Here’s a snippet:

There are many paths through the art. Having enough money to sit in a log cabin all day watching foxes make out, with berries on one’s breath. Having an entire university beneath one’s command. Ability to drag friends in for a little merlot and sloppy sex with students.

This is perhaps my favorite part:

Jay Leno, not Conan O’Brien, is the future. Why? Because Leno is more devious, sinister, and craven. These are things to aspire to be. Jay Leno would reach through your skin and deep into your stomach to fetch an undigested Skittle if he were hungry for one.

Makes me shy about eating Skittles ever again. That’s for damned sure.

Unfortunately, I read books faster than I can write about ‘em.  My desk is littered with books that are awaiting a blog post. In an effort to clear off the desk, I present a quick a dirty assessment of the past few months of also-reads.  I present them in no particular order:

Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann: McCann won the National Book Award for this novel, a series of interconnected stories that have as their focal point the famous tightrope walk of Philip Petit between the World Trade Center towers. Compelling stories, compellingly written. Still, I did not find McCann as engaging as this year’s runner up American Salvage (see previous post).

Parasites Like Us by Adam Johnson: Parasites is like two books in one. Three quarters of the book reads like the typical middle-aged man breakdown novel. A college professor of anthropology who is a failure at love and whose career is in the gutter ponders the meaning of life and the possibility of diddling one of his students (the boring stuff of Updike). The remainder of the novel, however, veers into apocalyptic. A cataclysm occurs that only the professor and his students survive, and the book prompts the kind of imaginative musings on the meaning and breakdown of culture that one would expect. A good book, though a bit tedious at times.

The American Painter Emma Dial by Samantha Peale: Peale’s first novel, Emma Dial reads like a first novel. The pacing is skewed, the plot is at time belabored, the language ill-fitting. BUT, I loved this book. The central character drives the reader onward, slogging through all the first-novel idiosyncrasies. As an aside, Samantha Peale was recently featured on one of my favorite podcasts Writers on Writing. Her interview inspires any writer who is trying to see a project through to the end. Check ‘er out here

The Land of Green Plums by Herta Muller: I love to say Muller’s name in a deep resonate monotone, a voice I imagine East German bureaucrats using when stamping passports. Herrr Ta Mew Lar.

Muller is the Romanian-born novelist who won the 2009 Nobel for Literature. Her selection is once again congruent with the Nobel committee preference for the literature of oppression. Green Plums is the only book of Muller’s that I have read, but it’s a doozy of a book. Partly autobiographical, extremely lyrical, the book follows the travails of a group of college students in Romania as they seek to be individuals (who love literature) in a society that does not value the individual. Muller’s writing is hypnotic and vivid. She’ll put a fissure in your synapses.

Ford County by John Grisham: I try hard not to be a Grisham hater. In fact, I kind of like the guy. When I was in grad school (when was I not in grad school, I hear you saying), Grisham was invited as the keynote speaker for the “Christ Haunted South” conference, a meeting that centered on Southern literature, paying a huge debt to a resurgence of interest in Flannery OConner.

Grisham opened his address by stating humbly and plainly that he was not sure why he was invited since his writing is far from literary. I admired his candor.

With Ford County, Grisham hammers the point home. Ford County is Grisham’s first collection of short stories, all of them set in the fictionalized Ford County in the Mississippi Delta. Grisham seems to have the idea of the literary short story firmly rooted in his brain, yet he cannot reach this ideal. I cannot say that I despise the stories in this collection, but none delivers on its promise, and I can almost hear Grisham’s fans screaming, “where’s the lawyer; where’s the intrigue, where’s the cheap moral?”

Tales of Outer Suburbia by Shaun Tan: If you want a weirdly uplifting fairytale of a book, read Tan’s Tales . A graphic novel written for a teenage audience but all ages should be able to embrace this fantastical world. One image from the book stands out for me. In my library work, I am always scribbling down bits of words, notes, call numbers on small scraps of paper. I carry these around with me like bills in my pockets till they have been lost. In one tale, Tan imagines what happens to the scraps of paper that we all carry around so casually, the laundry lists, poem scraps, receipts, and love letters. All these things, in Tan’s imagining, join forces and become a thing of beauty.

Read this book sometime. It will only take a few minutes of your life but you’ll want to spend more.

