Philistine

Did you ever have that trippy thing happen wherein you hear a word–a name, a reference to a movie, whatever–that you haven’t heard in forever? You’re traipsing along and suddenly someone mentions Punky Brewster, and you think, “man, I haven’t  heard of Punky Brewster in years,” and then, later that day, in a separate, distinct, and unrelated conversation someone else brings up Punky Brewster, and the next thing you know, you can’t turn around without running face-first into people who can’t manage to shut the fuck up about Punky Brewster.

Just an example. It can happen with anything. Cricket bat. Dynamo. Polyp. There, see how many people are talking about those things tomorrow. It’ll drive you out of your goddamn skull.

Let’s pretend I’ve actually researched this and have concluded that there are a couple of widely-accepted scientific explanations, and that I am not completely making this stuff up. It can all be explained by:

1. Chance.
2. You’re actually always awash in conversations about Punky Brewster, but until it really catches your attention, it’s white noise.
3. The formation of zeitgeist is actually far, far more volatile than I’ve ever imagined. Let’s assume that the first time you hear someone mention Punky, you’re actually in one of a handful of conversations about her that are happening at that precise moment. Maybe the first upward swing of a week-long Punky-mentioning nanotrend. It explodes in the popular consciousness like a tennis ball stitched full of match-heads, and–as quickly–dies.

I really wish I could talk myself into the third, most interesting option. But I’m thinking it’s #2. Whatevs.

The weird thing is: you can kind of do it to yourself.

Anyway, rattling around in my vernacular for the last few weeks has been the word–and the idea–of “impulse.” I’ve been explaining workplace dynamics in terms of conflicting impulses, for example. But it’s everywhere. I’m not wedging the idea into lines of thought or conversations–I really don’t think so–but it’s such a beautiful word: continent, solid, crystalline. It stands for the things we want to do or don’t want to do but are driven by our animal urges or the better angels of our nature to do. It’s a feeling–funky or exuberant–and its kung fu is quite strong because it’s at once glamorously vocab and maddeningly vague.

I blame Joseph Campbell and my enduring fanboyism of his lectures for this.

Anyway, tonight’s impulse? No real reason (a phonecall from an old friend when I couldn’t answer it, a college homecoming trip this weekend, another buddy who’s far away and mopey tonight), but it’s not Punky Brewster, it’s Charlie Brown. In Snoopy Come Home. He says:

Why can’t we get all the people we  really like and put them in one place? No that wouldn’t work, someone would leave. Someone always leaves. Then I would have to say goodbye. I hate goodbyes. I know what I need, I need more hellos.

Haunting and cathartic all in a couple lines.

‘Night, friends.

So, funny story:

The subtle, annoying pain in the side of my left foot? Yeah, turns out that would be a broken foot.

I snooped around enough trying to figure out why it wouldn’t go away, and I discovered that:

(Sudden increase in athletic activity) + (Heavy-ish guy running on concrete sidewalk)=Stress fracture of the fifth metatarsal.

Got a “just checking” appointment with my sports medicine guy, who got a “just checking” MRI after he initially guessed tendonitis (because it’s kinda happening on both feet, but only a little on the right).

The next day he calls and says “lol, just kidding, you totally have a broken foot.” He actually used the phrase “this is the worst-case scenario,” which, let’s face it, seems just a little over-the-top.

He then told me that if it was up to him “he’d go in there and put a screw across that sucker,” and that it all depended on “how aggressive I wanted to be.” I told him that I wanted to be more or less the opposite of aggressive to my injured body part (thankyouverymuch), and elected to alternately coddle, flatter, and ignore it until it got better.

There’s a higher difficulty rating here, because apparently there is no blood supply to this part of one’s body, so bones don’t really like to heal down there. This led to him prescribing me an enormous black moonboot, which is far, far less comfortable than a mysteriously and mildly broken foot.

So that’s the fall rugby season.

I’m actually pretty sure the foot was broken before practice started, and is a product of all that damnable preparatory jogging.

I’m bummed.

A friend from work (a loyal Philistine reader and a real-life amateur–everyone’s favorite kind of–comedian) was apparently delighted with this because it gave him a chance to take his “so you’re that guy” routine for yet another walk. I’ve heard this bit a number of times, but it’s getting a lot of play lately. That’s right, he’s that guy. In the last 3 weeks alone he’s put his taxonomy hobby to use in informing me:

1. “So you’re that guy: the guy who shows up at practice with new equipment.” This after he jogged by try-outs. Yes, it was futile to explain that, of course, my rugby shorts and cleats are new, since I’ve never played rugby before, don’t have these things lying about the house, and that, given my income, I’m not going to come out to practice and have to borrow cleats from another player, as some of my fellow rookies did. The shirt was quite old, recycled from work. It was no use: I’m that guy. His punchline was that he “used to love (to hit) that guy.” He didn’t attempt to hit me, though, and–anyway–that’s frowned upon in our workplace. I’m also not 100% sure he ever used to hit anybody.
2. “So you’re that guy: the guy who gets all into a sport and then gets a season-ending injury at the beginning.” I’ll be candid here. I didn’t know that this was “a guy.” He does have some precedent here: we began lifting weights together last spring, and while he was on the treadmill and I was trying to remember all my knee rehab exercises (which included the groin machine) I did something unspeakable to myself on the first day. Well, I did something unspeakable to a part of myself. Much like the foot thing, it didn’t hurt at all at the time. Overnight, however, my pelvic girdle rusted shut in an agonizing mass of crybabyism. Needless to say, I learned to walk using only the bottom half of my legs, as if I had imaginary pants coiled around my ankles, that day. That lasted about about 3 or 4 days, so I wouldn’t call it season-ending, but I take his point.

