Episodios

  • Stop the School to Sunday School Pipeline

    Stop the School to Sunday School Pipeline
    Jul 4 2024
    It’s the fourth of July. It’s time for you to watch this video again, or for the first time if you never saw it:You may have heard that SEMO Press, publisher of my novel Weird Pig, among many other books, is shutting down. It’s a terrible thing, and I’ll never forgive the creeps in charge who destroyed an organization that brought good things into a world that doesn’t have enough of them. But I have good news. Thanks in part to the fanatical machinations of SEMO Press director James Brubaker, Weird Pig has a new home: Black Lawrence Press. This is also thanks, of course, to the hard work of Diane Goettel, BLP’s Executive Editor—for which I am thankful. So now you can go to BLP get the copies of Weird Pig that you are so desperate to have. If you haven’t read it, let me recommend it to you now—almost four years after its release. Even after all this time, a lot of people still don’t know Weird Pig exists. But the people who have read it report laughing during the experience of reading it, and otherwise finding joy in its pages. It would make a great gift for Father’s Day, but then that’s already happened this year. So why not start a tradition of giving gifts on Labor Day? Why don’t you give someone Weird Pig, as a reward for their backbreaking labor?If you have a book club, now would be the perfect time for you to force everyone in it to read Weird Pig. If you don’t have a book club, now would be the perfect time to kidnap a handful of strangers, duct tape their hands together, sit them down in your sunroom, set mimosas before them, with straws for them to drink the mimosas through, since they can’t use their hands, and with God’s light shining on their faces make them talk about Weird Pig as if they read the book, which they have not done at all.Or, get this: you could go to Costco.One thing that upsets me about the publication of Weird Pig is that, even after all this time, no one from SEMO Press, or any other press, has taken me to Costco. I saw this video online last week that had Colm Tóibín in it. I’ve never read anything by Colm Tóibín. I’m sure I will soon, because this is one of those moments where I write a sentence like, “I’ve never read anything by Colm Tóibín,” and realize it’s kind of embarrassing. I should have read some Colm Tóibín by now. I don’t know why.I guess he just published a new book, which is not the one I will read—and why is that, I wonder? How did I decide, without even thinking about it, that his new book will not be the one I read? I imagine it’s the one he would want me to read, since he’s just published it. Sometimes I’m a mystery to myself. Because Colm Tóibín has a new book out, his publisher made this video of him going to a Costco. I don’t know what Costco it was, but I guess he’d never been to one. And that makes me feel better about not having read one of his books. Everyone in the world has at least one thing they’ve never done. I guess they thought it would be adorable and fun, to take this Irish novelist to a place that’s so utterly American. They filmed him walking around and getting free samples of different things, the way people do when they visit a Costco. I’d say he looked like a fish out of water, but he didn’t. Everyone fits right in when they go to Costco. I didn’t watch much of the video, though I would go back and finish it if I knew he had one of those giant slices of Costco pizza. I’d like to see the Irish eat that pizza. It’s so greasy.But the video made me want to publish another book. I was kind of on the fence, before, about whether it would be a good idea to do that again. The last time I published a book, a pandemic happened. Who knows what the next one might bring. I didn’t realize that when you publish a book now you get to go to Costco. I’ll bet Colm Tóibín didn’t even have to drive himself over there. I’ll bet they took him in someone else’s car. The Culture You DeserveThis Friday, I will have an essay on another Substack, The Culture We Deserve. Every Monday, Jessa Crispin publishes an essay over there, and they publish one by a guest writer every Friday. My essay, this Friday, concerns The Way of the Househusband, an anime show and manga series by Kousuke Oono, which is about a dangerous Yakuza gangster who gives up his violent life, gets married, and devotes himself to cooking and cleaning, but persists in being a frightening and intense, if nonviolent, man.You have to be a paid subscriber to The Culture We Deserve to access my essay, but it’s worth it. It doesn’t cost much, and Jessa and her husband Nico Rodriguez do great work over there. They even have a podcast.Church of the LibraryMy brother Jim wrote in his newsletter recently about what it’s like when atheism softens into agnosticism, among other things. And I was interested to read about that, because I think I’ve traveled on a similar trajectory to his. As a teenager, and for ...
