Jun
18
You can also follow Collected Alex here.
Annotations
Mike from Minneapolis. Sincerely.
Jun
17
The Salad (that I wrote a story about)
Word Riot has been kind enough to publish a short story of mine, “The Salad.” If you have an interest in reading about a person struggling to make a salad in an increasingly hostile environment with minimal companionship or know-how and a creeping sense of home invasion, then perhaps, well, whatever. Here’s to _____________.
(Also, I should say thanks to Word Riot’s fiction editor, Kevin O’Cuinn!)
Yesterday morning, I turned on my work computer, and saw an email from my dad. The above is the view from my parents’ room in Montana. My work desk looks out on to a parking lot, which, I will grant you, is shaded by some nice trees. Nevertheless, a parking lot is not a mountain haloed by a rainbow.
In retaliation, I spent the night at their house, eating pizza, watching cable TV, drinking my dad’s beer, cleaning their cats’ litter boxes…
I discovered my new favorite television character on the show Deep South Paranormal. His name is Hart and he’s missing at least four teeth and has a beard that seems to get longer each time you look at it. He carries around a stick with chicken feathers and a bell tied to it with colored string. In one episode, he sucked the breath out of a frog and blew it into a testtube; frog’s breath protects you from evil spirits, FYI. In another episode, he sat down for tea in an antebellum mansion and tucked his beard into his shirt. Here are some of his colloquialisms:
- “This place is bigger than a gator’s belly at feeding time.”
- “Boy howdy! Hell, he broke camp faster than a fox’s ass in a forest fire.”
- “Even the sun shines on a dog’s ass every once and a while. And my butt’s tanner than a pile of black-eyed peas.”
- “Spirits are crashing around like two skeletons playing hopscotch on a tin roof. Boy, it’s heating up here tonight. And if that don’t light your fire, your wood is wet.”
In short, whenever I get a dog, its name will be Hart. Here’s a video of him.
Elizabeth’s blog really is one of my favorites. You agree with me.
Jun
13
Steven Millhauser /// Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954
Great, so now not only does it kill me that Millhauser is that good, but it kills me that he was that good that early. Has any other American debut ever won a literary award … in France? No one here gets out alive—it’s a matter of who dies first, and whether the biographer is an inferior artist or, on the contrary, the most appallingly complete version of same.
Fucking terrific. This is like one of a handful of Millhausers I haven’t read. And now here you are, phantom internet friend, letting me know that I will probably feel the same. I don’t even have money to spend on beer right now, much less debut novels from the 1970s.
Jun
10
My foot hurts today. I’m a little hobbled, and it’s pissing me off a little. Here is a music and a video.
Jun
8
Please tell me what song this song reminds me of; also, good god goddamn.
What I like about everyone is different from person to person, depending on the person.
(Source: Spotify)
Jun
7
ratios
I feel like the weather for the last week has been “implied rain” even when it wasn’t raining. I’ve had the opportunity to wear my hoodie more often than I would have expected. I did not sit around trying to expect some sort of ratio for that. I am reading this Steven Millhauser book, Little Kingdoms, which is a collection of three novellas, and I have decided as I always do that I need to keep reading more Steven Millhauser. You should do so as well, for both health and safety. I also read Miranda July’s short story collection and that book has little rocket ships in its blood. I mean, maybe it gets a little tiresome to read first-person story after first-person story, but even alienation comes in, like, one really good flavor. Or laughter. Whichever it is. I think living forever would be pretty terrible.
The level of construction at the University of Minnesota has reached such a point of fanatical overload that I’m not even sure anyone is in charge. I think construction crews are just showing up and saying, “This would be a good place for fucking train tracks.” It’s like campus is some sort of cultural center for ambitious, self-starting construction crews that just happen to be wandering the country seeking perfect locations to make a shit load of unpleasant noise.
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