Fact is: I’ve been careful. Even in the gym, I was explicit about going easy, doing what I could do handily, not pushing things. And with the rugby, I’m convinced I’m paying the piper for trying to get myself in shape before tryouts. It seems like a real-life case of one step forward, two steps back, and that really kind of sucks.

Don’t get me wrong, though: between a devastating family tragedy and a rained-out fishing trip, it definitely only sucks on the latter end of the spectrum, but I am a little disillusioned by this setback. I emailed Coach Sully and he formally (and hilariously) put me on the “injured list” and wants me to continue to come to practices to learn the game for when things are sorted out, which is interesting and weird. Not weird that he wants me to stay a part of things–that part’s swell–but weird to imagine 6-10 weeks of standing around uselessly at the practices of a city rugby club. The hell of it is: I think I might do it.

The club is in New Orleans tonight, and I’m watching “How it’s Made” in bed and writing a post for you gorgeous bastards. The sauce is indeed weak.

In silver lining news, this frees me up to drive 15 hours both ways to practice the old, familiar sacrament of watching the Irish lose football games.

Anywho, I’m sure you’ve noticed, but I’m in kind of a mood tonight. The kind of mood where the only answer is listening to C.S. Lewis’ audiobooks until I fall asleep and dream creepy, Christian, on-the-nose allegorical dreams.

Toodle-oo, friends. Have a great weekend.

Dear Friends of Philistine,

I am, indeed, quite mortal.

Here’s the score, in case you’re playing along at home:

3 rugby practices so far.

8.5 total hours.

1 controlled scrimmage game with some other newbs.

2.5 of the practices have been full contact.

And my personal statistics?

1 giant greenish bruise on my chest that doesn’t hurt at all but looks like I took a fastball from Sidd Finch.

1 other mysterious, painless hickey-like gash down the middle of my torso. Jersey burn? Falling on a ball?

3 bloody and not-so-painless, but relatively superficial abrasions (both knees, one elbow).

1 busted lip, from the first day. Healed nicely.

1 briefly dislocated shoulder. I have this thing where my shoulder slides out of joint and then right back in, and my arm goes limp for a few minutes. My dad has it, too. I’m working on my rotator cuffs to see if I can keep it from happening as much.

1 running headbutt to the ear. I repeat: running headbutt to the ear. This happened tonight and hurt very, very much. Now my jaw joint is really being a douche about the whole thing.

1 mildly rolled ankle. Very mildly.

1 mysterious pain in the pinky metatarsal of my other foot, that is annoying but doesn’t want to go away.

I need to become much, much tougher. Not just more fit–which is definitely the case–but physically and mentally tougher. I haven’t played a sport in a serious, sustained way in 10 years. The good news is that the knees are hanging in there, and the “prehab” stuff I had to do a few months ago (when I couldn’t even walk up stairs without being a big baby) does seem to have fixed my floppy kneecap problem.

The game is really, really fun, though. As far as I can tell, you move around on the field in a soccerish way, and instead of kicking a ball, you get in a big fucking fight about a million times.

Even with the getting banged around, it’s been great for my energy/motivation levels off the pitch, and probably done wonders in terms of stress-relief.

The social aspect of the game was something I always heard about, but that always confused me. I’m starting to get it now. Sure, it goes along with rugby, but I think it also goes along–in this case–with the fact that our particular club, like most, is made up of rag-tag volunteers from everywhere, and all walks of life, who are doing this for the same reasons: to challenge themselves, to play a game they enjoy, and because they like each others’ company. There are remarkably few egos out there, at least as far as I can tell. They’re not instant best friends for me, or anything, but they are a neighborly bunch of guys, and they like pub culture a lot, so I’m looking forward to getting to know them a little.

As far as the sport itself, here’s where I seem to fall on the team, so far: although rugby players really dislike translating everything from American football (saying things like: “so, it’s basically option football, right?” makes them want to hit you, as far as I can tell), the sport lends itself the specific type of football I played–north and south with the ball, a lot of smashmouth, and what is basically linebacker defensive play. Because of this, I am among the more technically fluent newbies in drills, because this stuff is basically like riding a bike, and all comes back to you. In size, I’m right at about the mean. There are a couple huge players (in the 300 lb range, and tall) a good number of sort of 250-ish guys, and then a lot of smaller, taller guys, too. In terms of cardio/fitness, I’m below the mean, but I’m not completely alone down there, as most of the guys are out of shape, too.

Anyway, I’ll let you know how all that goes.