Methland by Nick Reding: On occasion I wander in the world of popular non-fiction. It does not happen very often. Nick Reding’s books, as the name implies, is about the methamphetamine epidemic in rural America. Reding provides not only information but narratives from those most affected. Not something I want on my bookshelf, but certainly a worthy read.

Good People of New York by Thisbe Nissen: Nissen is good. She is a good writer. Her story takes the New-York-Centric novel and stands it on its head…sort of. She does this by setting up these contrasting character studies of folks who are native to NYC and folk who have migrated there. Difficult to say who comes out on top by the end. Either way, Nissen’s story made me feel good. ‘Nough said.

American Romances by Rebecca Brown: This book of essays ranks up there with Annie Dillard for my affections. Brown has more of that post-modern playfulness than Dillard, but both are able to shift from the personal to the factual to the downright absurd in ways that make the reader reopen his eyes and reaffirm her faith. Brown has a doozy of an essay on reading (my drug of choice) called “Extreme Reading.” This is one that every Freshman English student should read. She says:

Every time you read a book you read what you desire
Every time you read a book you make that book your own

I certainly made Brown’s book my own.

Go now and read, my friends.

I was born in Flint, Michigan. My parents still live there. My grandparents have lived or still live there. Flint is the quintessential Northern factory town. It is a city that General Motors built, and when I grew up nearly everyone I knew was connected in some way to the auto industry. Yet despite being a distinctly Northern town, Flint was mostly populated with Southern transplants, folks who came North to find a better life. These Southern Yankees brought their Baptist faith and their cornbread up North and started raising families. Exiles from the Bible belt, singing the songs of the lord in a foreign land.

Bonnie Jo Campbell’s remarkable book of short stories American Salvage captures this experience of the Yankee South, however unintentionally. All the stories in the book take place in Michigan, a truth made more poignant by the fact that Salvage was published by Wayne State University Press as part of their “Made in Michigan Series.” It seems rare to find a writer of Campbell’s talent stake such a strong regional claim. The notion of a “regional” literature seemed, for a time, to be the purview of Southerners alone–and the ocassional “Westerner” (Cormac McCarthy; Annie Prolux?).

American Salvage, however, is distinctly Michigan. But in being so distinct, Campbell pays homage to Michigan’s cultural dependence on the South. These characters would be just as comfortable in a Faulkner tale or a Peter Taylor short story as they are here in this colder clime.

I read American Salvage over the Christmas holiday while on my way to Michigan to visit my family. The characters evoked memories of my people, my family, and perhaps for this reason alone I felt a deep connection to Campbell and her story collection.

But these stories are more than just evocative. Campbell is a master craftswoman. She has a seemingly innate sense of how to control language and employ it in story. The beginning of the story the Inventor:

A rusted El Camino clips the leg of the thirteen-year old girl, sends her flying through the predawn fog. She lands on the side of the road and lies twisted and alive in the dirty snow.

Two terse sentences that set up a story of loss and love, a story with one small part sexual tension and one big part discovery. The El Camino driven by a man who would be good, but who has only ever been the Other. In telling the story, Campbell gives the reader just enough to move to the next sentence with growing anticipation.

The fourteen stories in the collection share a tone and often a subject, though it would be difficult to pin that subject down like a moth. It is the stuff of life, and particularly the stuff of life in rural Michigan.

Campbell’s book was the runner up for this year’s National Book Award, an honor she fully deserves. As part of the festivities for the award, Campbell gave this fine reading of one of the stories in the collection. Not the story I would have selected for her to read, but a great piece none the less.

finalistread f campbell from National Book Foundation on Vimeo.

Check out her website too www.bonniejocampbell.com .

On her blog she had some great snippets of the speech she intended to give had she won the National Book Award.  I’ll conclude with this, which, IMHO, makes Ms. Campbell a damn fine Southern Yankee.

This award is good news for writers who feel uncertain, for writers who choose to live in small towns in Michigan or Maine because they feel a profound connection to their own people and landscape. This is good news for writers who do not feel brilliant, but who want to work hard to get it right

It’s that “profound connection to their own people and landscape” part that I’ll ruminate on.

