and verifiably attributed." I like to think he made them up, especially this one:

And am I to blame
If that's how things are?
--Machiavelli

Who's in (to) The Red and The Black

So some friends and I decided to read Stendhal's The Red and the Black--some good old fashioned beach reading. That's right, it's durn near a book club. I now see what all those people saw in having Oprah give them assigned reading.

Melody picked it out of a list we came up with. I think I suggested it for the list because of James Wood's references to it in How Fiction Works. I had actually avoided reading it in the past. I guess because of what I thought it was about. Which isn't really what it's about. What did I think it was about? Class, I guess. Which it is. Damn, I'm contradicting myself. Oh well, I contradict myself. Someone said that. But not about class the way I fear fiction is sometimes about class.

First I had to pick a translation. Damn foreigners writing in some other language. If you're going to be a famous author of classic literature, write in English! Preferably American.

So turns out translations are complicated. I settled on Burton Raffel's for The Modern Library because of this but have reservations because of that. I felt better about my choice when I went back and saw that Wood uses what is generally considered the "bad" translation.

I've just begun, but I'm already happy to see Stendhal take on some of my favorite topics, like spite and anger. Here's a couple character descriptions that I could apply to several people I know but won't name here, so if I know you, then it's probably you:

"...by clear signs of self-satisfaction and conceit, topped off by who knows what limitations, what lack of originality. Finally one is aware that his talents are confined to making sure he is paid exactly what he is owed, while paying what he himself owes only at the last possible moment."

Or

"...he was a tall young man, strongly built, with a florid face and great black whiskers--one of those coarse creatures, shameless and loud, that they call, in the provinces, good fellows."

Try these two as well:

"...he had learned by heart the entire New Testament in Latin; he also knew Monsieur de Maistre's On the Pope--and had no more belief in the one than in the other"

Or

"He thought that making a stop at church would be important to his hypocrisy."

Good stuff.