I’m waiting to see how it informs the rest of my life–the scheduling alone requires me to get my act together more than I’m used to, which is good for me. There are a good number of away games in places like New Orleans, Cincinnati, Mobile, and St. Louis, and I’m going to try to travel (with Mrs. Philistine, who I think wants to see more of the good ol’ USA) to all of them. I hope to learn the game and  become a pretty good B-side player this fall, and maybe even get some A-side minutes in the spring. I’m looking forward to seeing some of those places, and I don’t mind driving. It gets me away from campus and doing something interesting/productive on weekends that I’m not working, which is a perennial struggle for me, since it’s so tempting to just get in the couch time.

I’m going to try to pace myself as I pay the piper for a good number of years of laziness, but I am enjoying the idea of carpe-ing the diem a little bit more, in general.

And I’ll try to remember to keep you updated.

Okay, so this is kind of awkward…

So, Philistine

………………..you ask

……………………………what the fuck?

Well, I don’t have a tremendously great answer. I did what many blogs do. I went offline for a couple months. A sun-soaked quarter of that was a phenomenal vacation, and the rare fruits of my life as a “professional” writer. Mrs. Philistine and I bummed around the Galapagos and Ecuador for a few weeks. Caught up with nature and with old friends. All really brilliant stuff.

Back in Nashville, and I simply didn’t log in for a while. I have been subtly nudging my life back toward the asceticism and writerly discipline I admire so much, but it’s been really slow going.

I’ve recently taken up rugby. Well, more the idea of rugby. I’ve been out for pints a few times with the Nashville Outlaws, and in a couple weeks I plan to join them for a season of what’s certain to be utter brutality. It will be good for me, though.

What else has been up? Well, the in-laws were here about the second we washed ashore from vacation, and that–as always–was a fun and interesting couple weeks. In early June and late July, I had the chance to sneak away from work a couple times to play golf: a game that persists in intriguing and frustrating me.

Reading: all the David Foster Wallace stuff–most of it for the second time. Remember that post where I said I was going to check out “Little Children?” Well, it was apparently mis-shelved or something; couldn’t find  it. I did find DFW, and also found some .mp3’s of him reading his work. A really brilliant and stick-to-it-ive writer? Absolutely. Unparallelled genius and belle-lettriste inaccessible? I’m not convinced. I do really, really dig his work though, and think it’s pretty lame that he won’t be writing anymore.

Writing: job descriptions, org charts, etc. This is the time of year that work gets in the way. Buckle up, it’s going to be a rocky couple weeks…

So, while I’m doing okay with my own blog’s minimalist aesthetic, I’ve been struggling unsuccessfully to set one up for my wife. Installation isn’t a problem, but she’s primarily interested in a photo blog, and that brings its own challenges. I discovered a WordPress theme called “autofocus” that looked promising, but it’s not going great. Stay tuned.

Tonight, I went with some friends to see a sneak preview of Todd Phillips’ latest gross-out comedy, The Hangover. Simply extraordinary. While it had the usual ingredients (and subscribes to the comedy equation: female full-frontal=erotic; male full-frontal=hilarious, apparently. Plenty of the latter in this movie.) there was something really fresh about the (anti?)comedic style of Ed Helms, but most especially Zack Galafianakis, for whom this movie will certainly prove a kingmaker. I’ve noticed comic actors in the last couple years are gravitating toward earnestness as their primary mood; I guess it goes with the new (or re-emerging? no idea–when did awkward comedy start?) schadenfreude school of hilarity. It’s good, old, very unclean fun, and the most I’ve laughed in months.

The trip to the cinema left the dog alone entirely too much today (though he had breaks during the day), and so I took him out for plenty of frisbee time when I got home, around 10pm, and I was able to tire him out. It still feels eerily like outer space on campus, and I wonder if he’d be so singular in his dedication to fetching the frisbee if anyone else were to happen by and tempt him to chase and/or scare the hell out of them. He hasn’t yet mastered friendly approach, and “hey, I’m interested in you, let me run over and sniff/lick you” looks unsettlingly like “hey, I have canine antisocial personality disorder and I’m going to bite the shit out of you.” That–in case you were wondering–is why I keep ham in my pocket.

In the last three days, I’ve managed to completely resurrect our old notebook computers–the ones we’d replaced because they were broken–into working machines. My brother has another that he’s offered me, so I’ll wind up with three not-entirely-awful notebooks that we plan to pass along to some folks we know who can use them.

My brother and one of my friends are coming to visit this weekend, so I likely won’t get much writing done, but I did get a start on a new story; I basically have a title and a general mood. That’s enough of a genesis for now. Baby steps.

I’m also baby-stepping toward a bit more rigorous personal routine, and trying to integrate a little exercise and a lot of writing into my daily schedule. So far, so good.

What’s that? You’re dying to know what I consider a good writing day? Well, okay…

Nearly all my guidelines here are lifted wholesale from Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, and the rest I’ve stolen from Chris Offutt’s submission routine. A comprehensive view should look like this, seven days a week:

1. pounding out 1,000 words of good, “keepable” new writing or

2. 2-3 hours of focused editing.

