We’re late to the party. We’re very aware. We’ve got stacks of books we’ve been meaning to get to, and often reading those stacks results in the need to acquire subsequent stacks. Books are a vicious web of aesthetic agony in that regard, and the contemplation of any future wherein every book we’ve ever wanted to read has been read seems ridiculously optimistic at best.

Also, we’re a bit against the bandwagon. Tell us something is great, and we’ll tell you, “We’ll be the judge of that.” This is a bi-product of what we fear is an overly-fragile publishing industry. Quick, go and find us 10 negative book reviews. It’s a hard task. The scene is too small to throw stones. No one wants to offend.

So, when we heard about Michael Kimball’s Dear Everybody we put it on our list. We ordered it from a bookseller. It gazed sweetly upon our reading chair post-arrival. We knew we’d eventually pick it up. And we were damned pleased when we did.

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Everything Here is the Worst Thing Ever

We’re not going to talk about Justin Taylor. Maybe we should, because the caption to the above photo suggests such, but we are still waiting for our copy of Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever to arrive in the mail. And, even then, it will probably take us weeks to get to it.

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Recognize that handsome mustache? He’s the man that made your nightmares. He made black birds spooky. He put you in the pit. He placed you beneath the pendulum. The evidence of his ingeniousness still swings back and forth above you. The anxiety of his insanity still haunts you in the heart. His works can be compared “to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium — the bitter lapse into everyday life — the hideous dropping of the veil.” — Brian Allen Carr

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by Brian Allen Carr

We have a broken rib. This is the most unfortunate of wounds. Doctors can do nothing for you. Luckily there’s alcohol. Thankfully there is YouTube. We are at our most powerful while watching strangers get wounded.

Check out this sucker.

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We Need Sleep

We’re in the middle of spring semester, and our procrastination is killing us. We’ve got piles of papers to grade, submissions to sort through, and some stories to edit and send away.

Our lives are the equivalent of Rip Van Winkle’s farm: weedy and barren. We want to carry our guns out into the Catskills. We want to sip gin from the Dutchman’s flagon and toss nine pens with the personages.

But, alas, there are things to do. 

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