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Friday, September 05, 2003

"as you know, the id wasn't meant to be starved."
-Deadsy

check out spiderfrog! he can hop miles at a time. kids take note: all it took was a couple generations of pesticides to create a tiny little superhero!

the Pittsburgh Contemporary Writer's Series is bringing Fight Club boy Chuck Palahniuk to town on the 16th. i think i'll go listen to him to see what kind of voice he's got. on the page he sounds like an angry young man but in person you never know, he might have a Mike Tyson voice or something. it's dangerous to listen to an author speak, as i learned when i listened to the audiobook of Stephen King's "Drawing of the Three" when i drove from Toledo to New York.
with Chuck we'll have to see. also Rick Moody's coming here. i heard him read at Bowling Green once. he was good. James Patterson's coming too, who i don't read, but i'm glad to see a genre writer mixed in with the usual "literary" bunch.

speaking of, i was in a book store looking for books by George Pelecanos and i saw King Suckerman with (say it ain't so!) a new cover. the cover on the shelf is all brown and stately and serious and could be mistaken for fucking Arthur Conan Doyle. the one i got? Bright key lime green, we're talkin' radiation green, pink lettering, and a picture of a kid sporting two essentials: a gun and a giant afro. who are they kidding with that new cover? you got to judge a book by it's cover, you know? even the blurbs reveal the new ambitions. the new blurb: "those in the know read Pelecanos" the old blurb: "Jive, juice and a whole lotta justice!" god DAMN i hate when you can see the fucking strings.

anyway, at least i got a book reading event to go to. i need reasons to get into the city. exploring has stopped lately with this job.

and Chuck? dude. what's up with these tiny fucking books you keep writing? i was worried i wouldn't get your new book "Diary" read by the day of the reading since i haven't bought it yet and i pick it up the other day and it's so small i thought it was a road map. i'm thinking, hmmm is this tiny thing actually like a treasure map to the book "Diary?" is it like an interactive thing? do i have to dig it up, or find it hidden under a bed like a real diary? nope. cracked it open and apparently it IS the book. huge margins, short chapters, lots of white space. i don't want to sound green again here but dude, i wrote more than that yesterday between push-ups. as a matter of fact, i had to stop writing because i was buried under a pile of papers like The Cask of Amontillado. i had to draw a map to find my way out. maybe i should have tried to get the map published like you did.

the Pittsburgh paper calls him "a daring young new voice in fiction." he's good but hey, what about me? i probably started typing around the same time as him...hell, maybe even the same day. but he gets to be the young new voice? why can't there be two. it's like the wheel. you know that a shitload of people invented the wheel all over the world that never met. that's why you don't hear about the inventor of the wheel, there were too many cavemen riding around on unicycles to pin it down. it's the same with the "young new voice." it's happening everywhere. you need four wheels to make a car, so there's at least four of us! pubilish my shit! I'll cut your grass! I'll snake your toilet!

sorry about that. hard to keep the envy in check. added a new link over there on the left - As Above - a site originally found by Occult boy that turned out to be sweet. he put a zombie infection simulator on there and a tabloid (home of the Bat Boy!) decided to use it for a story ("Scientists Have Created a Computer Model of Zombies Infecting Humans!" he's the "scientists") since it was a slow news week. apparently not a slow news week at Fox however, my friend Mark alerted me to this warning. he said he saw it on Fox but i found it at the home of the Bat Boy, where all good things come from. also it looks like another alien was arrested for D.U.I.
and that's not an illegal alien, Hudson.

midnight epilogue: just read Diary. i hate to say this (mumbling, eyes darting around, nervously scratching at a stain on my shirt) but that book is pretty goddamn good. Chuck's description of the muscles of the mouth (especially the "sneer muscle") to open the book was excellent. of course, i did a 5-senses-in-the-car (smell a skunk but don't see it, hear a crash but don't see it, etc.) opener for my story "Ride" about a week ago. i'm just sayin'... and the first chapter of my book is, no bullshit, longer than Diary. i know it says 240 pages but if you eliminate all the white noise between those one page chapters and big type and big margins you'd get about 150 tops. that's a story, not a novel. i know i know, can't i just admit the fucker wrote a good book? yes. i admit it. he did. he's good. he's got skillz to pay the billz and right now i don't.

the jealousy is burning so hot as i type this that anyone reading it later should be able to put their hands to the screen and still feel the heat coming off the glass.

::: david - 12:42 PM [+] :::
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