3. posting 1 friendly note of encouragement/congratulations/gushing to a writer you’re geeked up about. This person can be more or less famous, more or less likely to actually recieve the note. That’s not important. It’s important that you send it, and that you don’t hope to–not even a little bit–ever hear back from them. And no asking for favors. You’re simply adding to the body of good, collegial writing karma out there. For more, check out her book.

4. once every 3 days (more or less) submitting a short story to a journal. If you happen to get one accepted, it didn’t count. The idea is to get to 100 rejection letters a year. I’ve already told you about this.

If I’m able to do that, 7 days a week (Right, I know, the mail doesn’t pick up every day, etc. Don’t be a pedantic dick, man, just play along.) that would be pretty awesome indeed.

If you take the #3, the friendly note, as a model for everything else, things get interesting. You can kind of see this in Offutt’s 100 rejections deal. It’s not about the response or the results, it’s only about what you–as a writer–can control. The result is a set of ambitious but achievable goals, completely independent of anyone else. Two of my favorite writers have, essentially, provided me with a structure for preserving a writing ethic that is at once reassuringly solitary and industriously engaged. Count me in.

But Philistine,

……………….you say

………………………….you promised a funny post! Where is the comedy?

Well, gentle reader, your uncle Philistine is a damned dirty liar. My b.

So it’s the weekend, and my schedule has settled into a bit of equilibrium, believe it or not: a marathon Thursday evening of unsuccessful computer building (the new motherboard had a dead ethernet port) kept me from going to sleep too early, which is usually the answer. It’s not completely normal, however, as I passed out around 9pm last night and awoke in great shape at 4am.

After a Friday afternoon round of golf, my ambitions were patently domestic–to do the dishes, dig into a mounting pile of laundry, and to cook a real dinner (my signature meatloaf). It went pretty well, but the temptation–when cooking for one–to forgo making side dishes eventuated in a very meatloaf-heavy dinner. My recipe does, however, incorporate every food group, so that’s something.

This after a pretty interesting day: prior to the golf, I had a meeting with one of my deans and with Kate Daniels, the poet and MFA director here. Since the dean was running late, we got to know each other and got along swimmingly–she even offered me a “terrorist fist bump” on the whole Kenyon thing. Based on first impressions, she’s a brilliant, connected, and accommodating lady, and seemed to really want to help me get linked in with Nashville’s considerable literary resources.

Once the dean arrived we got down to business: essentially, the plan is to establish, for the MFA students, “writer-in-residence” opportunities in the Houses I manage. The best part: the dean has left it up to me and to Kate to sort this whole thing out. I get to work on coming up with flashy names for the residencies, but–more importantly–it seems I will be tapped directly into the circulation of writers as they visit our campus. Cornelius Eady and others will be coming in the fall, and Kate even indicated that she might be interested in pursuing other writers with whom I’ve worked and corresponded–most interestingly, for very selfish reasons–she seemed to latch onto the idea (hers, actually) of having Valerie down in the future.

What goes without saying here is that Kate Daniels is an enormously heavy hitter in her own right, and she’s also promised an introduction to Tony Earley, who teaches here in the spring. Not a bad day’s work.

I promise that my next post will be less informative, more entertaining. Just putting that out there.

So I’ve officially steered my personal schedule into a tree. I realize, now, that my wife’s rigid personal bedtime (She looks at the clock at 10:45, every single night, and exclaims in genuine surprise, “Oh God! It’s nearly 11!” and goes to sleep. It’s a genuine production, and she does not think it’s awesome when I provide chorus for this little routine.) is the only thing standing between me and complete reversion to my polyphasic-sleep absurdity.

I think I fell asleep around 9pm, and it is now 1am, and I am wide awake. Both Philistine and his paycheck-seeking alter-ego have lifestyles that lend themselves to this wack[i]ness. I am, by nature, a “night writer.” Valerie Sayers, my favorite aunt and Obi-Wan of my writing life, called this shot long ago.

Night writing is “different.”

……………………………………….she would put it. Her Southern upbringing and consequent mastery of grace let her be mercifully ambiguous here. I have a feeling she was thinking,

…………………………………..Philistine, you’re coming off kind of like a sociopath here.

This was all during my stint as a stay-at-home priest’s assistant in a very Dead-Poetsy, bat-infested dormitory. I was a role-player on our three-man team: chances are, if something happened at 4am, I was awake to hear/see it. I’d occasionally be writing, but most often would be scouring the internet for the salient details of how to burn dvds in the dashboard of our old Jetta–or some other months-long, abortive undertaking–while half-listening to the freaky anime on Adult Swim. It was invaluable training.

This morning, I came off a two-week “duty cycle,” a period wherein I’m responsible for what happens at night (really 24/7) on our campus. Luckily, there are two other professionals in front of me in the response structure, but they’re instructed to call me for help or guidance using what I loosely define as the “blood, fire, newspaper,” criterion. If there’s a rape, somebody gets run over by a bus, knocks back a couple handfuls of pills, or whips a frisbee at a fire-sprinkler outlet and summons a “moisture episode” in the tens of thousands of gallons, I’m there.

All this combines to give me a goofball propensity for sleep-schedule idiosyncrasies.

