Man is in the Forest

and his freezer’s now spilling over with elk. which is to say dancing days are here again, all that.

and, because all this can’t seem to organize itself any other way, a list:

• That 32 Poems (Fall/Winter 4.2) with my story “Lunch” is out and about now.
• Just had “The Sadness of Two People Meeting in a Bar” accepted at Red Rock Review.
• That end of November reading I was doing at Texas Tech has now been moved, tentatively, to March 1, 2007.
• WORLD WAR Z rocks. Especially the Megatron footnote; it made my day. As did that . . . I don’t know: ending epigraph? envoy? Very cool (I love you, Mom). As for praise for WWZ: a lot of things I read, I think (or lie to myself, whichever) ‘C’mon, I could have written that.’ Not so with WWZ. Brooks is 6000 times more cued into the geopolitical machine than I can ever hope to be. I mean, if I were going to hijack the conventions of non-fiction (‘literary journalism’ may be the better term here) to tell a patently fictional story, I’m pretty sure I’d still end up localizing it to a neighborhood or something. I mean, all these places he talks about — some of them I recognize from the RISK! board, but most might as well be Mars. Which is my own failing, don’t get me wrong. What I’m meaning to say is, man, I really respect that somebody can both have all that in their brain and still spin out zombie lies. Which I guess reveals my prejudice that the two are supposed to be somewhat exclusive of each other. But maybe that’s precisely the magic of WWZ. Now I’m going to have to go back and read the ZOMBIE SURVIVAL GUIDE too, of course. Just in case.
• Counting down the days until AGAINST THE DAY here. I plan to savor it for three or four weeks, while I’m writing this new horror-thing. Maybe two new horror things. They’re each making a complete and total mess of my head right now.
• And, was counting down the days until CASINO ROYALE, but it’s here already. All hot to watch FREAK OUT too, which was waiting in my mailbox for me last night.
• It very much hurts to write with fingertips all sliced to ribbons (skinning all kinds of elk and deer).
• People at the airport give you plenty of second looks when you stand out front with your hair down and an elk skin wrapped around you (it was cold). But they don’t say anything.
• Reading now: LISEY’S STORY. And man, it’s a top-notch writer writing at the exact top of his game, near as I can tell. Not a single misplaced word. Cool too having Chabon on the back cover, he of, if I’m recalling correctly, “The Arsonist’s Daughter,” just because in LISEY’S STORY King has “The Coaster’s Daughter.” I also really like his (King’s) “latening skies.” Not sure I’ve ever heard that before, or as well, anyway. Then of course this goes straight to the heart: “Scott takes a book with him everywhere he goes, there are absolutely no exceptions.” Only thing I haven’t liked in it so far (100 pages from the end), is that it makes some quiet fun of wallet chains. Just on principle, of course, I have to resist this kind of humor (though I’ve got to say, searches like this make me question the whole culture of wallet chains . . . ). Anyway, the structure or ‘layering’ of LISEY’S STORY, it’s exactly what I usually hate — flashbacks cutting back and forth with a couple of more time periods — but, man, King, he’s making it sing. And, more important, I suspect it’s one of those rare cases where that ‘layered’/simultaneous way of telling the thing is directly related to the content of the story. Which is cool. It’s why he’s king, I suspect.
• Friends’ newish books, which I mention not because they’re friends, but because they’re each very strong writers: GOODNIGHT, TEXAS and NEWSWORLD