Stephen Graham Jones

I first read Pynchon when I was twenty-two, I think, between a B.A. and an M.A. The only reason I read him, too, was because I’d hit up a professor I trusted for a list of books I’d need to have read if I didn’t want to get laughed out of grad school. She of course gave me an excellent list — Nabokov, Heller, etc — but, when guiding me through the highs and the lows of all these titles, that professor stopped at Gravity’s Rainbow, said I wanted to st…

An Amazon short, “Gabriel.” Would say something about it here, but I think it’s all allready¹ there. Only thing I didn’t say to/for them, I guess, was that, when I read their guidelines and saw that there was a 10,000 word cap, I of course scoured my story directories for something just a touch over that, on the idea that more words for two quarters is a better bargain than less words for two quarters. Kind of the same way two scoops of ice cream for the pric…

as always, spoilers abound.¹

Man, mix even parts Adaptation and The Wonder Boys, let Will Ferrell shake it, and you’ve got something a lot like Stranger than Fiction. And of course, as all movies about writers of whatever kind have to end, Stranger than Fiction pulls the same trick those two do. Or, that Get Shorty does. So that, when Ebert says that the ending is a compromise, I don’t know: I’m kind of inclined to disagree. Or disinclined to agree, whichever …

I don’t have nearly enough time to devote to this now — I’m in the early stages of a study that hopes to finally conclude whether the Bulletboy’s old “Smooth Up In Ya'” song¹ (1989) really had hidden sexual overtones or not (next up: Warrant’s “Cherry Pie”) — but I feel I’ve got to say something anyway. And, I’d meant to frame this in some “Open Letter to Hollywood” or something, alon…

Looks like, in pre-celebration for TURISTAS¹, Demon Theory pulled two reviews this week:

• 
&

• 

Cool places each, though the reviews are kind of opposites of each other.

Anyway, it’s none other than Mike Bracken on the Toxic Universe one. Which, I mean — for my first novel, I remember telling somebody that it would only be complete when I knew that Gerald Vizenor had read it. And then, bam, it was suddenly complete before it was even publis…

hey, way down in that Halloweenie post I wrapped up by lamenting that there were no pics leftover of my shirt. Turns out it was a lie. There’s this one (click it to enlarge):

The farthest-back person in the room’s my friend William J Cobb, and the frontmost is Jay McInerney. I’m in the middle of an imaginary line between them, posing with a coke (there was no sweet tea). Right in front of me’s Amanda Eyre Ward. Or, hey: just look for the guy in the goofy red sh…

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 W

• Best line, by far: Samuel Jackson’s SNAKES ON A PLANE one, here
• Best monster kill: that last one in FEAST
• Best justice: in the bathroom stall at the end of HOSTEL
• Best subtitle: “[Zombies Panting],” from SLiTHER
• Best remake: THE HILLS HAVE EYES
• Best prequel to a remake: TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE: THE BEGINNING
• Best tanning bed death(s): FINAL DESTINATION 3
• Scene you (I) most wanted to look away from:¹ either that rib-splitter early on in SAW 3 or Jigsaw̵

Bleak. Unremitting. Is to the road trip book what THE HILLS HAVE EYES was to the family vacation movie. And as far as post-apocalyptic stuff goes, Cormac McCarthy’s THE ROAD makes you see what a happy fantasy A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ was, how tame DR. BLOODMONEY was. That that road in THE PARABLE OF THE SOWER was gold brick.

Anyway, though this is a non-review like all the others, still, some steering if you’ll take it: read THE ROAD in five hours or less, all in one sit…

everyone dreams the dream
                  but we are it

It’s like a word problem: If two ribbons, one gold one green, approach each other at a rate of eight pages at a time in a three hundred and sixty page book, will they ever meet? Because of course one-eighty isn’t a multiple of eight — you’re either four short or four over. Which kind of make…