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    20 m
  • All Eyes on Ian Fleming, Etc.

    All Eyes on Ian Fleming, Etc.
    Jun 21 2024
    We need to do something about this James Bond fellow. Let me explain what I mean. Because I’m not saying it in a fun way, like maybe I’m pretending to be Goldfinger, having an incredible time on a private jet with my golden finger.No, I’ve been reading Ian Fleming novels. I started with Dr. No, moved on to On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and have just finished Casino Royale, the first installment in the series. You don’t have to read the books in order. No one checks. I started reading them in the first place because I saw one in the New Fiction section at the library. Dr. No wasn’t new, but it had been reprinted, so, close enough, I guess. I thought if I checked it out I might have a good time reading a book. I thought it could be a reading adventure, like what those kids have on Superwhy whenever they read books.I had, also, been thinking about James Bond. I had been comparing him, in my mind, to Ethan Hunt, the hero of the Mission Impossible films and TV show.When I compare any two characters in my mind—which I do only on occasions that demand it, as it is a laborious process that leaves me exhausted for days afterward—I shut my eyes as tightly as I can and picture one of the characters. Then, with great concentration, I imagine the image of the other character, some distance from the first, for safety’s sake. Through painstaking mental effort, I pull the first character closer to the other, and then do the same with the second, until finally they are side-by-side, no space between them at all. This can take hours, and someday it will kill me. But it’s the only way to go about this work that I know of.In the end, I felt like Ethan Hunt was a much more interesting character than James Bond. He just seems like he does more things. He climbs, he runs, he puts on masks. He’s usually dressed for movement, and he’s good at pretending to be people he’s not. What does James Bond do? Well, he looks good in a suit. He’s particular about how he likes his martinis to be served—so he has the formidable trait of being finnicky about drinks.He doesn’t wear disguises, that I can recall. He rarely uses an alias. In fact, one of the things this international superspy is most famous for is the way he tells people his actual name, repeating his surname so as to give it extra emphasis and make sure everyone remembers to call him James Bond, which is his real name. It’s an intriguing quality to have, when you’re an agent of something called the “secret service.” I went into reading Dr. No, the first 007 novel I picked up, with an open heart and an open mind. I wanted to have fun. I think it was printed on the back cover that none other than Raymond Chandler said Ian Fleming was the best suspense writer around. That’s quite an endorsement.Raymond Chandler wasn’t wrong. Ian Fleming knows how to show readers a good time. The pace of his novels is consistently high. His hero travels to exotic locations. He eats great food and drinks a lot. The drinks are always good, and so is the food. He has hot sex with beautiful women to whom he is not attached in any way. They’re either provided to him by the secret service, as colleagues that he then sleeps with, or they appear out of thin air, like the woman whose name I forget from Dr. No. Bond arrives on the shore of an island, near Jamaica, where he suspects Dr. No has built his secret hideout. As he plans his next move, a woman walks over to where he is. She is startled to see him. She is beautiful and not wearing any clothes.Now that I’ve read three Ian Fleming novels, it seems to me that the appeal of James Bond is that he’s a man who has everything handed to him. He messes up fairly consistently. He gets his friends killed, he gets captured, and he loses at baccarat when it’s his mission to not lose at baccarat. But somehow, by god, he wins, usually thanks to someone else intervening on his behalf, and in the end M begrudgingly congratulates him. 007 has done it again! The women he falls in love with, and to whom he comes around to feeling he could perhaps actually devote himself to, conveniently die, so that he never has to follow through with being tied down. The novels are a breeze to read, and it’s fun to read a breeze. But let’s face it: as a character, James Bond kind of sucks. To illustrate how much he sucks, let me cite a couple of passages from Casino Royale.In this first one, Bond has learned that Vesper, the woman who was assigned to aid him on his current mission, has been kidnapped, and is likely being used as bait to get to him:This was just what he had been afraid of. These blithering women who thought they could do a man’s work. Why the hell couldn’t they stay at home and mind their pots and pans and stick to their frocks and gossip and leave men’s work to the men. And now for this to happen to him, just when the job had come off so beautifully. For Vesper to fall for an old trick like that and get ...