I stayed up last night until 5am reading Coetzee’s (infinitely readable) Slow Man. I awoke (raw and sweaty from my lingering cold, with sore molars from my nightly attempts to shatter my teeth by clenching) this morning at 7am to a call from Kololo, Uganda. I sort of bit my wife’s head off for that, and made her feel like shit. Which made me feel awful–it became this big, cyclical mess–but she has a deft touch for defusing this kind of thing, and did.

I puttered around the office a bit today, but it’s officially “down-time,” and there’s not much that’s pressing. Campus is empty–that magical time between the students’ departure and the advent of conference season (not our problem) which brings droves of Baptists, cheerleaders, and cheerleading Baptists to campus.

It is quarter past Rapture out there.

I walked the dog down to a relatively enclosed quad between four of my buildings, and let him off the leash. He ran spastically over the grass–apparently in disbelief–always staying a few feet out of my reach, lest I should declare recess over. I felt good for him, and kinda bad that he doesn’t get to do it more often. There’s a dog park here, but he’s not really into dogs: he tries to herd them, and when they don’t move, he goes apeshit and bites them. We muzzle him like a nineteen-pound Hannibal Lecter, he foams at the mouth, it’s all ugly and not worth it. We have a lot of “inside playtime.”

I watched a tree service using a crane to surgically dismantle an enormous, dead tree on the center of campus. It was strangely fascinating–attach a cable up high, cut off the top segment, run it through the chipper. I walked by later, and there’s a clean, wide stump that smells like Home Depot and is flush with the grass. They even vacuum up the sawdust, apparently.

I also plunged elbow-deep into resurrecting a homebrew DVR project I put together about  a year ago. It’s basically a PC that works like a free Tivo. It didn’t go well, and I’m ordering a new motherboard. Be cool about it, though: don’t tell the wife.

Well, anyway, down to business:

I promised a review of Blue Mosaic Me, writer Jackson Bliss’s (at least 2.5 year old) literary blog. I’ve browsed a good deal of it, and there are some interesting things going on there. Now a disclaimer: I’m not presuming to be qualified to offer critique of another blogger, as I’ve just started this thing. My interest is in the set of experiments–perhaps planned, perhaps organic–that Bliss is documenting there.

Especially early on, he writes some personal stuff–news about his considerable travels, artsy friends, stuff like that. Fairly straightforward subjects, good writing, gives you a feel for Jackson’s voice. Probably interesting to his close friends and to his (and I’m certain they’re out there, or on their way) die-hard fans. Since Jackson is an old acquaintance that I recently pestered into becoming an accommodating literary brother-in-arms, I don’t really fall into either of these categories.

More intriguing–to me, anyway–is what the blog has become in recent months. Jackson tells me he’s earned (I mean this in the best way: that he’s had the pills to go out there and submit work) 424 rejection letters–mostly from journals, but also from publishing houses, it seems–in the last five years. This after I share a conversation I had with Chris Offutt last year, when he advised me to shoot for 100 rejection letters every year: the only number that I could control. Bliss is right on track.

He means business about this whole publishing thing. He seems to be (increasingly) systematic in his submission ethic, and he (almost always) maintains a helluva healthy professional remove from the process. It gets to him, at times, and he doesn’t hide that.

Blue Mosaic Me features a real-time updates in his dispatches–presumably from Buenos Aires, Marrakech, Casablanca–that feature the latest rejection letters from journals that have held on to his work for embarrassingly long periods.

A couple observations I’ll examine:

1. He includes the titles of the pieces he’s submitting–presumably, when an editor gets her head out of her ass and one does appear in print, those who follow his blog are keenly aware of the piece’s positively Dickensian childhood.

2. His blog, then, includes whatever algorithms would lead someone who typed “Identity Theory”+”Jackson Bliss”+lame into Google to find his justifiably scathing indictment of that magazine’s editorial laziness (or an episode of it). This includes those editors, themselves (whose names appear). In one case, at least, this prompted a long apology email only a day or two later.

So, Philistine, what do you think of all this? Well, I’ll tell you.

While #1 does shatter the veneer of universally-acknowledged authorial perfection, if you don’t realize that good stories are shot down by even bad magazines, you’re a fucking idiot. I think it’s great that his chronicle of rejections (and eventual acceptances) proves this. The risk here would be that, when seriously considering “Example Story,” an editor would Google “Jackson Bliss”+”Example Story” (perhaps to see if it’s been published or self-published–some writers put full texts on their blogs, after all) and find that other editors have consistently rejected the piece. I guess, though, that even in that case only the most short-sighted editor would defer to the opinions of other editors. I’ve been an editor. We all know we’re the smartest guy in the room, and the only hack out there with real taste. I imagine that Blue Mosaic’s audience likely comprises fans of Jackson’s writing and other writers. Both of these groups love a good comeback.

Observation #2 is more complex. No editor has ever imagined that editorial correspondences are confidential. Rejection letters, notes and critique wind up being the objets de dérision that really boost pagecount when the letters of the old masters are gathered, edited and bound. It ensures that the twelve guys who passed on The Naked and the Dead really feel like douchebags now.

