Writing about Sex is like cooking with garlic: the garlic is not the point. Imagine writing a scene in which…
3 POSTMODERN MURDER MYSTERY NOVELLAS
Sometime around the year 2002 or 2003 I wrote a novella called THE BAD CZECH. The narrative of that novella is…
FUN with DER ALT RIGHT: UPDATED
It happens not infrequently that I’ll casually pop over to a progressive site, to read an article and express…
VERY RECENT COLLECTED SHORT STORIES of STEVEN AUGUSTINE: 2017-2018 [downloadable pdf]
VERY RECENT COLLECTED SHORT STORIES of STEVEN AUGUSTINE-DOWNLOAD VERY RECENT COLLECTED SHORT STORIES OF STEVEN AUGUSTINE 2017-2018 EPUB…
SCI FI FOR MODERNS
Six Quickies and Two Shorts from my Collection WE DO NOT DIE ******** 10 …
KOOTCHIE TOWERS EXCERPT #4
Let’s take a stylistic trip across Literary History, back to when Novels were Novels, Writers were Writers, and Sex was…
TRUTH-WIT’S PHLOGISTON
Good stuff. Not quite sure what the “stuff” is but it’s good. An academically-trained practitioner of the bodily-invested postmodern breaks…
FICTIFICATION and ITS RISKS
In my latest completed Novel, THIS INCREDIBLE SEX COMEDY, the (often far-out) fiction is so closely mixed with solid thru-lines of autobiography that…
KONG of PAP [re-posted from 2009, with an offensive new preface]
PREFACE In 2009, when the hyper-American entertainer, Michael Jackson, died, I thought: sunlight has finally hit the vampire. An innocent…
TEH TYME MASHEEN
1. “Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature’s inexorable imperative.”—H.G. Wells It isn’t widely known that H. G.…
RADICAL RASPBERRIES
1THEM TOO The problem isn’t “MEN (eye-roll™)”… the problem always was and always will be that powerful people, men…
KILLING THE RARA AVIS (with a catshit trap)
Yesterday I read a story, by Haruki Murakami, in the New Yorker, that was so bad that it offended me.…
HOW IS IT THAT YOU READ THESE THINGS? A Quick Little Rip on Murakami’s Latest
I keep waiting for the day to arrive that I’ve become so old that reading a shitty short story by…
JOY
“Wait,” said Mara, “I know this.” She turns it up. “This is Beethoven. Or Mozart or stuff.” It is…
INUTILE ARGUMENTATION
A Fugue of Six Subtly-Interrelated Short Essays 1FORBIDDING POTENCY JHVH or “Jehovah” was once a kind of J-word: “Religiously observant Jews and…
QUICK LITTLE WEBBY TITTERS
Category: Hilariously Misbegotten i-Yuppie Pretences Description: Regarding the character-forming utility of bedtime stories (if you’ve been using them to…
GOTH AND CHOCOLATE: AN INVERTED ME TOO TALE
Early in 2004 I was looking for a bass player. I had gotten my first serious royalty check, as…
RUBY’S LOOPS: A SHORT STORY
Ruby-June stood shivering in a cloud-shaped queue at what appeared to be a bus stop on the sidewalk outside the…
EXCERPTS FROM “THE VELVETEEN GULAG” [a memoir]: CHAPTER 5: BOJOVAT ZA NOVY ZIVOT
Romy and I decided on impulse to make the four hour drive to Prague. The first thing we did…
EXCERPTS FROM “THE VELVETEEN GULAG” [a memoir]: CHAPTER 42:STOCKHOLM SYNDROME
JULY 22, 2000 Crossing the Baltic in a train was a thrill. The train, an old Czech monster, was loaded…
RESISTANCE-IN-JOY: APPRECIATIONS (episode one)
Offspring invited a chum over yesterday so I decided to take a walking fast (it was already slightly after…
FROM WAY BEYOND THE MARGINS: DAY 1, YEAR 2019
My ears are still ringing and the air in the garden is bruise-blue with low mists of the ghost…
LET X=
1-LOWER MATH Today’s winkingly pseudo-progressive racialism award goes to Eric Ross Weinstein, who coyly tweeted, the night before Xmas (emphasis…
THE MIRACLE of the APPARITION in the CANDLE-ILLUMINATED CORPUS of the CRANBERRY SAUCE: a Christmas Story of Short Length, illustrated by ET
At the sagging table of the two-turkey dinner of ’92, Ahmed Collins heard his Aunt Nura say something that changed…
JULES: a short story
The night my uncle Chandler did grievous damage to his Beetle at a bend in the road in North Carolina…
THIS WEEK’S LETTER EXCHANGE WITH ET
From: ET Sent: 20 December 2018 4:03 PM To: Steven Augustine Subject: Sweet Jay-sus https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/dec/20/death-drugs-and-destruction-the-troubled-year-of-soundcloud-rap I blame William “No ideas but in…
COLLECTED APHORISMS and OBSERVATIONS of PASTOR PRIME [continually updated]: A NOTEBOOK
1. “Anger with your father IS your father.” 2. “It is notoriously difficult to convince people living in a modern police state…
PURGE THINE AUDIOTOXINS
SOME MORE OR
Excerpt from THE BOMB COLLECTOR (a novel)
In early 2008 I finished a 41,000-word novel (c. 200 pages?) called The Bomb Collector. I wrote it…
PROFILES IN SHEER NERVE: A Heavily-Bowdlerized Journal Entry regarding the Summer of 2001 and Beyond
Long walk in the bitter cold the other day with longtime acquaintance René, who is roughly my age (younger…
ISAAC ASIMOV: A SONG
isaac asimov— from S-FILMS on Vimeo.