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    22 m
  • Tough Guys Are Boring Unless They're Being Taken Apart

    Tough Guys Are Boring Unless They're Being Taken Apart
    Jun 13 2024
    My kids, wife, and I spent a recent week in Philadelphia and New York City, seeing family, seeing friends, making new friends, walking on the High Line, going to a show, and doing gymnastics in Central Park. We did other things, too, and we had a great time. I was not the one who did the gymnastics.What I can I say about New York City that hasn’t already been said? Absolutely nothing. That’s what. But what is new is a short story that was published just the other day at Bull magazine. Beware: it is, like other things I’ve published recently, highly sexual. Why have I been writing so much about sex? The answer is that I haven’t. It was in 2020 and 2021 that I wrote a lot about sex, and I think it’s because thanks to COVID I wasn’t around other people anymore. Like, not at all. I was with my family, but everyone else was inaccessible, because I didn’t want to get sick or make others sick. For the longest time, like so many people did, I felt the absence of nearly everyone on planet Earth, and my isolation expressed itself in this unlikely, weird antieroticism. I wrote about sex and how awful it can be, even when everyone involved is at least having an okay time. I was not the only one. I recall another writer on social media wondering publicly why everything she wrote at that time had turned abruptly sexual. She blamed the pandemic. I think she was on to something, and I don’t think it was just the two of us. Anyway. It’s only now that my antierotic stories are getting published. That’s how it is when you’re a writer. You write something, and unless you want to publish it yourself you have to wait sometimes a long time for anyone to see it. It’s not my fault. I don’t make the rules. I don’t even know how to make lasagna.A Tale of Two Adaptations of the Novel The Hunter by Donald E. WestlakeI have not read The Hunter by Donald E. Westlake, but I’ve recently watched its two film adaptations. Or, rather, I watched the whole of one of them, and the first half of the other, which I saw before, once, a long time ago.I watched these movies the way their creators intended: in increments of anywhere from thirty seconds to twenty minutes, over the course of seven to ten days, interrupted every time by the pressing need to go to bed so that obligations can be met the next day, or by a kid who wants to watch something else on the TV on which I have been viewing the film. I’m not complaining. It’s okay that I don’t get to watch whole things in one sitting. It’s a privilege to be one member of a household, to have demands placed on me by a whole in which I am one part. It can be vexing, but in this season of my life it’s where happiness comes from. The first of the two adaptations I watched was Point Blank, directed by John Boorman and starring Lee Marvin.As the poster for the film indicates, Lee Marvin plays a human head that has lost its body but grown a hand and bought a gun, so that it can talk to people and shoot bullets at them. Lee Marvin’s head is out for revenge, and for two hours it rolls around the city of Los Angeles, screaming about how great it was to have a body and how much he misses his arms and legs.I’m just kidding, of course—haha!—but not about the revenge. The story of the film is this: Walker, a criminal, is convinced by a friend and fellow criminal to participate in a low-stakes heist. But it turns out the stakes are higher than he was led to believe, and he gets double-crossed by his partner in crime and his own wife, who has fallen for the partner in crime. They shoot him and leave him for dead—but you’d better believe he’s not dead. He returns to the city, having convalesced, with all of his arms and legs, plus his torso and stuff, and gets to work.Here is one of the weirder parts of the movie, in which Walker has returned from his supposed death and tracks down his wife, intending to murder the man who betrayed him, who he has reason to believe is living with her: If you don’t feel like committing the minute or so to watching it, the scene at first consists of Lee Marvin walking through a cavernous hallway as his footsteps echo. The footsteps persist as we see his wife going about her day, and we see him driving around the city in search of her. The footsteps continue unnervingly through this montage until at last his wife enters her apartment and he bursts in behind her. He storms into the bedroom, where he empties his pistol into one side of the bed, which has no one in it. We can assume that it’s the side of the bed where he would be sleeping, were they still together. And so is he blasting away at the absence of his rival, or at the absence of himself? Whose blood is he really thirsting for? I watched that scene and couldn’t believe it. It’s a bizarre series of images and sounds. It’s the kind of thing that makes me feel like it’s good to watch a movie from time to time. It’s not long after that scene that the film ...