Nonetheless, it flags Jackson’s name in an editor’s mind–and this might be dangerous. On one hand, a good editor would see the grand experiment of Blue Mosaic Me for what it is, and might respect it. On the other, this level and flavor of publicity (combined with Jackson’s bent for responding to his responses: something I’ve never thought to do) could earn him (perhaps unfairly) the reputation of a writer who insists upon stirring the turd. After that, it becomes a question of whether there really is “any such thing as bad publicity.” I don’t have a clue.

So, not really a review so much as me blabbering about a couple dynamics I see on the blog as entree into rambling about publication in general. I’m not sure an audience is what he’s after, but in case he is, you all should really check it out.

While I’ve been writing this, I’ve been half-watching Little Children, the 2006 film based on Tom Perrotta’s novel. Seems pretty subtle, pretty sharp, like it might have been underrated, or at least I somehow missed it completely. I’m going to sign off now and check it out, maybe pick up the book at the library later today.

I’ll let you know how it goes with that and with Coetzee.

Stay tuned.

So, after tacking this thing together last night and thinking a good deal about it, I’ve discovered a problem:

While I’m at home with the fact that my ramblings here might have a very small and specific audience, I’m not even sure how those masochists would find this blog. I considered

1. adding it as a link to my facebook profile, but that version of me, and many of my “facebook friends” have so little to do with my writing that it seems almost a liability (More on why this is the case, later in tonight’s post).

2. Another option would be to brand this blog with my real name, and in the case that anyone ever gets interested by something of mine they read, they might Google me and find this. This level of fanhood seems positively off-putting now, and seems unlikely even years down the road. This option also incurs costs that I’m plainly not willing to accept (More on why this is the case, later in tonight’s post).

3. A strategy I’ve flirted with in a real way is to create a separate facebook account for my life as a writer. I’m not sure how useful this is, or how far it will go.

4. I think what I’ve settled on is to weed my friends list back a bit. I’ve happily approved anyone I’ve ever met, and while on the face of it I don’t regret this level of promiscuity, it has resulted in my definition of “friend” becoming much more vague than I’m comfortable with. My plan is to: go back through my friends list and only preserve

a) genuine friends. That is, to say, people I see regularly even though I don’t have to; people that have me on speed dial. This, in and of itself, is a broader definition of “friend” than I usually use, as–to my wife’s dismay–I prefer quality over quantity in friends. A very small handful know where the bodies are buried, and they know who they are.

b) writing acquaintances. People from college and grad school, mainly. Since–essentially–my writing life falls under the heading (for me) of “personal life” v. “professional life” (ie., the things I do for money, that have almost nothing to do with my personal life), you could sum up the first half of today’s post by saying that I’ve decided to de-professionalize my facebook account and reclaim it as personal space.

c) fleeting acquaintances. I’m not a recluse, and do meet people when my wife drags me to social affairs. Chances are, if you’re a friend of a friend and I met you relatively recently at one of these things, and you subsequently wound up being facebook friends with me, you’re probably safe. For now.

I’m not trying to be a dick here. The fact is that I’ve failed, in the last three years or so, to pay sufficient attention to my writing life, to the point that I got sort of embarrassed to even call myself a writer–and this after suckering a world-class institution into giving me a terminal degree in creative writing.

As many of us must, I’ve taken a day job. It’s not glamorous or (usually) creative, but I’m pretty damn good at it, and so I’ve almost unintentionally achieved an institutional posture that assumes I’m in this thing for the long haul. Don’t get me wrong here, either: I like my day job. I hang around (and occasionally blend in) with important people at an important university with a great library, and I do something different every single day. I’m overpaid as far as day jobs go, and I often give into the temptation to leave that part of my brain that contains my literary ambitions unplugged upon returning home at night. I have the time to write, I just haven’t made the time to write. I haven’t protected it. I’m out of shape as a serious writer, and I’ve come dangerously close to becoming a fucking hobbyist, and it’s probably hard for people who know me now to imagine that there was a time when I was a full-time writer of serious fiction, or at least did a damn passable impression of one.

The problem with the people I bounce off of (but don’t genuinely become friends with) in my day job, is that they’re probably not that interested in the fact that I write. Some of them probably paint or are into marathons or light bondage, and–while it makes for interesting trivia–it’s really not a priority for me to know this. These are the people who learn that you took a degree in writing and ask you,

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………so you’re a writer, huh? Like, what kind of stuff?

And you can give an honest answer and come off like a complete effing snob, or you can try to be accommodating and vague, or–better yet–you can reply something like

…………………………………mainly porn.

and hope they never ask you again.

I promised you I’d tell you why I don’t want my Christian name all over this blog.

Here’s the deal:

I’m sort of like an assistant principal at a university. I’m one of the guys you see if are pissed off about something in your dormitory, or if you manifest your fury by kicking a water fountain off the wall in your dormitory. You land on my desk if you try to kill yourself, or want us, your parents and your friends to think that you want to kill yourself. I also have to keep some logistical trains running on time–I supervise the people and processes that move you in, keep you alive, and kick you out.

