I have formatted my first six years' worth of “blog” posts — go to motormouth.com, click on Blogs, and peruse my writings from 1992-1996. 1998 is formatted, too. Anything newer than 1998 is not formatted and, frankly, resembles the dog's breakfast.
Monthly Archives: October 2007
yay Sox!
First baseball I've watched all season was the last four innings of tonight's game 7.
Good timing. I ate a Macoun apple and watched the Red Sox win and for a moment Massachusetts didn't seem so bad. Boston versus Denver in the 2007 World Series.
The Rockies are gonna lose, because they had snow before even Boston did.
new one-act
I have a new play. It's a one-act. It's called Bible Study. No, it's called Many Mansions. No, it's called “Unpacking.”
No, it's called Bible Study. It's being read at Lab on Wednesday and then I'll send it off for this year's National 10-Minute Play Contest.
Very happy for having this inspiration; I'm eager to enter this contest again!
Amazing
not even 23 months yet and tonight The Boy counted to ten. Unprompted. My baby rocks!
you're gonna hate me
I just finished my Christmas shopping.
sharing
Our boy's little friend, trying to take his balls away. “It happens,” I told Monstro.
october haircut
It was his second “real” haircut but the first one where he sat by himself on a booster-plank atop the stylist's chair. Kind of sketchy but I was there to catch him, if necessary, which it really wasn't. He was a bit traumatized by the end of it but then we went out for strawberry ice cream, which we ate outside. Some woman walking past stopped to talk with us for a minute and when she moved along, she said “What joy and light he brings to the street!”
cheap sunglasses
These look a lot like the inserts I got last time my eyes were dialated, but they might be an old pair of Monstro's; I'm not sure.
Amy Hempel
Have any of you read Amy Hempel's Collected Stories ? I'd never heard of her until Palahniuk wrote about her in his Stranger than Fiction n-f collection. She's like his overarching goddess. I can see why.
I'm halfway through her Collected and it's knocking my socks off. She writes minimalistic prose that McCarthy (Cormac, not Joe), Proulx, and McMurtry only wish they could write. Instead of being off-putting or stiff, her reductionism (and subsequent embellishment, a la her story “The Harvest”) draws you in, then reaches up through the page, grabbing your heart and throat with one really really really big hand.
“In the Cemetery where Al Jolson is Buried” is her widely anthologized piece, but it's not her best — I'm particularly loving “Beg, Sl Tog, Inc, Cont, Rep” and the two-page “San Francisco.”
How come I never heard of her when I was working on my MFA? One of her books was out of print at the time but others were available.
Anyone else out there read her? What's your opinion?
Huh.
Did you know that the guy who wrote those Left Behind books wrote a Bible ?
Now you do. Do you feel a little dirtier for it? Me, too. Shower time.