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    23 m
  • Studies in Urology, Scenario 761 - EXPLICIT

    Studies in Urology, Scenario 761 - EXPLICIT
    Jun 2 2024
    This Hoedown will be a short one, because I really just want to read for the listening audience my short story “Studies in Urology, Scenario 761.” It was accepted for publication in a magazine several years ago, but I never saw a copy of the magazine. I’m not sure any copies exist. That didn’t bother me much, but then, I don’t know. I came around to liking the story more than I did when I wrote it. I’d like to share the thing. I should warn everyone that it’s pretty disgusting, and highly sexual. Beware. I will read the story after the standard newsletter content, the usual hoedown material. You can only hear it if you listen to the audio. If you are interested in the story, but not in the newsletter, you can skip ahead. When you hear the Pig City News Weekly Register Hoedown Quarterly Review Times a Thousand theme song, you will know I’m about to read it. I was actually going to send this out in the middle of last week, but I got scared and worried that the story would come across in worse ways than I anticipate. I hope that doesn’t happen. It’s supposed to just be funny. I swear that I am nice, and that all I want is for everyone out there to have a good time. That’s not wrong, is it? But then, all Jesus ever wanted was for people to have a good time, and look what happened to him.Book TitleI could use some help. I have put together a collection of essays that mostly have to do with fatherhood. No one has ever written a book like that before, so it’s pretty important that I get mine into the world. I have to give the book of fatherhood essays a title. I am torn between three of them. The first one is Fathers Die, which I like because when you say it out loud it sounds like you’re saying “Father’s Day” but with some kind of an accent. And what the title tells you is true. Fathers do indeed die. The second title is Happy Fathers Die, which sounds like “Happy Father’s Day” with the same accent as the first option. It is also, like the first title option, a true statement. The third option is Father’s Day Present Father Gift What to Get Gift Idea Father Day Best Gift List. This title would attempt to maximize search engine optimization (SEO). I could shorten it, and title the book Father’s Day Present, so that my book comes up immediately when someone searches those words online. I don’t know what’s best. I’m just looking to move units, here.Please tell me what you think I should do. Telling me I should quit writing and save myself further embarrassment is an option.I mean, it’s true that I shouldn’t have put this book together. There are so many collections of essays about fatherhood. The difference is in the pudding, and the pudding is in me. I ate the pudding. And this is what it’s all about. This is who I am. Physically I am a champion. Mentally I am a genius. Emotionally I’m available. It doesn’t get any better than the way it already is. Polo ShirtsI was at the luxury high school the other day, subbing again, and I asked the coordinator of substitute teachers a question. I said that at my substitute orientation I was told to dress business-casual for subbing assignments, but pointed out to her that nearly all of the teachers at the luxury school showed up there wearing jeans and t-shirts. How, I asked, am I really supposed to dress for the job? She laughed and someone joined our conversation. I don’t know who she was, but she said she was married to the person who was in charge of that sort of thing. I was confused. What did that mean her spouse’s job was? Who, at a public school, polices the attire of substitute teachers? Why have I not met this person? She said that as far as she was concerned I didn’t have to wear a dress shirt. I could come in wearing jeans and a polo shirt—as long as I looked, you know, presentable. I nodded, smiled, thanked the pair of them, kept what I was thinking to myself, and ate three slices of cold pizza in the hallway. They had been in a plastic bag in my backpack the whole time. What the hell is it with polo shirts? I haven’t worn a polo shirt in probably fifteen years. The one I wore fifteen years ago had stripes on it, and I put it on sometimes because I was in good shape, and in that shirt I looked like a man. People loved to see me in that shirt. They wanted to touch my chest and face. Only one of them got to do it, and today we are married.But aside from me when I wore that one shirt, which is long gone, do you know what grown men look like when they wear polo shirts? They look like they are all dressed up for picture day. Every man in a polo shirt looks like his mom made him put that shirt on before he left the house to go to school. And she combed his hair! It hurt! He was trying to play Bubble Bobble on Nintendo, and she kept getting in the way. He could barely see the screen!He would have put on a dress shirt, but it’s not the easiest thing for a little guy, to button all the buttons on a ...