Many of my students are obscenely wealthy, and most are obscenely entitled. Being effective at what I do doesn’t always mean being popular, and some students (and their parents) take our decisions and processes very personally. They like to flex their influence by second-guessing even the most logical things you do in angry, indignant emails to deans and chancellors–folks they imagine (rightly) can make you go away.

In fact, I think you can say your likelihood (not to be confused with worthiness) to advance quickly (as I have) is a function of how easily or quickly those deans and chancellors can endorse what you’re being grassed on about.

Sometimes these folks build ad hominem cases–they nitpick typos in emails, and attempt to reach you at ridiculous times (a non-emergency 11pm weekend email is routine) and, if you haven’t responded within a couple of hours, faxed complaints begin appearing on mahogony desks all over campus. With your name on them.

Remember: the money’s really respectable, though.

All of this to say: I don’t want my writing life–and the fact that I say things like “fuck” for impact–to end up as evidence in one of these deals. I’m not a faculty member, I don’t get paid to “cultivate eccentricities,” as I’ve heard one of my faculty colleagues put it recently.

Poor readers who get pissed off at me could dig and find my work and my entries, of course, but not having my name plastered all over it swings the “Philistine’s plausible-deniability” v. “Philistine-hater’s creepy stalkerishness factor” balance in my favor.

And why “Philistine,” you ask? Well it was the name of my novel and it really, really fit. I killed the novel and made it the name of a magazine (likely online) that I still hope to put together with a couple of really, really stellar writers with whom I’ve worked closely in the past. So I booked the website “philistineliterary” and then built a blog.

I am a Scots-irish Catholic and have never been to Palestine (though my wife lived there once).  So, that’s not what it means.

Think more along the lines of Carlyle’s “person deficient in liberal cultural.” Stir in Appalachian upbringing and uber-Appalachian sensibilities combined with weirdo erudition. Add irony to taste.

I realize it’s a bit weird to sign my fiction and to chicken out of signing my blog–but if you’re here, you know damn well who I am. Don’t worry too much about it, but if you want to post or comment (or post a comment–I’m still learning to sprechen the lingity), and you happen to call out my name, as in

…….damn [my real name]! you are really quite kickass indeed!

and you come back and it’s been changed to

………………………………………………….damn Philistine! you are really superlatively kickass indeed!

don’t let it hurt your feelings.

If you want, I can give you a code name, too. Earlier today, a really close friend of mine who happens to be a genuinely kickass designer/affectation-enabler offered to help pretty up the blog, visually (she’s already onboard for the magazine, whenever that happens). Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Amanuensis to the blog.

Today’s thoughts, to be explored later: my first two posts here are well over 1,000 words each. If only that were good fiction writing, I’d be positively ascetic in my writerly discipline.

I recognize–and hope that you will–that blogging and [W]riting are two entirely different things, like talking and singing. I will fuck up constructions and have uneven voice/tone/imagery here, and that’s sort of the point.

What I do here isn’t really real.

I am, in fact, several orders of magnitude awesomer than this Philistine guy.

So I, luddite when it suits me, am finally getting around to blogging. The fact is, I’ve tried to build this thing at least a few times in the last two years, but always got stuck (index.php v. index.html) and forgot about it. I hesitate, here, to say “gave up,” as I have a famed propensity for obsessiveness and tenacity applied to small, inconsequential problems.

At any rate, the story of my actual getting this thing off the ground goes like this:

My wife is in Kampala for the next 22 days, and she left about 2 weeks ago. Bereft of our usual source of entertainment, the dog and I are at respective loose ends. He enjoyed, I think, adjusting to my schedule of nearly incessant napping peppered with jags of pecking away on the keyboard (not writing, mind you; mostly just looking up things I by all rights shouldn’t be curious about–how to create special effects gunshots in AfterEffects, the feasibility of heating one’s home with biodiesel, how to construct fine wooden furniture, to name a few.)

This lasted about two days, and then he turned on me. He mostly hangs out under the bed now, and resists my attempts to play with him. My wife talks to and dances with our dog for hours on end; it’s not that she doesn’t do other things, but she’s able simultaneously to do those things (journaling, work, chores around the house) and to provide our dog with a high level of funtivity. I gotta hand it to the perceptive little fucker, though: she’s the fun one.

I don’t really multitask. I’m either doing something else, or I’m focusing my full attention on the dog, which usually means honing his formidable frisbeeing skills. This level of attention plainly freaks him the eff out, and he’s back under the bed after a few minutes.

Yesterday he yawned in technicolor about five times in various parts of the house. He’s on a good diet, but supplements it–when he can get away with it–by eating his own shit. He fights our scooper (”The Claw”) over it, a la He-Man and Skeletor. I think that was the problem yesterday.

So that’s what kind of party he’s got going on these days. I have a feeling that I’m in for more fireworks tonight–I’ll explain below.

As for me, I had big plans: to continue to convert my old car into a 65 Mustang version of KITT from Knight Rider, to achieve and sustain a high degree of virtuosity at a number of XBOX games, things like that. It went okay at first–on the first day she was gone, I rebuilt a Holley Carburetor on my kitchen table. I was on my way.

Then work got crazy and I caught H1N1. Well, a nasty cold at least. It was the last week before commencement and my buildings and the students inside them began to wave their hands and run around in fast-motion little circles to a soundtrack of “Yakety Sax.”

