13 January 2010
“The Love Story of the Young Woman and the Small Doctor,” an excerpt from The Fixed Stars, is up at Cavalier Literary Couture, which has a lovely and evocative website. (But the URL of the excerpt does not look very permanent; do let me know if that first link breaks.)
Maybe you like it? Or maybe you don’t, how should I know? I am currently hearing mid-March for the release date of the book.
Comments (4)11 January 2010
I got a subscription offer from One Story in the mail today; this is a magazine that publishes every three weeks, but each issue is just one story and nothing else. I used to subscribe. (It is only available by subscription.) The offer said: “In just one page, you’ll be reminded of why you love to read short fiction.”
“But wait,” I thought: “What if I don’t love to read short fiction?” Then I laughed and threw the offer in the trash.
Comments (0)8 January 2010
You can look at Michelle’s pictures of our Hawaiian adventure here. [Update: Mike & Kim's pictures are here.] Maybe I will say more about Hawaii sometime, or maybe not. At the moment I am preoccupied with the cold.
The Fixed Stars will be out soon, it seems.
Comments (0)18 December 2009
I’ll be back on the fifth of January, I think. Last night it was ten degrees here. Ice formed inside my windows.
Comments (0)10 December 2009
After the math program debacle I thought I might as well send some fiction around for real, which I hadn’t done in a long time. (I finished The Fixed Stars in the summer of 2008 and then stopped writing at all until quite recently.)
The Bicycle Review is an online publication with a simple look and an ornery disposition, both of which naturally appealed to me. Each issue features poetry and visual art and various kind of fiction all arranged in an aggressively linear fashion as though to spit in the face of the internet. Their submission guidelines said I could send more than one piece at a time (ballsy!) so I thought why not? and sent two. They took both; they’ll be up February 15 I’m told.
The pieces are entitled Circumstances of my Life and Fawn Suit. Probably I will post here again when they actually appear. In the meantime you can read the current issue.
Comments (0)7 December 2009
A very nice review by Ben Gottlieb.
I am particularly interested in the pigeon he mentions near the end of the stories section.
Comments (2)6 December 2009
Last winter I paid close to three hundred dollars a month for heat and was still cold and miserable. This time I decided to delay turning on the heat as long as possible; if I’m going to be cold and miserable anyway, I might as well save my money. For the last month or so the temperature outside has been generally in the forties, and the temperature in my house as been generally in the fifties. This isn’t so bad, really. I wear five shirts and sit on the couch; my fingers get cold but I feel fine — better than I did last year, actually, maybe because I’m resigned to it. But I’ve been dreading the day when it gets really cold out and I have to turn the heat on and start paying again.
Today there is a little snow on the ground. Weather.com says the temperature outside is currently 27. Temperature in here: 53. Pretty comfortable. Granted, I’m cooking at the moment, and that’s generating some heat, but it’s been pretty comfortable all day. What is this? Do I have some kind of magic house that bottoms out at a temperature of 53? In the middle of February will it still be 53 in here without the heat on? Am I going to save myself a thousand dollars?
Comments (2)5 December 2009
MIchelle’s mother read my post on foreign candy and arranged for some candy to be brought from China. (Her parents, Michelle’s grandparents, spend half their time in China and half their time in Kansas.) It seems the majority of this candy spoiled in transit, which makes me curious for details, but I ate the two unspoiled candies yesterday. They were hard candies, maybe slightly chewy in the center, in delicious flavors that I could not identify. (I can rarely identify the flavors even of American hard candy.) One was pink and one was yellow-green. I wondered whether I should start eating hard candy more frequently.
Over Thanksgiving I took the Fung Wah bus to visit friends in New York, and at a rest stop along the way the driver gave me a Chinese cigarette. I don’t ordinarily smoke, but since it was a bus ride and since the cigarette was Chinese I smoked it. It was an exceptionally smooth and delightful cigarette. I wondered whether I should start smoking.
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I mentioned before that I have been slowly working my way through Xenophon’s Anabasis, having taught myself the rudiments of Attic Greek. The story so far: Greek mercenaries are traveling with Cyrus to fight against the army of King Artaxerxes, Cyrus’s brother, for the throne of Persia. Orontas, a Persian nobleman and part of Cyrus’s retinue, has been caught trying to betray him to the king just as the army is nearing the capital. He has been tried and sentenced to death by a small group of Cyrus’s advisors, including one of the Greek generals, Clearchus. Clearchus finishes telling the rest of the Greeks about the proceedings:
“Then those who had been ordered to do so led him away. And when the same people saw him who used to bow to him, still now they bowed to him, even though they knew he was being led towards death.” But once he had been led into the tent of Artapates, the most trusted of Cyrus’s officials, nobody ever saw Orontas again, either dead or alive, and nobody who knew said how he died; everybody speculated differently. And no grave ever appeared.
An endnote by the editors explains:
Herodotus (7.114) states that it was a Persian custom to execute by burying alive. It is not improbably that this method was adopted here.
I wouldn’t say this surprises me exactly; everybody knows the ancient world was a grisly place. But it does terrify me. I’ve read the passage several times and will probably read it again, and there is a vivid picture in my head of what it might be like to be buried alive secretly in the camp of Cyrus on the eve of war with the king. These things seem more real when you have to work for them: I can’t just read this account in ten seconds on some website, I have to translate it from Greek. The things that happen in the Anabasis are far more real to me than the things that happen in the newspaper. Maybe stories are always better in a language freshly learned; maybe we should always be learning new languages so that we can read stories in them and have those stories affect us the way stories used to, when we were first learning our native language.
This post was the first time I translated Greek in public.
Comments (0)2 December 2009
Ben Gottlieb invited Joanna and me to post as guest editors on Art + Culture, which is a kind of social site for arty types. Our posts are there now; as I write this mine is in the main slot and Joanna’s is below, but Ben has said they will switch soon. The two posts go together, you understand, and are of equal importance, but the structure of the site demands that exactly one post be in the one main slot. Thus the switching off.
For the future (when they are no longer on the front page or whatever), my post is here and Joanna’s is here.
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