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    40 m
  • If We Can't Get Rid of Guns, At Least Give Us More Ways Out

    If We Can't Get Rid of Guns, At Least Give Us More Ways Out
    May 15 2024
    If you live in or near New York City, you should go tomorrow to Amy Bennett's art show opening. It's at the Miles McEnery Gallery, at 525 W 22nd St. I would go, but I live in Kansas City. It's hard to get to places like New York from places like Kansas City. It can be done, but it’s not easy. I had the tremendous pleasure of writing an essay to accompany Amy's show, which is included in a digital catalog that you can access here. The nice thing about something being digital is that you can make it available to lots of people. So follow the link. Read my essay. Marvel at Amy Bennett's paintings. See the show in person if you can. Exits Exist, and Not Enough of ThemI should warn anyone reading this that partway through this section of the newsletter it gets pretty dark, and addresses the subject of school shootings. I was a substitute teacher, yesterday, at the luxury high school, which is my preferred subbing location. When I see on my substitute teaching app that someone needs to go there and fill in for a real teacher, I scramble to claim that eight-hour job for myself. I want to spend the day at the luxury high school. I want to make a little money supervising its well-behaved teens.You might be asking yourself what’s so great about the luxury high school? What makes the high school luxurious?It’s not a private high school. It’s not like that. I don’t think I’d want to go there if it were private. Those places tend to attract the wealthy, and while plenty of wealthy kids are lovely people, the ones who aren’t are worse than the not-lovely kids of the middle and lower classes. Or the rich ones bother me more, at least. The luxury high school is one of the public high schools in our district, and I don’t know how it works exactly, but apparently students can elect to attend the luxury school instead of one of the other two that we have. People tell me the luxury high school is “more project-oriented” than the other schools, but no matter how many times I hear those words, I can never seem to figure out what they mean. I nod and say, “Yeah, that makes sense,” but I don’t know what anyone is talking about. The thing I like most about subbing at the luxury school is that the students there are for the most part calm and focused. They do their work quietly, which means I can work on my own stuff. I take my laptop over there and do what I would do at home, except in this other location, and I get paid to be there. I have to stand up and walk around the room, and make it look like I’m a real authority figure from time to time, but mostly I can just sit and work. I get more done there than I do at home. Everybody wins.The luxury high school is more relaxed than other schools. When I’m in the room with students, the noise level increases from time to time, but it has not yet reached a point where I feel I need to tell everyone to quiet down, to focus on work. I can let them be. I may not love that they’re talking to each other about stupid b******t; maybe I would prefer it if they did their work. But they talk about stupid b******t at acceptable volumes, and years after I graduated high school, I remember the stupid b******t conversations more fondly than I recall any work I did there. Why not let the students generate those memories, when their usual teacher is away? Why not give them a couple hours off? It’s not like the teachers leave me instructions that forbid the formation of fond memories. It’s not like if the students did their work they would solve climate change. Having conversations with one’s peers is itself a kind of education. Everything you do in a school is part of your education—which is something that took me many years of schooling to really understand. The little things are as important as the big things. It all accumulates.The luxury high school is more like a college than the other schools, in that students have a little more freedom than they have elsewhere. Throughout the building are small rooms with glass walls and conference tables. You can walk past and see what’s going on inside, and make sure no one is making bombs or solving climate change when they’re not supposed to. These “flex spaces” are where students can get away from their peers, if they work better in isolation. They can work in one with a student from another class.I’m impressed with the architecture of the place, with the building itself and the atmosphere it makes possible. About a third of the classrooms don’t even have doors, they’re large recesses in the hallway with comfortable seating. I heard from someone that the luxury high school was supposed to be an office complex when it was built, but was then repurposed as a school. I don’t know if that’s true, but it would explain why, unlike most schools, it’s not a death trap.I’m impressed more than anything by how many exits the luxury high school has leading out of it. I thought of this yesterday when I ...
