Tag Archives: lists

Against Coherence

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I am too old to care about rap beefs. 

Pets are overrated. 

I wanna give that guy a wedgie. 

So much of respectable adult life is just hair maintenance. 

Airplane mode all the time, by which I mean I’m wearing sweatpants. Sorry, joggers. 

Perhaps online headline shriek is structural more than rhetorical, but also, still, rhetorical.  

Cats are underrated. 

Mechanical pencils are just fundamentally better than wooden pencils. “Trad” pencils. I’m sorry. 

Tweet threads were/are a terrible way to read.

I self soothe by reading online gift guides. 

Rust: it never sleeps.

Reading the exposition on the rap beef is not unlike trying to piece together the backstory on Gamehenge when I got into Phish at seventeen but also somehow still even more loserish. 

Deer, qua species, have an overdeveloped death drive. 

Fondly remembering peeling the perforated spool receipt from freshly printed continuous form paper, and wonder if/when today’s rage-inducing tedium will become an occasion for nostalgia. 

I hate standing in line but spend all day on line. 

People watching is underrated. 

Dogs are appropriately rated. 

Words and phrases that should be retired: onboarding, longform, third place, vibe shift.

Listening to explanation of rap beef’s intricate symbolism is worse than listening to teenager’s post-school-dance drama debrief, because with teen at least you recognize some of the names. 

I try to skip the first three paragraphs of any online article.

I am building a bridge out of legos. It will be human-scale. It will go nowhere, support nothing. It will never be truly finished. It will make a great video for my YouTube channel. 

I have known [giant technology conglomerate] for years. I consider them a good friend. However, I am seriously disappointed in [giant technology conglomerate]’s behavior at the party last Thursday. 

In terms of writing, what if the bots are better? Everyone’s saying the same thing already, sis. 

There will never be less stuff on the internet.

What I hate about writing on the computer is the formatting, the way the machine formats for me, incorrectly. Let me be ugly in peace. 

Trend that in retrospect was innocent, harmless, amorphously adorable: tote bags. 

Don’t scrimp on: dental care. 

Last night I dreamt I was trapped in a Kroger on the chip aisle while the backing-up beeping of personal motorcarts gradually grew louder. Nightmare buffet. 

Bluetooth: unreliable. 

Accumulated Baggage

short stories, The Portable Son, , , , , , , ,

Hello.

The good thing about never posting is that you eventually accumulate something worth posting.

And so it is with great pleasure that I link to a list of Ten Essential Southern Novels I wrote for Conversational Reading. Boiling down that list was instructive, revealing. So much gets left on the floor. For better or worse, there’s nothing too terribly idiosyncratic in my list, except for the fact that my list of novels includes four collections of stories. No matter, the collections are novelistically expansive, panoramically interesting. But it made me think of the paucity of my list-making ability. Get thee to the library! And it made me appreciate D.G. Myers’s energetic listing over at his excellent A Commonplace Blog. Here’s my favorite list he’s done thus far: Five Books of Professors.

In addition, I am happy to report that a short story of mine is in the newest issue of Louisiana Literature (27/2), available now in better bookstores and libraries everywhere. The story is called “Popular Baggage” and is included in the story collection that will come out next year. The story is my, ahem, High-School Prom story. Every writer who’s read Hemingway attempts a hunting story, and likewise, everyone who was a child in the 80s, or has seen too many John Hughes movies, has a High-School Prom story in them. My Prom story is a bit more like Carrie than Sixteen Candles, except there’s no blood, or telekinesis, or John Travolta, but there is dancing, by god.

Here’s how the story begins:

Continue reading Accumulated Baggage →