J.D. Salinger and I go way back.  It was he who stuck “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a poor sinner” into my little brain.  Yep, this is that damned Jesus Prayer that drives Franny Glass bonkers in Franny and Zooey.

As much as I hate the man for giving me that ear worm, i’m sad to see him gone.

My good friend The Hamster has the best remembrance of the man I’ve read.  Go check it out http://wheresmyhockeymask.blogspot.com/2010/01/indeed-today-is-perfect-day-for.html

Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

-W.H. Auden, “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”

I’ve been thinking a lot about poetry and politics.

This is one of those recurring themes in my thought life. I’m an idealist who masquerades as a realist, but I cannot shake the belief that good art can shake the system to the core.

On the other hand, I fancy myself an artist, or at least a fella who likes to play with language. And, as such, I have always harbored a deep respect for Oscar Wilde’s apology for the uselessness of art.

The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium. No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved.

No artist has ethical sympathies.

I believe Oscar. Of course, loving beauty got him two years hard labor. Maybe he was more ethical than he thought. Maybe it was his ethics that ran him headlong into the authority of the day. And perhaps his art helped to (eventually? still going on?) bring down the ethics that put him in prison.

But poetry makes nothing happen.

Auden’s words about Yeats.

And here is Yeats, taking swipes at and then steps toward Irish Nationalism. He turns his Nobel acceptance into an opportunity to promote Ireland:

“I consider that this honor has come to me less as an individual than as a representative of Irish literature, it is part of Europe’s welcome to the Free State.”

Ahhh, but the Yeats I love is the Yeats with “a faerie hand in hand,” the romantic Yeats. Or that dark lyrical pessimism of Adam’s Curse: “we’d grown as weary hearted as that hollow moon.” Gorgeous. The beauty that needs no moral.

Poetry makes nothing happen…

And maybe Auden’s point is that politics, the give and take, the back and forth, it goes on with our without our art. But it sure don’t hurt to try and make something happen. Maybe the attempt to make something beautiful, and in that way to make something happen, maybe this is a windmill worth chasing.

Senator Blanch Lincoln has royally pissed me off.

Yesterday Senator Lincoln announced that she would be a cosponsor of the Murkowski resolution that prevents the EPA from regulating greenhouse gases. (Read the news here.)

I do not normally wade into politics on the blog.  Most of my political opinions I reserve for friends over a few frosty brews.  I do, however, keep up with the political fray and there are some issues that I care about passionately.  Climate Change is one of those issues.  There is simply no excuse for not acting now.

Throughout the Bush administration Republicans resisted taking action on climate change and said, “the science is not in yet.”  We know now this was a lie propagated by the oil and natural gas industry.

Now the naysayers are coming at it from a different angle.  “We have to take it slow so as not to wreck our economy.”  Bullshit.  We can accomplish strong climate change legislation AND strengthen our economy. What these folks really mean is “We need to protect the oil and natural gas companies who have given millions to our reelection campaigns.”

Blanche Lincoln, Arkansas senator since 1998, is among those senators.  I didn’t want to believe it.  I wanted to believe her website where she says:

Most importantly, I believe our country should focus on a long-term investment strategy in renewable and alternative energy sources, which will pave a road to energy independence.

Or how about this one:

Having been raised in a seventh generation farm family in Arkansas, I grew up with a love of nature and a great respect for the conservation of land and water resources.  I value our environment and want to find ways to best protect it for wildlife and for our enjoyment.”

Senator Lincoln has clothed herself in this narrative of the humble little farm girl who just loves the natural world. She’s done so even as she’s taken more and more money from the Agri-business industry, which has effectively killed the family farm she claims to love, and the Oil and Gas Industry, which is destroying both our economy and our environment.  (Don’t even get me started on her refusal to support a public option for health care, even as she pockets thousands of  dollars from Blue Cross Blue Shield).

If you want to see who is donating to Senator Lincoln check out the Federal Election Commission for a comprehsive list.  Open Secrets, a governement watchdog organization, also provides a summary view if you don’t feel like wading through the thousands of donors.

The text of the resolution is not yet up on Thomas.gov. It will be there once the EPA issues their rules. You can check out the Congressional Register if you’d like to read what Alaskan Senator Lisa Murkowski has to say for herself. It is shocking that someone who is so obviously in the pocket of the energy industry can say with a straight face that she is concerned for the American people. The words I have for this hypocrisy are not kind, and I’m biting my lip as I write this. (The ruling yesterday of the currently ultra-corporate dupes in the Supreme Court just further demonstrates the deep rift between “we the people” and our government).