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    21 m
  • Kisses Sweatier Than Wine

    Kisses Sweatier Than Wine
    Apr 30 2024
    Final Thought, FirstI know Pete Seeger is an unlikely guy to be listening to in 2024. But there’s an album of his that was rereleased some years ago, a recording of a performance he gave at Bowdoin College in 1960. He performs a song that Leadbelly wrote, which he and his group The Weavers turned into an apparently less good song. I guess that’s arguable.But Pete Seeger had his moments, and one was when, after the first verse of singing this song live, at Bowdoin College, he encourages the audience to sing along by saying, “If you believe it, sing it.”No computer will ever tell a person “If you believe it, sing it.” If it does, it won’t mean it, not like a person can mean it. It won’t be like when Pete Seeger said it onstage, and on a morning sixty-four years later another man felt those words in his heart, and he sat in his basement breathing, petting his cat, and looking forward to when his children would come home from school and he could hug them and ask how their days at school went. I know that tragedies happen. I know about atrocities. I know that sometimes the kids don’t come home from school. It’s a miracle, every time they do.This newsletter will largely be about artificial intelligence and the things it can make. I have some conclusions to work my way toward, but for now, right here, I want to say that while it’s not always so great to be alive, sometimes it is. Maybe I’m in an exceptional mood, because I just woke up from a nap, and kissed the wife I’m so lucky to spend so much of my one life with. But I came back down here to the basement, to finish my newsletter, and I know that while it hurts to be alive, a lot of the time, it is also beautiful. It is a great gift, to get to be a human being. I’ve never asked much of the people who read this. And I’m not asking for much when I say I want everyone who reads or hears this to spend some time today or tomorrow doing something that it takes a heart and a mind to do, something that requires humanity. Write someone a message that only they will truly understand. Take a photograph of something that has meaning to you or someone close to you. Join a protest for a cause you know is right. Tell someone you love them. Sing a song you know by heart. In your own way, make the world a little more beautiful. It’s something we all know how to do.And I’m not going to edit this part out later, when my mood changes. I’m keeping this part in, damn it. I don’t care what my future self has to say about doing things that are beautiful.The Hidden Room DreamI went out with some friends recently, in Lawrence, Kansas—not to brag or anything—and I talked with them about something I’d read recently. I don’t recall what it was exactly—an essay from online? a page from a book?—but the author, who I think was a woman, not that it matters, described a recurring dream she has had in which she discovers, in her home, a door she didn’t know was there, or knew was there and never bothered opening. She opens the door, in the dream, and finds it leads to a room full of undiscovered treasures. All this time, that wonderful room has been right there, and now she’s on the other side, and it feels so good to have crossed into it. She explained, in the essay, whoever it was, that this is a common dream lots of people have all the time. It’s the Hidden Room Dream—yes, it even has a name—and apparently I am the last to find out how common it is. What a buzzkill! Right? I thought I was the only one who had that dream.Actually, that’s not true. Last year, someone on a podcast described my recurring Hidden Room Dream almost perfectly, saying it’s a dream he has often. He goes into the hidden room and thinks, What’s this room doing here? It has all of this behind it? How have I neglected a place with such potential all this time? I thought it was a wild coincidence, that he and I had the same dream, but no, I guess our shared dream is just one of the nighttime slideshows that come with every human brain. But despite how common the dream might be, we are all free to interpret it as we please. Maybe the dream is your mind alerting you to untapped potential, or it’s a premonition of new ideas, new possibilities, maybe a cool watch that you’ll find lying on the ground outside a Citgo station that will lead you to a mystery that only you can solve.Maybe it means that. But I’d like to think that this dream is something like a preview of what it feels like to die. What if, when we die, it’s something like the Hidden Room Dream? What if it feels something like opening a door that’s been there all along, that we’ve always known was there but ignored in the name of carrying on? What if the feeling of dying, of being the one who dies, is the feeling that saturates that dream? Oh, so that’s what’s been behind that door all this time! How could I have never walked through this door before? Maybe that’s how it feels to...