I KNOW I ARE BUT WHAT YOU AM: A QUICK COLLECTION OF DINKY THINKLINGS & ONE GOOD JOKE
1 RUE IN ELEGY I spent my precocious youth reading detailed warnings about the era we are now all…
3Pomes from IF BERLIN
“Fate rarely opts for the strictly comic or the simply tragic when the tragicomic will do.”-Pastor Prime . 3Pomes from…
A READER WRITES
Sent: Friday, December 7, 2018 5:47 PM Subject: M & N Steven! Much great writing on your blog over these…
EXCERPTS FROM “THE VELVETEEN GULAG” [a memoir]: CHAPTER 2: IMAGINED
1- I can’t remember if it was Kurt’s idea. Maybe it was mine. Ideas come out of the air at that…
EXCERPTS FROM “THE VELVETEEN GULAG” [a memoir]: CHAPTER 27: GIANTS
The Convoluted Real Life Romantic Adventures of a Bohemian Serf Abroad and at “Home” During Fewer Than Two Months of…
2 SAUL and WALLY TALES (two short stories)
Few people are aware of the fact that Saul Bellow and Ralph Ellison were chums. This unlikely twosome inhabited…
THE GRADUATE (a short story from DIFFICULT TEXTS)
Miriam with the curly blonde hair that when you looked closer was full of white and gray. Her point being…
THE GENDARMES OF MOROCCO: a Short Story
Local hysterical-realist writer Donald DeLillo’s self-parodying novel, Cosmopolis, begins with an epigraph from a Zbigniew Herbert poem: ―a rat…
THREE OBLOMOVIAN OBLOQUIES
1-JUNGIAN (Borgesian?) EPITAPH In the summer of 2002, two women I’d known in Berlin, in the early ’90s,…
FATHERSTORY: THE INVERSIONS
Without Life’s bizarre and often ironic twists and turns and dips and loops, it wouldn’t be Life… it would be…
JUST SAYIN’ : A FOOTNOTE or “A TOUCH OF IRONY”
So imagine a Central American nation (with a history of political assassinations) in which the former head of the Secret…
KUDOS, by RACHEL CUSK: a Book Review
Too often, when I fall for the trick of being seduced into buying a new book (of literary fiction), I…
MAJESTIC IMPERIAL PANOPLY: DIVERS and SUNDRY LINKS/JAPES/GRUMBLES
1 IMPERIAL HEADLINES 2017-2018 *Pregnant 19-year-old accused of raping boy, 14 *If a nuclear bomb is dropped on your…
THURSDAY NIGHT BY THE LIBRARY
Nanette Glitz referred to the mop-filled warren in the basement containing the janitor’s closet as “the physical plant,” a…
21 UNFORGIVABLE ONE-LINERS
Let’s keep wrapping our heads around the spectacle of McCarthyite Lefties until it feels right! Let’s empower Women…
MR. GOOLD: a short story
The neon artist, shit, I heard he’d been in a psychedelic band in the late ’60s when nothing was…
THE MEH-TRICKS: ART IS ALWAYS UNDER ATTACK
I had an old friend who was a self-proclaimed “Communist” (who spent more than one Xmas in his banker-sister’s Central…
DR. RED: a short story
I see someone has promptly raised a hand. This is very good. Because I want to ask a question.…
LIVES of the POET
1. PREAMBLE A man approaches a microphone mounted on a canting stand in the beam of an unspectacular spotlight…
DANGEROUS CRYPTO-MEGA HITS OF THE OTHER WORLD
1966 1966 1969 1972 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1982 1983 1983 1993 1994 1996…
LET THE WALLS COME TWOMBLING DOWN
When I was the object of desire of a mover/shaker in the Art World, she observed to me, one afternoon,…
How the CENTURY of the CHILD became the most CHILDISH CENTURY
“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child:…
THOUGHT PROCESS
“The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it. Power is…
WHITMAN, HEFNER, PLATH, DELILLO, GHOST MOTORS and CERN (et al)
1METAPHORPHYSICS, METAMORPHYSICALLY: Another Round of TEDDY vs SYL Reading and writing are the only Arts I know of…
