MY FAVORITE ALBUM OF 2007

If this concert happens, the live recording. I basically can’t believe it. It’s a whopper of a deal. As Alfred pointed out over email, it reads like something from The Onion. I don’t often suspend my disbelief—a bad habit turned aphorism by modern idiots—but this is kinda worth it.

TWO BOOKS BY SOUTHERN WHITE MEN YOU OUGHT TO READ

The Mysterious Secret of the Valuable Treasure by Jack Pendarvis and Geronimo Rex by Barry Hannah.

Welcome back into my hot heart, fictive prose. Re-engagement is predictably on the terms of comfort food—uncomfortably sarcastic, deadpan pantomimes of po-faced-ness in an effort to drown you in the tidal waves of asininity routinely offered by, well, regular ol’ life. Pendarvis is more self-consciously absurd: lots of exclamation points, lots of belabored syntax; faux-chu’ch-newsletter-style with a touch of the naïf, like a good email from your mom, only about a lot of really terrible shit. A little bit of Beckett, a little McSweeny’s, a little Mr. Show. Hannah’s more forceful about his grotesqueries, which makes him a higher-wire act—so often can these funnies go horribly unfunny—but most of the time, he stays balanced. Which isn’t always good; through his deft pen I’ve been reminded of how colorful adolescent misogyny was. Literature is indeed, as you once epigrammatically noted, the history of the soul, Barry Hannah! But hell I had put a personal moratorium on bildungsroman and I really like Geronimo Rex, even if half its flexing is for a one-man dozens designed to cast the female sex as a uniformly eager, helpless one.

ALSO

Me on the jogging thing, which is okay I think.