If you live in Arkansas, call Senator Lincoln and tell her to withdraw her support for the Murkowski Resolution.  Visit her website lincoln.senate.gov. Her telephone in Washington is 202-224-4843 . Calling may not matter, she’s too deep in the pockets of corporate interests, but she should at least know that her constituents see her for what she is: another cog in the greed machine.

I am the database jockey for a medium sized library. My title is Technical Services Supervisor, and my tasks are legion, but one of my primary jobs is to attend to the library’s catalog. A library catalog is a giant relational database that connects information about authors, books, and ultimately people like you and me who use the library.

In this role of database jockey, every year I have the gruesome honor of tallying up all the dead authors and entering their death dates into our catalog.

You have probably seen this before when you search for an author. You search for “Hemingway, Ernest,” and the catalog returns “Hemingway, Ernest, 1899-1961.” Well, when Ernest was alive the entry would be “Hemingway, Ernest, 1899-” A person just like me entered that 1961 sometime after Hemingway’s death.

Not every author gets a date. In general only authors for whom there is a conflict receive a date. So, if there are two Hemingway, Ernest’s out there the dates distinguish between the two. This rule doesn’t always seem to apply, however.

This week I’ve been stamping out the dead. Making sure that those who need it get the death date. It was a big year for literary dead, though, imho, the only real luminary to die this year was John Updike. Nevertheless, many lesser lights were extinguished.

Among those lesser lights, two were connected to the great state of Arkansas, where I call home. Donald Harington and E. Lynn Harris.

Stay More, a place as vivid as Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha, formed the setting for each of Harington’s 15 novels. Harington takes the raw stuff of life in the Ozarks and twists it into literary fiction. In an interview with Edwin Arnold Harington says:

The hillbilly is already a creature of myth.
Alas, then, I also am not a hillbilly. I am too educated to be a hillbilly. Like the lawyer who gives up his career to write crime novels or the doctor who gives up practicing in order to write medical novels, I forfeit my hillbilliness in order to write novels about hillbillies. It is some consolation that certain characteristics of hillbillies – fierce independence, shyness coupled with loquacity, a wry if not sardonic sense of humor – remain in my bloodstream, remain in my genes, and permit me never to forget what it is like being a hillbilly, at the same time that the deprive me of complete objectivity about hillbillies. I can’t laugh at hillbillies because I am still laughing too hard with them.

Harington never achieved commercial success, despite the fact that each of his books was met with critical praise. Maybe, he will undergo that transformation that death sometimes brings an artist, but until then he remains one of the greatest writers no one’s reading.

Harris’s novels all deal with handsome African-American men on the down low, fellas who are struggling to come to terms with their sexuality, their masculinity, their identity. Harris took up this theme well before it was popular, and he did a damn good job writing convincing romance stories on a topic that still makes people squirm.

I’m prone to like Harris, though I’m not a huge fan. Like me, he was born in the dirty ol’ town of Flint, MI and like me he is a transplant to Arkansas. I’ll miss knowing he’s out there keepin’ it real on the down low.

I’m a two pack a day man, smoke like a fiend
Like a burned out bearing in a bad machine
I cayn’t breath in the mornin’ till I get myself a cigarette lit
Say, Daaaa aaaad Blame, anyways a man cayn’t quit.
–Roger Miller

I did not meet her as a teenager, as so many others do. True, I saw her often, flirting with the gutter punks and metal heads, men, women, she was indiscriminate, flirty bitch, and I was not attracted to her. I was NOT.

Paul introduced us. He had not known her very long, but he invited her along one night. We had no plan. It wasn’t a formal date. Just friends, feeling the first flush of adult independence but with nothing to do except drive around that dirty Indiana river town. Five of us drove out to the river. There was Paul and her, Kelly and Jenny, and myself. They all knew her better than I did, and I was uncomfortable around her, awkward, but I wanted to get to know her. I wanted to impress her, show her how cool I was. I didn’t know then how easily impressed she was.

There, on the banks of the Ohio, our first kiss. My head was a mason jar of frenzied fireflies. Ecstasy.