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    43 m
  • Phffoorremmann

    Phffoorremmann
    Apr 22 2024
    I should start with something controversial, so as to draw new readers to my newsletter who cannot resist the harsh iconoclasm of a practiced firebrand. But it can be hard to embrace controversy when there’s a genocide on, so instead I’ll direct you to an interview in which Shayla Malone, of The Missouri Review, asked some questions about my short story that the magazine published recently. I love to answer a well-asked question, and Shayla asked five of them. Thank you, Shayla, and the whole Missouri Review team!The rest of this newsletter rambles and digresses in a self-indulgent fashion, which means it’s just like everything else I’ve ever written. But the reason I gave it the title I did is that everyone should listen to the Harry Nilsson album Knnillssonn. I know people will call me a dreamer, when I say this. They’ll accuse me of not thinking realistically. But it’s my true and firm belief that if, on this day, everyone who read or heard this newsletter listened to the album Knnillssonn by Harry Nilsson, all wars around the whole world would stop, and none would ever start again. I should also mention, before I go any further, that there is an audio version of this newsletter you can listen to. I got some pretty good feedback on the first one I recorded and sent out, with people telling me my voice “is not bad enough, I mean, probably not bad enough, to make people want to drive headfirst into walls and buildings, so they never have to hear anything like it again; I mean, I guess it could be worse, is what I’m saying.” Also, I published a short story a couple years ago in a little magazine somewhere, but I never actually saw it in print and the magazine has no online presence, so as far as I can tell no one has ever read it. On the website, the issue is listed as “Coming Soon,” but it’s been that way since, I think, 2022. And I like that story, so maybe I’ll record myself reading it and release it as a “podcast episode.” Sometimes I don’t know what I’ll do until I’ve done it already. Something I will do for sure is read the first five or so pages of the novel I’ve been revising, at the end of the audio version of this newsletter. Because people can’t get enough of the sound of my voice.This Is Where the Real Threat Is Emanating from for You, Part OneI was reading an essay by the psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster, and came across the line, “this is where the real threat is emanating from for you, signalled by these letters.”I don’t have any idea what she’s talking about there, so I’ll provide no context. I don’t even know I could do it if I tried. Sometimes I read things I don’t understand. All I will say about it is that a real threat to me is emanating, and it’s signaled by some letters. I wrote the letters down, some time ago, and I have to deal with them now. Or, I don’t have to, but I am. And that’s just as bad.What I’m trying to say is, I have been revising two novels. I spent the last year ignoring them. I wrote short stories instead, and said I was done with book-length things. There was no point. I’m not sure there is a point now. But I am working on the two novels I wrote prior to just one year ago. I am getting back to it. I trade off. One day I’ll work on one novel; a couple days later I’ll work on the other. In between, I do the work I have to do to stay alive. The novel I’ve been working on today and yesterday is called We Eat the Rich. I thought it was finished already. I read it again recently and found that, 100 pages in, its momentum flagged. Some books’ momentums can flag. They’re allowed to do that. This one’s momentum, though, cannot. Its premise is too absurd for the reader to have even the slightest opportunity to say, Wait a minute. This is ridiculous. I have to keep throwing more weird s**t at them, so they don’t question anything I’ve already hit them in the face with. It’s a good strategy! There is no way this will not work out. To be honest, I’m uncertain about the novel as a whole, and I think it may have been a terrible mistake to write it in the first place. I’m sure I’ve explained it more than once in this newsletter already, but here we go again: it’s about four young women who roam America in a van and kill and eat rich people. They go to a house that looks nice, have a feast, burn the place down, and move on. They never get caught, because their van once belonged to a sorceress who cast a spell on it, or because they’re lucky, it’s not clear which. There’s not much actual bloodshed in the novel. I mean, there is some. There has to be some. But I’m more interested in the way these four characters talk to one another, and the world they generate inside their van, in which the things they do make sense and everything is inside out. The two novels I’m working on, and another one that’s finished that I’m querying agents with, form an unintended trilogy, in which ...
