Dunno why but writers tend to like to tell people when they've been writing a lot; whether it's true doesn't seem to matter. And this is kind of what this post is, because I have been writing a lot, just clearly not on this blog! ha ha!
bleh, that's how it feels knowing you need to tell people something they more than likely couldn't care less about. But I NEED this! har har, Anyway - just shipped off a new short story to some journals and writing contest things and am eagerly anticipating the thoughtfully worded rejection letters (or the generic ones they send to everybody, or ooooh a really mean one would be kind of awesome on some level), which I'll happily post here when they come.
So, what else? Been reading a bunch as always:
- Just finished Don DeLillo's 1985 novel
White Noise (not to be confused with the terrible 2005 movie of the same name starring Michael Keaton)
-
Antoine Wilson's short story
"Everyone Else" from the fall 2004
Paris Review, which made me immediately order his 2007 novel
The Interloper. (Seriously, do your eyes and pocketbook a favor and just buy a real fucking book, $4 at
Powell's. Having to turn your iPad or iPhone off and stop reading during taxi, takeoff, and landing is a HUGE drag.)
- James Lasdun's short story
"The Hollow" also from Paris Review.
And I can't really say enough about these next few excerpts from David Foster Wallace's soon-to-be-here-but-not-nearly-soon-enough last and sadly unfinished novel
The Pale King.
"Good People" (published in the New Yorker). A snippet:
What it really felt like was a taste of the reality of what might be meant by Hell. Lane Dean had never believed in Hell as a lake of fire or a loving God consigning folks to a burning lake of fire—he knew in his heart this was not true. What he believed in was a living God of compassion and love and the possibility of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ through whom this love was enacted in human time. But sitting here beside this girl as unknown to him now as outer space, waiting for whatever she might say to unfreeze him, now he felt like he could see the edge or outline of what a real vision of Hell might be. It was of two great and terrible armies within himself, opposed and facing each other, silent. There would be battle but no victor. Or never a battle—the armies would stay like that, motionless, looking across at each other, and seeing therein something so different and alien from themselves that they could not understand, could not hear each other’s speech as even words or read anything from what their face looked like, frozen like that, opposed and uncomprehending, for all human time. Two-hearted, a hypocrite to yourself either way.
"The Compliance Branch" [PDF Link] (From Harper's Feb. 2008 issue). The first paragraph:
My audit group's Group Manager and his wife have an infant I can describe only as fierce. Its expression is fierce; its demeanor is fierce; its gaze over bottle or pacifier or finger-fierce, intimidating, aggressive. I have never heard it cry. When it feeds or sleeps, its pale face reddens, which makes it look all the fiercer. On those workdays when our Group Manager, Mr. Yeagle, brought it in to the District office, hanging papoose-style in a nylon device on his back, the infant appeared to be riding him as a mahout does an elephant. It hung there, radiating authority. Its back lay directly against Mr. Yeagle's, its large head resting in the hollow of its father's neck and forcing our Group Manager's head out and down into a posture of classic oppression. They made a creature with two faces, one of which was calm and blandly adult and the other unformed and yet emphatically fierce. The infant never wiggled or fussed in the device. Its gaze around the corridor at the rest of us gathered waiting for the morning elevator was level and unblinking and (it seemed) almost accusing. The infant's face, as I experienced it, was mostly eyes and lower lip, its nose a mere pinch, its forehead milky and domed, its pale red hair wispy, no eyebrows or lashes or even eyelids I could see. I never saw it blink. Its features seemed suggestions only. It had roughly as much face as a whale does. I did not like it at all.
Go read, I'll have some more stuff soon. Promise. Happy Holidays!