The S.S. and I winded our way to Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, making stops along the way in St. Louis, Hot Springs AR, Glenwood, AR, and Norman, OK. In the time it took to get from Evansville, IN to Fort Worth, TX, I fully committed to tobacco, and on that trip, I switched my allegiances from cigarettes to the pipe. This was a decision made on a whim as I rolled through a drive-thru smoke shop in Hot Springs. There I bought a corncob pipe and a pouch of Prince Albert. The pipe I named Quennie.

Queenie and I snaked our way through the Ozarks, puffing and laughing, light headed. This was when one puff still gave me the lightening bug feeling. Empty one bowl, tapping her out on the side of the S.S.. Fill another. Empty another bowl, tap tap tap. Fill another. Puff, Puff, Puff. Later that night I sat around a campfire with Luc and Irys and we passed her around, taking turns. There was something sad in the air that night, like fumes of Auschwitz, and the tepee was cold despite Queenie’s presence.

How could I know then that I would scarcely spend a night without her for the next twelve years.

I don’t smoke, and I don’t chew, and I don’t go with the girls that do.
~anonymous

I knew immediately when I arrived on the campus of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary that i had made a mistake in coming there. A quick review of the bumper stickers in the dormitory parking lot told me all I needed to know: “My Boss is a Jewish carpenter,” “We Vote Pro-life,” “In Case of Rapture, this Vehicle Will Be Unoccupied.” But in that election year, the top-rated bumper sticker was “Dole/Kemp ‘96.” Even in the height of my religious fervor, I despised jingoistic Christianity and hated this identification of evangelical Christianity with the Republican party, and SWBTS, the largest Christian seminary in the world, was, at that time in history, the seedbed of jingoistic, politicized Christiainity.

Smoking was anathema. No one smoked on campus. In fact, all SWBTS students were required to sign a pledge saying that we would not smoke or drink alcohol. I broke that pledge within two seconds of my arrival. I violated the pledge at least five times a day during my brief stay. I was afraid, though, of getting kicked out of graduate school, so I smoked in secret.

If smoking is an ice cream sundae, smoking in secret is the whipped cream and cherry on top. The secret makes the smoke delicious. My favorite place to smoke was the Denny’s on University Avenue in Fort Worth, and it was here that I would spend my nights and early mornings for the one and one-half years that I endured SWBTS.

My habit was to go the seminary library and check out books of theology that had been blacklisted from classroom reading lists. Then I would take these books to Denny’s and devour them along with twenty cigarettes. Yes, cigarettes. Queenie demanded too much codling. She was a demanding lover. She needed constant attention, cleaning, accessories. Ciggies only needed a light, and Armando, the manager at the Denny’s was always good for a light. He was sweet on me.

Then one rainy Tuesday afternoon, I couldn’t handle SWBTS anymore. I was sitting in my Southern Baptist History class. Earlier that morning at Denny’s I had finished a book about the recent history of the Baptist Convention. I read about the so-called “purge” of liberalism; I read about the back room deals (one wonders what might be different had those rooms been smoke filled); I read about all the subterfuge and jockeying for power, and I was illuminated. “I am not a Southern Baptist anymore.” I left class, got in the Smoking Section, lit a cigarette, and drove the ninety-miles to Waco, TX where I enrolled at the Truett Seminary. They didn’t care that I smoked, or at least, they didn’t make me sign anything saying I wouldn’t. True, they were still Baptists, but they were kinder, gentler Baptists. Joining their ranks brought catharsis for a time. To celebrate, I sat on the banks of the Brazos and smoked half a pack in the rain.

Pamela Ryder is a writer’s writer.

A quick Google blog search proves the point. Every writer-blogger has something good to say about Ryder.

Ryder’s story collection Correction of Drift also finds its place on many a young writer’s short list of recent and influential books. Lydia Peele, whose story collection is a similar tour de force, mentions Ryder’s book in a NYTimes interview and says the book “defies definition either as a story collection or a novel, but lies lyrically and refreshingly somewhere between the two.”

Correction of Drift is ostensibly “historical fiction.” Ryder retells the story of the kidnapping of Charles and Anne Marrow Lindbergh’s baby, the subsequent investigation, and trial.

