I rewatched Interview with the Vampire last night and it just doesn't seem dark enough. Maybe that's a reflection of how my emotional self has darkened after Covid, rapacious politics, and so much social turmoil. But it seems to me that the story, the myth, of the vampire is dangerous because it is Dionysian and… Continue reading Interview with the Vampire Reconsidered
Category: zombie culture
Maybe You Can’t Handle the Truth
Today, after all the Covidy Trump ups and downs, the questions about Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation, and the hard questions about whether there should even be a VP presidential debate, I'm thinking again about Chris Beck's excellent piece in Splice Today, "The Media Reports Narratives, Not Facts." We all live online now. We look at… Continue reading Maybe You Can’t Handle the Truth
How to be Good
A rhetoric professor of mine used to amuse himself by saying, “The truth is always simple.” By this, he usually meant that accurate-seeming propositions are built from small assumptions, arrayed around a central premise easy to accept as common sense. The central premise is simple. The rest is usually a complex rhetorical exoskeleton designed to… Continue reading How to be Good
Newsfeed
White men are horrible, straight men are horrible, white straight suburban women are especially horrible, oven cleaner is white adjacent, history is horrible, you are horrible, look at my dog. Racism, hillbilly violence, iconoclasm, the anarchy must be put down, but isn't it about time, anarchy is okay, anarchy in the UK, anarchy is not… Continue reading Newsfeed
The Temporary Autonomous Zone
A short short in the style of Tony Earley. It was time for the end of the world again. We thought it was going to end in December of 2012, but in our exuberance, we’d miscalculated the date of our ultimate annihilation. Now, eight years of heartbreak and trouble later, we were informed that we’d… Continue reading The Temporary Autonomous Zone
Ok Boomer
Consider this hypothetical. You’re standing in your kitchen, cutting slices of cheese with a razor-sharp carving knife. You realize there are such things as cheese knives, but you don’t have one. For those readers currently languishing in suburban opulence, who can’t imagine someone not owning a cheese knife, I’m here to tell you such people… Continue reading Ok Boomer
Read my latest at Splice Today . . .
On Knowing If You’re Any Good
If you’re a writer, you’ll live your life not knowing if you’re any good. And you’ll die not knowing. I think John Berryman said that. After Phil Levine published his first book of poems, people said, yeah, but can you do it again? Then he did it again. Then they said, yeah, but have… Continue reading On Knowing If You’re Any Good
Writing the Hard Thing
If I could tell you the number of stories and novels I’ve begun writing and not finished, we’d be here too long. But “not finished” doesn’t mean “discarded.” It means what it says. The difficulty comes when I’ve convinced myself that I’m one sort of writer (the consistent, cheerfully productive kind) as opposed the other,… Continue reading Writing the Hard Thing
The Myth of Making It
I don't often reblog other writing here, but this one is worth the trouble. The author is Soraya Roberts. — M If the most financially and critically successful artists don’t feel successful, maybe there’s something wrong with how we think about success. Source: The Myth of Making It
The Writing Expedition 