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    31 m
  • Oldman inside a Youngman

    Oldman inside a Youngman
    Apr 9 2024
    I substitute-taught for a class at our older daughter’s school last week. At dinner she said one of her classmates told her, after seeing me in person, that I have the face of a twenty-year-old and the hair of a fifty-year-old. I’m still processing this bizarre observation. For now I can only say the child was wrong. I do not have the face of a twenty-year-old. I’ve suffered too much sun damage for that. And my hair is more like the hair of someone who is seventy, or at least sixty. It’s freaking grey as hell. I should dye it brown. I should make it brown again. I should win a million dollars gambling online and spend it all on my beautiful face. I should do it in the name of building a better world for my face and my ancient hair.Elfriede JelinekI’ve been reading the novel The Piano Teacher by the Austrian author Elfriede Jelinek, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004. My path to reading it was an unhappy one, and I’ll get into that in a minute. But the novel is great. Of course it is. I didn’t know it existed until recently. I didn’t know about Elfriede Jelinek until last week, and isn’t that sad? She won the Nobel Prize, in my lifetime. I should have at least known her name.It’s ridiculous! And, you know, don’t get me wrong. There are more important things than the Nobel Prize.I don’t ever care much about the Nobel Prize, or other prizes, because I am a creature of light, a child of the stars. As a traveler to this place from distant galaxies, I care not for worldly things like literature awards. My interest is in beauty and the marks that words make on the human soul. And I don’t think it’s strictly my fault that I near heard of Elfriede Jelinek. When I searched for one of her books through my library, I learned that they don’t have even one of them. When I searched for a copy of The Piano Teacher online, to buy, all I could find were used copies. Are her books out of print in the United States? I don’t know. I’m not sure how to find that out. It seems like they are. My heart tells me they are. But the heart can lead its bearer astray.At least I can say I wasn’t completely ignorant of this author and her work. I once heard about the film adaptation of The Piano Teacher, starring Isabelle Huppert. A friend described it to me, in some detail, in about 2007. She did it with a certain horror in her voice. I recall from her description that someone in the movie gets their hand sliced up with broken glass. I would be harder on myself, for not knowing about Elfriede Jelinek, and not having seen The Piano Teacher myself, were it not for the childrearing I’ve been participating in for the last eleven years. I’m still hard on myself, for a lot of things, but I want to give myself some slack when I recall how many times in the last decade I’ve watched Frozen, Inside Out, Frozen 2, movies that star CGI Spider-Man, movies that star CGI Legos, and so many others. When you’ve got kids around, it’s hard to engage with the warped psychology of characters that feel uncannily real as they come alive on the page. You’re too busy changing diapers, fetching snacks, and lulling kids to sleep for things like that.I’m not complaining! I would not give back those fulfilled duties and repeated viewings of children’s films for anything. And I can’t mention those activities without admitting that, while they have taken up much of my time, they’ve taken up more of the time of my partner in this, the children’s mother, my wife. When the kids need something, they call out to her. It doesn’t matter if I’m nearer to them than she is. She is the one they trust most. She is their mother. And I could have read The Piano Teacher at any time before our elder daughter was born. It was first published two years after the year of my birth. All I’m saying is that I’ve spent eleven years without a lot of time to myself. It’s for the best possible reasons, but I’ve missed out on some things. It’s not out of the question that if I’d never once watched Frozen I’d have read the novel The Piano Teacher sometime between 2012 and now. I didn’t even know that movie was based on a novel until the other day when I was listening to a podcast I like quite a lot, The Culture We Deserve. I don’t remember why Jessa Crispin said something about it, or what she said exactly. I recall only that it came up, and I was like, That movie with the broken glass hands thing was based on a book? What? Oh my god.Now that I’ve read the novel, I don’t know how anyone adapted it into a movie. I doff my hat to the people who did it, but honestly I’d doff my hat to anyone who read this book and considered making it a film remotely possible. It’s one of the most intense things I’ve ever read. It’s like watching a slow-motion recording of someone having a panic attack. The passage of time throughout it can be hard to track, because everything happens inside characters’ minds...
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    30 m