I delayed going for groceries mainly by eating a jar of “guest” peanuts over about 4 days. The dog got a couple, too–I’m a giver.

I delayed doing laundry until yesterday, when I washed many dark-colored items along with a not-very-dirty fountain pen. Luckily, it was a blue pen and most of the clothing was navy, but some things (my Mustang “Herd Club” t-shirt that my wife despises) weren’t so lucky.

Today, I realized that the remainder of my “meal money” per diem was set to expire, and that I needed to spend $55 dollars on food today. I ate an enormous lunch ($16 after a 30% tip) and then, for dinner, ordered enough Papa Johns for an entire family. It wasn’t until I actually went to pick it up that I noticed that PJ’s has gift cards that one can purchase.

So I bring the giant pizza home, and eat some of it, leaving the rest on the table. I’m hanging out upstairs building this blog, and our dog–as is his custom–disappears for maybe fifteen minutes. He ceremoniously presents me with a soggy, perfectly remaindered pizza crust. He ate maybe three slices tonight; he’s a helluva teamplayer. Initiate countdown.

What was I talking about?

Oh, yeah: this blog. Well, I got home from work a bit early, since it’s Commencement today, and there’s not much to do. In my inbox is an email from David Lynn, Kenyon professor and editor of unparalleled taste. They’ve picked up a story I sent them back in January, and are putting it in their online edition.

I’ll go more into this later, but I am shocked and geeked up. I brag on facebook, try to call the wife, and generally pat myself on the back.

I take a look at KRO, and–lo and behold–I know one of the current contributors. Jackson Bliss was a couple cohorts behind mine (I was on the 3-year plan) in our MFA program. I don’t know him that well, but generally understand that he’s a swell guy, an immensely promising writer, and an all-around different kind of cat.

One thing leads to another and I find his blog. It’s pretty cool: I’ll spare you my full review (at least until a future post), but I decide to swipe the idea, sort of. He’s really going after this whole publishing thing, and is documenting it in real-time on his blog.

I’m not sure what this will end up being, but I like this part of what he’s doing.

So here goes:

The fates have aligned in the last two days to provide me with a kick in the ass.

On Thursday, I learn that Kate Daniels, the director of the MFA program here in Nashville, has learned about me, and wants me to take part in a reading entitled “After the MFA” later this fall. It’s a bunch of former MFAers reading to and mixing with current MFAers–as far as I can discern–to assure them that, yes, there are jobs out there if you don’t wind up teaching next year. My company is fairly literary-glamorous–writers who have gone into publishing–and I’m afraid I’ll come off like a bit of a weirdo, since my job as a deanery lackey has nothing to do with fiction writing, but who the hell am I to turn down a free lunch?

Today, I got this from the Kenyon Review:

Dear Philistine:

I am delighted to accept “insert story here” for publication in KR Online. This is the electronic literary magazine of The Kenyon Review, and it allows us to publish exciting new work more quickly than we are able to do in print. KRO also features work that is a little more timely, experimental, challenging—or just out there. And it reaches a much larger audience.

You will receive a contract and copyright information via regular mail within the next few weeks.

All the best, and my warm thanks for sending your excellent work to The Kenyon Review.

Sincerely,

David Lynn

Editor

Fuckin’ A.

The story is an old one that I’d shopped around only a bit, and picked at from time to time. Having not seen it for five months or so, I was almost embarrassed that someone had taken the bait. To be honest, I recalled it as a bit more in the regional trap that I’ve tried to avoid, and also recalled it as being a bit sugary.

I pulled it out and read it again tonight, and don’t know what the hell I was thinking. I’m pretty proud of it–it’s got that good rhythm that is in the best of my work and does some good things on the sentence level. It also has some of my hotly-contested justified text, where one character (ignore the ellipsis, this thing doesn’t let you hit tab) says

I talk here.

……………. and the next character responds

………………………………………………..Ahh, that’s kind of weird. But it makes sense. Seems kind of conversational.

That drives some people (mostly the MFA poetry crowd) up a tree, but who’s laughing now?

I am. And that prince of a man David Lynn is. We are the ones who are laughing.

I’m kind of a dumbass.

Well, this was a long post, and the sudafed is wearing off.

Hey, thanks for reading, by the way–you guys are hard-core. Come back and see me sometime, I’ll try to post regularly, and you might like it.

Things I want to tell you about:

1. Me as a (non)writer, but specifically about how a student did a profile on me as a (non)writer recently.

2. The ice factory where I used to work. And the best job I ever had, on a gas dock. In fact, you’re probably going to see a whole post about weird jobs I’ve had. Get psyched.

3. My observations re: a couple of blogs I like. I’ll do Ekarj and Blue Mosaic Me first, Ebert-style. Not really. I’ll probably just describe them and then crack wise.

4. other activities.

5. Some fucked-up stuff that I see in my job or in the e-mails that get in the way of me doing my job and coming home to not be doing my job anymore that day. People are messy.

6. I’ll probably hold forth on a handful of imagined truths about writing from time to time.

Big gulps, huh? Welp, see ya later!