No, it’s not chlamydia. Nor is it the secret mark he made on his keys over there in the glass bowl by the front door, the one that lets you know which are his. It’s this, from his essay, “Distance and Point of View”: It is not surprising to hear practicing novelists report that they [...]
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This is I think the one song of the stellar and (for me, at least) seminal Arise, Therefore record that hasn’t been tabbed online. I’m not sure whether it’s 100% on (the song is piano heavy, which always makes transcription difficult), but it’s a start. Please revise/edit as needed. Note: This is for a guitar [...]
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I just wrote what I think might be the last sentence of the taxidermy book, at least in this version I’m about to send to my editor: “We are not animals, we are given them.” It felt righter two minutes ago.
weird-science verb, trans. 1. to fashion an object out of thin air, or to improve the general quality of a pre-existing object, using the vague powers that have seemingly been placed within you by a pair of horny experimenting teens: I’m starving; it’d be great if someone could weird-science me a pizza | Huh, this [...]
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I. One of the effects of being on the academic job market as I’ve been since, oh, September, is that you stop thinking. You stop engaging in much else around you that’s not an academic job posting, or a certain wiki. Your loved ones suffer and your liked ones do. Your students. And but it’s [...]
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Here’s another book I want, seen in a well placed ad in the New York Review of Books. Why (and not, please, whether) we care about literary characters is a subject I’m committed enough to to want a read a whole book that finds an answer. Would you believe it’s $60.00 through Johns Hopkins Press’s [...]
About 90 percent of everything I know about music I know from two friends who both now live (not together) in Brooklyn. One of those is my Pittsburgh friend Steve who has been making and sending me mixes for so long that the first ones were on tape, because few of us had CD-burning laptops [...]
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Taxidermist Carl Akeley is considered by most taxidermy folks to be the father of modern taxidermy. Taxidermy. Taxidermy taxidermy. Certain words when you write a whole book become very easy to type. Taxidermy. Can’t remember the last time my fingers in that pattern didn’t hit their targets: Taxidermy. Certain words’ meanings begin to fade as [...]
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There’s a new book I want. Well, it’s two books, the two-volume Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. I like very much my Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus, which has smart little editorials on words and their usage from Zadie Smith, David Foster Wallace, Stephin Merritt, and other smart people whose opinions I don’t just [...]
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Maybe we don’t have to choose. Or maybe some don’t. I chose Alabama. Suck it, Texas.
Not in chronological order: Terminator: Salvation Miracle on 34th Street (original) Home for the Holidays The Marc Pease Experience The Brothers Bloom xXx Alice (Svankmejer, dir.) Inglorious Basterds (sic, pending) What else is there to do when it’s single-digits and snowdrifted outside?
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