Publication is mine...finally!

The folks over at Camroc Press Review published my shorty short, "Baby's Gonna Be A Rock Star" the other day and I want you all to read it if you have a chance. It's a sad story.

Here.

Picks of the Week

So, yeah, that's the second week I forgot to do this post. But, you know what? I'm nothing if not persistent, so I'm getting back on the horse today. There are not a lot of great games this weekend, but the ones that are, are really great.

Picks of the Week

Last week could've gotten really ugly if I had thought to predict more games. Something like 5 of the top fifteen teams got beaten by lower ranked teams. It was hard out there for a pimp. As it was, the only game I got wrong was my Wolverines getting their asses handed to them by the Spartans, so my total only went down to 76%.

This weekend continues the trend of horribly boring match-ups. The SEC has a couple sleeper games that might end up interesting, and the Big Ten and Pac 12 have some key conference matches.

Picks of the Week

BAM! I went 7 for 7 last week for a straight 1 double 0, to bring my total up to 73%. What we learned is that all of the big boys are legit. This week we don't get a lot of action except a whole lot of questionable teams get legitimate shots to prove their worth. In the Big Ten Michigan and Michigan State battle it out for the Paul Bunyon trophy and the frontrunner status in the Legend Division. In the Big 12 both Texas A&M and Oklahoma State are trying to stay neck and neck with Oklahoma. And in the Pac 12, Oregon needs a win over AZ St to nip at the heels of Stanford.

Year of the Novel Meets National Novel Writing Month

So, it begins again, sort of. Next month is National Novel Writing Month and the curious thing is that I will actually probably maybe be finishing the novel some time next month. Or rather, that is the goal. I'm going to hit the ground running this month and hopefully I will have enough of a head of steam that I will be able to cruise to the finish line with this behemoth of a book.

At this point I have finished just about all the main storylines, except the one about the two main characters. I would say, i have about 40K-50K more words to write which may seem like a crap ton of words, but if I really work hard, that is totally doable for me. All that will be left will then be to comb through the various storylines for terrible inconsistencies and grammatical problems. Then I will need to tie everything together in a satisfactory way and re-edit it. At that point it will have a "finished" manuscript.

So much work. But I'm really very satisfied with what is emerging. More info as we get there.

The Neo-Sentimentalists

Again, piggy-backing off a post I had a while back that is now sort of, more or less, coming true*, I recently read this great post by Tony Woodlief about contemporary authors being tasked with stripping away all the bullshit of postmodernism and post-postmodernism and getting back to what is real about being a human being on this planet. David Foster Wallace talked about this in his amazing essay "E Unibus Pluram,"** in which he said that the next vanguard of authors will have to battle the circular logic of postmodernism in order to get to something real, or else the future of letters could be at stake. He suspected that the next vanguard of avant gard authors would be what he called Neo-sentimentalists who would be unafraid to be honest and earnest and who would leave irony by the wayside and speak directly and truthfully. That is happening now. The internet is filled with new authors who are not ironic, and if they use irony they use it in order to better facilitate the truth-telling. Whether this movement has legs or not, time will tell. Maybe American Letters have already died too much to be fully revived, or have any major impact on the larger culture. But I'm proud of these new authors, who are unafraid to be honest. Who are unafraid to be talk of love without flinching.


*This was actually an interview with the brilliant neo-sentimentalist, xTx. I think my long-winded "question" in which I lay out my theory about neo-sentimentalism is around question #7. For other neo-sentimentalists see Roxane Gay, Matt Bell, Ethel Rohan, me, Jason Jordan, Alan Stewart Carl, etc.

**Seriously, take the time and read this thing. It's brilliant.

Why I will never win a Nobel Prize for Literature

Basically, I'll never win one because I'm a white American male*. Ok, maybe that's a simplification of the argument in the aforelinked article. But, I gotta admit, my first reaction to something like this is, how is a foreign-born immigrant writing about the experience of being a foreign-born immigrant any less solipsistic than a middle-class bourgeois white guy writing about the experience of being a middle class white guy? Essentially, what this article is saying is that it's not that American writers don't win the Nobel Prize because they "write what they know," but rather they don't win because no one cares anymore about what American's know. That's probably a valid argument. The world is bigger and more inclusive than it used to be, but please don't cloak that argument in the pretension that American writers are somehow more self-involved than writers of other nationalities. Writers are self-involved. We're only ever writing about ourselves. Let's just be honest about this.

Case in point, Roberto Bolano is probably one of the best examples of the type of Globally-minded, expansive, non-American writer that they're talking about, yet Bolano's last and greatest novel is basically about how tough it was for him to write that last and greatest novel. In fact, throughout his body of work Bolano referenced himself more than George Lucas. He basically was a literary movement unto himself.

The Nobel peeps are free to give their prize to whomever they wish, and I'm sure that person will be really great and all, but let's not disguise the truth. Americans don't win the Nobel Prize because we are just one country and there is a whole world out there now. Only one person out of millions of published authors can win. The world isn't a small pond anymore, even big fish can get lost.