three a.m.

Notes:

1)  It rained for about a week straight here, just in time for the 1st week of summer session classes.  The rainy weather, combined with the fact that I’m teaching technical writing at 5:30-6:45, inspired a surprisingly strong urge in me to leave, leave, leave, move on with my life.  Last night I was looking at jobs in Portland, New York, Texas.  But perhaps this is another form of procrastinating writing the novel???  I do have a great apartment here.

2)  Speaking of writing, my first fiction pub. will be coming out in The Cream City Review, though they don’t know which issue yet, fall or next spring. 

3)  Today I went for a hike at Indian Steps with Leanne & Moura & their dogs.  The highlight was when the Game and Fish lady came tearing down the dirt road by where we were parked, and Moura jumped in front of her truck and flagged her down and told her to slow down before she ran over someone’s dog.  The look the lady gave Moura was priceless.

All the rock and woods and hills reminded me of Northwest Arkansas.  I need to get out more.  I want to do some hiking and maybe rafting in Virginia/West Virginia later this summer — anyone interested?

4)  Books:  The NY Times recently did an article about the best American work of fiction in the last 25 years, based on a poll of editors, critics, writers.  Toni Morrison’s Beloved won, which I still haven’t read.  What I thought was funny is that Don Delillo, Updike, and Cormac McCarthy all had several books listed as runners up. Phillip Roth had 6.  6!  Give me a break.  Fucking New York Times.

Actually I just finished McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, and it is hands down the most violent book I’ve ever read.  But also one of the most interesting — it’s like Faulkner after he’s been up for a week taking speed and reading shakespeare and watching spaghetti westerns.  It’s full of passages like this, when a small criminal army is attacked by Apaches:  "Now driving in a wild frieze of headlong horses with eyes walled and teeth cropped and naked riders with clusters of arrows clenched in their jaws and their shields winking in the dust and up the far side of the ruined ranks in a piping of boneflutes and dropping down off the sides of their mounts with one heel hung in the withers strap and their short bows flexing beneath the outstretched necks of the ponies until they had circled the company and cut their ranks in two and then rising up again like funhouse figures, some with nightmare faces painted on their breasts, riding down the unhorsed Saxons and spearing and clubbing them and leaping from their mounts with knives and running about the ground with a peculiar bandylegged trotlike creatures driven to alien forms of locomotion and stripping the clothes from the dead and seizing them up by the hair and passing their blades about the skulls of the living and the dead alike and snatching aloft the bloody wigs and hacking and chopping at the naked bodies, ripping off limbs, heads, gutting the strange white torsos and holding up great handfuls of viscera, genitals, some of the savages so slathered up with gore they might have rolled in it like dogs and some who fell upon the dying and sodomized them with loud cries to their fellows."

I also recommend Thomas McGuane, Nothing But Blue Skies, for something a little lighter.  It’s about a Montana businessman who kind of slowly loses it after his wife leaves him.  Funny.