Bro

You know what I thought of as I was falling asleep last night? That part of the Bible where Jesus kills a disappointing fig tree! I was like, "Hey, McNeil may be onto something." ("Click" here for some of McNeil's interesting reflections upon the character of Jesus.) So I was looking up the passage this morning, and I couldn't decide who was more annoying, the people on the "internet" who know exactly why Jesus absolutely needed to kill a fig tree at that moment and want to justify it to me in depth or the people on reddit who are like "What the ding dong!" (I here modify their colorful cursing.) They are like "Jesus straight up murdered a fig tree, bro!" (I paraphrase only slightly, if at all.) They are like, "This proves it! Religion is over! We did it! High five, dude!" You know what? Yes, they are worse. I'll stick with McNeil. McNeil is neither fish nor fowl! Ha ha! People say that like it's a bad thing.

Pig Head Song

Okay now this weird French governess in this novel is singing "a quaint old Bretagne ballad, about a lady with a pig's head." Uh, here's some of it: "And she would sing like a funeral bell, with a ding-dong tune./ The pigs were afraid, and viewed her aloof;/ And women feared her and stood afar./ She could do without sleep for a year and a day;/ She could sleep like a corpse for a month or more./ No one knew how this lady fed -/ On acorns or on flesh." WHAT!

Anybody Home?

Still waiting to hear whether I am allowed to show poet Ann Fisher-Wirth printing the contents of SKIN MAG in lipstick directly onto the medium. It may violate SKIN MAG's strict rule about reproduction! Reportedly, when SKIN MAG was read at Faulkner's grave (the culmination of its "publication"), latecomers asked if the poem could be repeated, and SKIN MAG replied, "No. It will never be uttered again." (To that end, Ann's husband Peter was not allowed to view the printing. Known for his prodigious memory, he once performed the entirety of KRAPP'S LAST TAPE for one of Barry Hannah's classes. The utter obliteration required by SKIN MAG could not be complete had the poem been allowed to live on in the amazing brain of Peter Wirth.) In the meantime, here is SKIN MAG discovering that Faulkner's house was closed to visitors by the time SKIN MAG arrived. So the planned shirtless tour did not happen! The next part of the plan did, though: SKIN MAG perpetrated a classic "ding-dong ditch" prank at the home of famed novelist Richard Ford. As the house did not appear to have a doorbell, SKIN MAG was required to bang frantically with a knocker before running away. Witnesses stated that a tall figure could be seen moving behind a window, and suddenly the front porch blazed with light. What happened next, nobody knows. SKIN MAG had vanished mysteriously into the gathering gloom.

Dong Ding Ding Ding Ding

There's a commercial for the iPhone with a strummy little guitar pleasantly strumming and then a nice glockenspiel tinkles merrily thusly: Dong ding ding ding ding dong ding ding ding ding, and it's just so very coy and lovely and I'm sure it's a great song but all I have ever heard is the foreshortened part for the iPhone commercial that goes dong ding ding ding ding dong ding ding ding ding over and over and it is starting to make me hurt inside, not emotionally, not like it's so beautiful or something, no, just pain, just pain inside, like I'm going mad, mad I tell you, mad inside.

Asinine Project Bears Wholesome Fruit

In an arbitrary move which should be of no interest to anyone, a few months ago I decided to read one short story a day for a year... just one story per day, no more, no less, each by a different author. You mathematicians will have no trouble discerning the magnitude of my project: 365 stories by 365 different writers. Today I read story #65, "The Stick" by Kobo Abe, translated by Lane Dunlop. It was a real winner! It was so good that I ran out and bought Kobo Abe's novel, THE BOX MAN, which is about a guy with a box on his head in Tokyo. Now that's what I'm talking about! Anyway, it occurred to me that this is the kind of thing that people "blog" about. It's an exciting and titillating way to read: for example, now I want to read EVERY short story by Aimee Bender and Lorrie Moore... but now I have to wait until the year is up, or I'll be cheating! Well, I decided to do a little audit, and I discovered that I want to reread (for the umpteenth time in some cases, though I have tried to stick mostly to stories with which I'm unfamiliar) exactly 20 of the stories (so far) when my self-imposed literary exile is over. Here are those stories: "The Jelly-Bean" by F. Scott Fitzgerald; "Starving Again" by Lorrie Moore; "Feathers" by Raymond Carver; "The Calmative" by Samuel Beckett; "Up, Aloft in the Air" by Donald Barthleme; "So! I've Got You" by Robert Walser; "The Case of the Salt and Pepper Shakers" by Aimee Bender; "Uncle High Lonesome" by Barry Hannah; "Gloomy Tune" by Grace Paley; "Peasant Women" by Anton Chekhov (tr. by Richard Pevar and Larissa Volokhonsky); "Old Mr. Marblehall" by Eudora Welty; "Animals in Our Lives" by Tom Bissell; "Now I Lay Me" by Ernest Hemingway; "Hidden Ball Inside a Song" by Ben Marcus; "Say Yes" by Tobias Wolff; "Winky" by George Saunders; "The Adventures of King Dong" by Jonathan Baumbach; "Train" by Joy Williams; "Water-Message" by John Barth; "The Stick" by Kobo Abe. Now all you have to do is buy 20 books, each containing one of the above stories, find a Xerox machine and a stapler, draw yourself an imaginative cover on a piece of construction paper, and pretty soon you'll have an anthology edited and with an introduction by me (this is the introduction)! As an appendix you'll want to include the story "How it Floods" by Pia Z. Ehrhardt. The day I met her and heard her read, I was compelled to seek out one of her stories... though it violated my little obsessive-compulsive arrangement, as I had already read my "one" story for that day. Well, my friend Beth Ann told me only a jerk would write a book about this kind of exercise, and she was right! I've seen those books in the store and passed them by disdainfully! But I think it's okay to "blog" about. Okay, everyone, get cracking on your anthologies! I'm giving a prize for the best cover.