It’s been a bad-news year. It’s been a great newsyear, which usually amounts to a bad-news year. You all know why. As I’ve slacked on the output on this blog of late, I want to do a personal 2013 recap thus far. JANUARY I was in Boston for the MLA conference, interviewing for only one [...]
I. B.G. as Bob Cratchit is Scrooged‘s most inspired casting decision. II. Charlie Day is the heir to B.G.’s comic genius.
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It was my co-founding editor Jenn Meccariello Layman who showed me this story in Pittsburgh Magazine on The New Yinzer‘s 10-year anniversary celebration. Which means it was just more than 10 years ago that I was working a PR job at an arts center in Pittsburgh and I ran into Jenn one night at a [...]
Saturday is historically the worst day of the week to read the newspaper. And yet here’s this morning’s Tuscaloosa News bucking trends. Two front-page stories I need to quote from. First up is an AP article: “Lyon out as chief justice candidate”: Democrats removed perennial candidate Harry Lyon as their nominee for chief justice of [...]
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I can’t remember the first friend I made. That I can’t remember the first friend I made may imbue my boyhood with a kind of friend surplus, but it was just I lived from day one in a clover-shaped set of cul-de-sacs with four or five kids the same age. Timmy probably was the first [...]
I still have a blog. I’ve got recent news and things to go over, and I’ll do them once a day this week, like vitamins we’ll all take to resurrect our blogging health. Stay tuned, friends. Thoughts are forthcoming on sickness, cleanliness, books, The Legend of Zelda, and Post-its.
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One of my resolutions for the new year is to buy one new record a month, at a store here in Tuscaloosa. And not Best Buy or Barnes & Noble, but Oz Music, which has these bumper stickers I’ve been seeing on the more sticker-laden cars around town that say “Support Local Music” or some [...]
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I’m not sure what one of these even is. I. I spent a week on the road in October reading from The Authentic Animal,*** which was a nice fall break full of all the foliage we can’t quite see in the deep south. I sold fewer copies than there are months in a year. But [...]
I’d’ve liked, had I my druthers, to’ve invented a whiskey-based cocktail. But haven’t they all been invented already? Until then, here’s a refreshing cocktail, unseasonable as all hell, so wait until it’s warm out again to imbibe. Or: live in the South. It’s still, like the fashions, hitting the 80s here. Recipe Fill one pint [...]
That’s not official, that name, but I’m taking my show on the road this fall. Won’t you come see me, or tell your friends and family in these towns to see me? Wed. Oct 5 radiowest.com hourlong interview with host Doug Fabrizio (may be a call-in show) 1pm EST Mon. Oct. 24 Pittsburgh Copacetic Comics [...]
This post is for Mac users, chiefly. And especially those Mac users who are writers. A couple years ago, I blogged about my beloved Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus, and how it includes little bits of copy about words and their usage by writers like David Foster Wallace, Francine Prose, Zadie Smith, Simon Winchester, and the [...]
Do you know that The Authentic Animal is available for pre-order on Amazon? This means the book’s got a whole Amazon page with all of its little widgets and bits of more information than most folks want. For instance, Customers Viewing This Item [i.e., me or my mom] Also Viewed this item: It’s a poster [...]
Movies watched since the tornado hit (in order of my remembering that we watched them): Defiance Hereafter The Green Lantern Nanny McPhee Returns The Social Network Skyline Secretariat How Do You Know? The Royal Tenenbaums Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban [...]
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We didn’t have any tornado helmets. It was something Neal’d heard in passing on the news broadcast, something our friend Erica had mentioned on Facebook in response to my update, “Tornadoes again. TORNADOES. AGAIN.” We’d had tornadoes in Western Alabama just two weeks previous—another set of warnings a week before that. All told, three times [...]
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Lately, I’ve been thinking about memorization. There’s that Foer book that’s climbing the charts. There’s that cell phone I have to which I’ve outsourced the memorization of every phone number in my life save N’s and my parents’. And there’s the final oral exam I assign to most of my undergraduate creative writing classes, where [...]
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Getting here? It took nine lifetimes. N nonplussed. It was “worth it.”
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Some people for the first time! Why doesn’t everyone live here?
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I. The Authentic Animal‘s got an ISBN now: 978-0312643713 if you use the new ISBN-13 designation, and all authorities tell me you’d better. This means the book’s pre-orderable through Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble and other online vendors. I’m still deciding whether to use DAve Madden as some groundbreaking nom de plume. The big letters [...]
It has recently come to my attention that I’m good at singing non-B-52′s songs in the voice of Fred Schneider. Favorites include X’s “White Girl” and Pavement’s “Cut Your Hair”. (Career! Career!) What’s not been made apparent, however, is how this talent may be rendered profitable. Ideas welcome. In other news I’m allergic to cats, [...]
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Just a quick post to say that the redesign (and restructuring … those of you with RSS feeds may need to relink? I’ve no idea how this all works) of the site that you see here is all thanks to my good friend Beth Sullivan. Why a redesign? I don’t know it’s like a blog [...]
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