February 2012
13 posts
Currently revising. Putting in heart where there was no heart before.
I can’t help but to feel haunted… I keep having these dreams of people from my past… every night… I wish they would go away. I cannot pick up the phone and call any of them in my waking life.
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“I cry a lot because I miss people. They die and I can’t stop them. They leave me...”
– Maurice Sendak
Patrick Somerville just killed it on tumblr with flowcharts of good fiction and bad fiction.
It’s sad enough when I have dreams about old friends or lovers who no longer talk to me that I cannot even imagine what it’s like to be old and having the same dreams about those who are dead.
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Tweets from the past year:
Opened my snake’s cage tonight and said to him, “Hello Pol Pot.”
Was tempted to put ‘tumescence’ at the end of a list of communication methods.
“slugabed”
I have a big effin’ stack of crime novels in my house now. Also, licorice candy. I’m old.
There are men in this world who name The Monkees as their second...
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How I ended a cover letter for a job that I wrote today:
“I have left out: life in Singapore, the stories I’ve published, the upside-down shed currently in the backyard, the chocolate mousse I once prepared with chocolate made by French monks, that Carl Sagan’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors is one of my favorite books, my interest in brain science, my love for yoghurt, and also that for...
January 2012
16 posts
When I was at my most stressed out in Singapore, I would look up flights that would leave to the US the very next day. I could do it, I told myself. I could leave without telling my boss or my landlord that I was leaving. And then I would feel better about my life because I was still, theoretically, in control.
I just remembered that I took a shower once in the Incheon Airport in Korea. That seems pretty weird to me right now.
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Walt Whitman’s brain is in a jar in Philadelphia. I want to go visit it.
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In 2010 Mark Baumer walked across the entire United States (from Georgia to California) which he documented on his tumblr, The Baumer. This year he’s writing 50 novels. On Sunday he asked Tom Hanks for $50,000 dollars to cover costs for that project. Tom Hanks declined. So now he’s asking the rest of us for $50,000 on Kickstarter. He sent me this exclusive excerpt from his novel I Only...
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I just opened a piece of gum and put it in my mouth while thinking, “I’ve been chewing a lot of gum lately.” Then I discovered when I started to chew that I was already, in fact, chewing another piece of gum from less than an hour ago.
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“The perfect man is pure spirit. He does not feel the heat of the burning deserts nor the cold of the vast waters. He is not frightened by the lightning which can split open mountains, nor by the storms that can whip upon the seas. Such a person rides the clouds and mounts upon the sun and moon, and wanders across and beyond the four seas. Neither death nor life concern him, nor is he...
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The best part about 2011 was that I didn’t do anything incredibly stupid, like I did in 2010.
December 2011
13 posts
vwswrite asked: So you have an MFA in writing? I was thinking of going on to do that but I'm not sure if it's worth it. What do you think? Did it help you in any way in your pursuits??
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My year in books
I found quite a few books to be earthshakingly good this year, many more so than usual. I don’t know if this means it was the books that were better or if it was I who had become a better reader. I am of the perhaps mistaken notion that it is the reader that creates the book through reading, so I would be inclined to say that I had evolved in the past year, and that after one-third of a...
All the various valuations that are put on [life] by the social game are illusory, basically. Because it’s only in play that we say this is good, this is bad, this is advantageous, this is disadvantageous. We would go on to say after this, “I cannot imagine anything more difficult than overcoming this hypnosis. I am so enchanted by this system that the idea of treating it as not very...
Does the present create the past?
My throat is sore, but I have no brandy to douse it.
Here is the last thing I typed on my typewriter:
“We measure ourselves against others: Am I sane or insane? Am I smart or am I the stupid one here? How can I reach those shores of the norm where is which so many of us would like to dwell.”
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Brother's Friend Maggie: Laugh like a Bellatrix. You'll feel better.
Monkfish Jowls: What's a Bellatrix?
Brother's Friend Maggie: Really?
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November 2011
7 posts
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“So long as a writer is working below the power of her powers, she is depriving...”
– Marilynne Robinson (from the forthcoming When I was a Child I Read Books)
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One of the best passages I’ve read in a while, about fecundity:
Lacewings are those fragile green insects with large, rounded transparent wings. The larvae eat enormous numbers of aphids; the adults mate in a fluttering rush of instinct, lay eggs, and die by the millions in the first cold snap of fall. Sometimes, when a female lays her fertile eggs on a green leaf atop a slender stalked...
MFJ: I have 3000 tumblr followers now. What should I do with them?
XA: Hahahahah... send them on a treasure hunt to my blog.
MFJ: ok
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VKN said: “You disappeared off your blog for awhile.”
Okay! Here’s an email I was writing (but didn’t finish or send [but which I’m finishing now to you, dear blog reader]) to my friend Kevin yesterday about American novels:
I.
Have you read anything good from the US lately? I’m despairing. Yesterday I read the first two pages of the new Dennis...
October 2011
12 posts
VKN: How are you keeping warm at my mother's house?
MFJ: I am keeping warm by keeping sheep in two of the three bedrooms. At night, when the temperature falls, I remove some of the sheep from their rooms and take them into bed with me. I keep spare sheep because some sheep have escaped and some have died; I want to be sure to always have one or two on hand. I have once been in bed with a sheep that has died, and it is just as chilly as having no sheep at all.