This is his blog.
Imogen Heap “Canvas” | Dir. Tom Kelly
(Source: youtube.com)
Now reading.
The interior smelled of spoiled vacations and amateur porn shoots wrapped in motel shower curtains and left in the sun.
This description of an RV appears on page 8. I’m not much further than that in the book because I just got it this afternoon, but yeah. I have a feeling I’m going to love these essays. It’s only a sentence, yet it warns that John Jeremiah Sullivan is an exciting, adventurous writer.
The book feels good in my hands, like an indispensable map. I’m conscious of being so drawn to essays lately. (Ryan Van Meter’s If You Knew Then What I Know Now is another recent example.) Maybe I’m on a creative honesty kick. I might argue that the best stories—even in fiction—are the ones carefully drawn from real life. Make it real.
Anyhow, I’ve only just begun to read this. Fingers crossed.
Before coffee and too-bright sunlight, before alarms and phone calls and need-to-dos… sleepyheads.
Status Quo
We’re stuck in a tape loop of square-format photos, blurbs, and tracks. Feeling self-conscious and sorry. I’m funneling my creativity in another direction—a new story—and that inevitably means my fuel tank is spoken for long before I get to this space. It’s just a phase, moon tide stuff.
I mean to get my digital camera out soon and start taking more pictures, but I’ve fallen in love with the camera on my iPhone and it’s been a fun resource. “The best camera is the one you have with you.” I mean to write more things exclusive to this place. I mean to keep doing my sit-ups. I mean to get on my bike and ride. I mean to…
More soon.
It was there, with no help except curiosity and the will to learn, that my taste for reading developed and was refined. —Jose Saramago
“Like a lot of young writers, when I started out, I had a dim conception of my material. I wrote about people and places that were vastly separated from those I knew. Then, too, if I tried to write about my own self, the results were far from illuminating, for the simple reason that I didn’t understand myself too well. As soon as I began writing The Virgin Suicides, however, I suddenly realized that I knew a lot, not about my own psychological dimensions so much but about the town where I grew up. I knew everything about the people who lived on our old street. I remembered their oddities and family histories, the rumors and gossip, and I remembered the weather, the local legends, the racial tensions, the flora and fauna. I stopped being embarrassed about being from a suburb in the Midwest. I treated it like my own Yoknapatawpha County and, for the first time, produced something that interested adult readers.”
-Jeffrey Eugenides in The Paris Review
In the morning, I fill the coffeepot with water. I fill it up to the six printed on the glass. The water sloshes as I pour it out, out and into the back of our simple coffeemaker. This makes about two mugs of coffee and leaves about another mug in the coffeepot. Sometimes I waste that last mug. Sometimes it’s still sitting in the coffeepot the following morning, dark and stale and unloved. Other times, lately, I enjoy that final mug in the early evening. The sun begins to set at a quarter to five. The falling light brushes passed our windows, quietly settling against the white eastern wall of our home. I heat the last mug in the microwave then. I warm it, wondering if the microwave’s invisible energy could turn my black Costa Rican beverage into something radioactive, wondering and not caring.
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