SNEAK PEAK MORGAN BLAIR BOOK COVER = YUMM.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING -- LETS ASK FRANK ZAPPA A QUESTION

Skip up to minute 4:34.

old school ramble

Thanksgiving? If you have some kind of day job, which I do, you most likely have a three-day week. Which means you'll work for two days because on Wednesday no one will be doing anything. People will talk about how many people they are having over for dinner, what they are cooking, where they are going, and will try and leave early.

The holidays are officially kicking off. I got my first "happy holidays" last week and said "isn't it a little early?" The person said "no, thanksgiving is next week."

I feel like this blog lacks energy lately. Just look at this post which I started by talking about Thanksgiving.

I wonder how many days/months/years this blog has left in it.

I might get a membership to the YMCA around the corner and start swimming again. I was a swimmer in high school. My time for the 50 freestyle was 27sec. 100 breast stroke was one minute and 16sec. Both of these times are considered only okay. Like a C+ on a paper.

I gave a homeless man 50 cents last night. He wanted a dollar. I said I only had the 50 cents. He said "im gonna get that other fifty!" I said "I bet you will" and wished him good luck. I was coming out of a wine store where I had charged a 12 bottle of wine.

By my day-job standards, my beard is out of control. Wonder how many days/months/years I have left there.

From out of nowhere told my wife the other day "we lose everything we love." Then we had some fried fish.

Watching the Buffalo Bills blow it in the fourth quarter. Classic. (update: they just lost)

Sometimes I think I can predict things. Maybe just paranoid? I currently imagine a giant shit-storm blowing everything away. Nothing to do but eat shit sandwiches afterwards.

Blog post has taken a pretty dark turn from the start by talking about Thanksgiving.

Let's lighten it up. Happy Holidays:

RECENTLY

*Felt like a long week. Had to stay late for work on Monday (10 hour day) and I think it infected the rest of the week.

*Started reading Pale Fire. I like it so far. I keep thinking "master prose stylist" while reading it. I've never read a word by Nabokov. There are other writers I've never read and feel guilty about doing so.

*Watched the movie Days of Heaven. I really loved this movie. Some of the images are burned into my head. Malick pieces the film together in a really interesting and beautiful way. There's very little dialog. Malick spent years editing this film, pissing people off, just exhausting himself to complete it. He took a 20 year break from making movies after finally finishing it. Intense.

*I don't know.

*I'm not sure what's going on this video, but it looks like the German publisher Eichborn has some pretty rad ideas on how to promote their publishing house. Here they are at the Frankfurt Book Festival where they tied promotional tags to insects and had them fly around the book fair. David Foster Wallace also makes an appearance:

geegaaaaaa+++

Two weeks left to enter the Failure Six essay contest. So come on people. I'll add a bonus copy of The Failure Six and if I have them in time, a copy of the chapbook Cannibal Books is currently printing. Funnnnn.

Almost finished with Gravity's Rainbow. Don't really know what to say about it other than it's amazing and i'm kind of in awe at the skill Pynchon has. Also reading Wind-Up Bird Chronicles. Started Cloud Atlas and almost threw the book across the room after the first five pages.

Snap:

UK

Pynchon, DeLillo, Marquez, Tecmo

Tecmo Super Bowl game

TOUGH

Hey, you're a writer who spends hours sitting and writing and then more hours sitting and reading - what do you do for exercise? Does exercising make your writing better?

DON DELILLO AND RUSSELL BANKS

Friday night the NY Writers Institute had an interesting/strange thing involving Don Delillo and Russell Banks. The place was packed with mostly older people (50+) and few people laughed when Banks said that you want your audience to get younger, not older, because the older ones will die and then your work won't be read.

The whole thing was about forgotten writer Nelson Algren who wrote The Man With A Golden Arm and other lyrical/realist novels. We watched the movie version and then Don Delillo and Banks sat at a table on stage with NY Writers Institute head Don Faulkner.

The discussion was a little stiff, but flowed well and had some really interesting points. Like most people there, I just wanted to see Don Delillo. He didn't seem like he could be a real person. I imagined he would be very serious and somewhat intimidating. Although serious, he came off as nerdy, a little nervous, odd, very well organized (he had a folder full of notes he kept going through), soft-spoken and intelligent, and spoke with a slight lisp. I got a good feeling from him. I'd rather hang out with Delillo than Banks who kind of bashes you over the head that he's just this regular beer drinking joe from the northeast (I had seen Banks read before where he also told the story about him being a plumber in the NH).

The discussion revolved around personal accounts both Delillo and Banks had with Algren and how Algren was intensely popular in his time and how now is almost completely forgotten. At one point Algren was the top writer in the country, mentioned alongside Hemingway, but overtime, younger writers and readers came up and didn't read Algren, and both Delillo and Banks weren't exactly sure why this was, other than Algren's style comes off as outdated to many.

Overall, it was interesting. I'm not sure why we had to watch the two hour movie - hardly anything was discussed about it - and I think most were there to see and hear Delillo.

Also, really enjoyed the guy who during the Q&A period said "YEAH, I DON'T HAVE A QUESTION, IT'S MORE OF AN OBSERVATION."

AUTHOR COPIES CAME IN THE MAIL TODAY AWWHAHA.

Order copies direct from FUGUE STATE PRESS.

If you don't like using the Google payment on the pubs site and want a signed copy with my tears of future failure stained on cover, paypal $12 to:

Read an early review from blogger Darby Larson here who says "one of my favorite books of the year" and "In some ways I like The Failure Six more than Light Boxes."

Read "spotlight" on the book at HTMLGIANT here.

Excerpts in the next issue of New York Tyrant and Dark Sky Magazine (both out at the end of this month) and upcoming reviews in Interview Magazine (Dec/Jan Issue) and American Book Review (date unknown).