Prior to reading, I did not know anything about the Lindbergh kidnapping other than that the kid got napped. There is, however, nothing pedantic in Ryder’s fictionalized interpretation of events. She is not writing a veiled history book. Instead, Ryder uses the Lindbergh kidnapping as a way of exposing this grand human comedy/tragedy.

This is, I suppose, what all writer’s seek to do: convey something of our human plight. Saying Ryder “exposes this grand human comedy/tragedy” now seems trite. So much Blah Blah Blah.

I cannot do Ryder justice. She’s good. Just good. She gets inside skulls. She disregards the maxim to “write what you know.” Instead she writes what she visualizes. Writes what she has only heard about, intuited. She takes a risk. A 189 page risk. And whether she succeeds or fails, depends on one’s definition of literary success.

Irony of ironies: I picked up John Grisham’s latest book, a collection of short stories titled Ford County. Grisham’s book will appear in every library in the country with multiple copies and a hold queue as big as it’s carbon footprint. Ryder’s book I struggled to find. She’s published by the University of Alabama Press. I finally got Correction via Inter-Library Loan. It came to me from the Austin Public Library in Texas (being a librarian has its advantages). Yet of the two story collection, Ryder’s is the more moving. Her’s is the one that attempts to grab the reader with the beauty of language.

But I’m rambling.

I’ll have more to say about Grisham’s Ford County after I’ve finished with it.

This is how I came to Amy Koppelman.

Koppelman–look at that photo–looks like the quintessential NYC hipster writer: a Columbia MFA pedigree, a retro-tshirt, and a damn good playlist.

Koppelman has published two novels: I Smile Back (2008) and A Mouthful of Air (2003). I read ‘em both, in reverse chronological order.

The two novels bleed together like blood brothers. In I Smile Back, Laney is a middle-aged mother living in the suburbs of NYC and teetering on the brink of the mental abyss. In A Mouthful of Air, Julie is a younger version of Laney, a twenty-something mother living in NYC and trying to overcome her own ennui, a world weariness that, at the opening of the novel, has just manifest itself in a suicide attempt.

Both Julie and Laney are acutely aware of the absence in their lives of their fathers, an absence that Koppelman frequently evokes with narrative flashbacks. Both also struggle with the very notion of happiness: what does it mean to be happy? Both delve into the world of psychoanalytic recovery. Neither recovers.

Laney has two children, a beautiful car, loving husband. Julie has 1.5 children but is otherwise a match. Neither work. Both have domestics to do that which their angst finds unbearable, viz. take care of their children, their home, their lives.

Both have husbands who are practically non-Characters: always supportive, always ready to stand by their lady even after rehab or a suicide attempt. Both are committed to the idea of “family” and domestic bliss: “Let’s be happy, baby. Please, let’s just be happy.”

Halfway through I Smile Back I thought: “Now it’s the women’s turn.” American Literature is littered with stories of angst-ridden white male urbanites. Babbit, Rabbit, Portnoy, Herzog, all of them bemoaning the domestication of the White Man and his almost purposeless existence. Do I dare to eat a peach?

I thought Koppelman might have a refreshing perspective.

Kate Chopin, anyone? I remember sitting in a Denny’s in Fort Worth, TX after finishing the Awakening, chain smoking Camel Filters, and trying not weep in front Armando, the manager who was sweet on me.

But Koppelman’s characters are more caricature than flesh. There seems to be no affection between writer and character, and, quite the opposite, one senses a bit of judgement, as if Koppelman, fresh from a high school reunion, went straight home to write about the washed up homecoming queen she saw there.

Possibly, I’m being uncharitable. Maybe Koppelman herself is that homecoming queen. I know nothing of her biography that I didn’t read on a book jacket; nevertheless, wealthy, depressed urbanite is not the image she projects.

I read for those moments when a story takes me out of myself (as with the Awakening). I want words on a page to lead me into lives not my own. I want some mythos. I am not typically judgmental about what kind of world a writer leads me to. I like fucked up lives and unhappy endings as much as normal, happy ones. The trip there is the pleasure. I am as addicted to this feeling of leaving the body as I am to tobacco.

Reading Amy Koppelman was like smoking a candy cigarette: a puff of white powder and a useless gum, the image of smoking without the guilty pleasure.