Wednesday night they went and saw an arty Italian horror movie at the TLA and after the lights went…
GRAYSCALE
This life is inconceivably beautiful. It is a life of the mind. It is always late summer, the blacks…
Top 5 Patricides of Midville, Illinois (a short story from DIFFICULT TEXTS)
[by request from a reader: one of the hairier postmodish texts] Top 5 Patricides of Midville, Illinois …
ERYN; EDWINA (a short story from DIFFICULT TEXTS)
[Among my topics, as a Writer, are subtler manifestations of Racism and Sexism… but I always felt it was more…
SENEGAL: a Short Story by Guest Writer JEFF WHEELWRIGHT
[Editor’s Note: removed August 14th, and reinstated August 17th, at Jeff Wheelwright’s request] Senegal By Jeff Wheelwright Chapter One…
BEDTIME
FILM CLIP: THE TREACHEROUS COCK Nighty night, kiddies…
CHILDREN of the NEVALUTION
Will this Inspire or Depress you? John Cassavetes’ film, FACES, came out in 1968, when I was nine, and I…
TALE of the BLACKEST GIANT (a long short story)
he wanted to meet in the real world the unsubstantial image which his soul so constantly beheld -James Joyce,…
SUPRA-NATIONAL INSENSITIVE CULTURAL APPROPRIATION DAY
The third annual SNICAD (Supra-National Insensitive Cultural Appropriation Day) went off with barely a glitch, yesterday, in an undisclosed location,…
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 with the…
AND ANOTHER THING…
THE RACE/ GENDER/ BODY/ BELIEF SYSTEM VICTIMOLOGICAL STANLEY CUP What nobody really talks about is the stiffly vicious…
COMACOSM: A VERY LONG and STRANGE SHORT STORY
When you have the sweet disease (compulsive writing) you will write things and put them away and later…
REVIEWS, POLEMICS, PANEGYRICS & TINGLY FANCIES of the SCHADENFREUDE GAZETTE
1. UPSTATE, by JAMES WOOD: a GLOATING REVIEW from a LONG TIME HATER With the doggedly cheeky defiance…
QnA
Q: If you’re so good, why haven’t I heard of you? A: Well, you’re good and I haven’t…
THIS INCREDIBLE SEX COMEDY: A NOVEL (complete)
”The best reader,” he says, ”is one who is most open to human possibility, to understanding the great…
JESUS in VEGAS: a Novella
Writing seriously for twenty years (and writing unseriously for at least a decade before that) will, as it did…
POEM of the WEAK (a short story)
The drive up was tense not only because of the tritely appropriate drama of the rain but also because if…
A ONCE-TIDY NARRATIVE BECOMES COMPLICATED
It’s not my natural style to traffic in Hollywood gossip. But as a man who was gulled into becoming a…
totally naked with wild dogs: an allegory
Barry lectures: One out of every hundred people, or perhaps one out of every two hundred, harbors the seed of…
c. ONCE EVERY 6 MONTHS, THEY COME UP WITH A MASTERPIECE
Wow. ADDENDUM (can’t expect this kind of genuinely dangerous material out of our “serious writers,” eh?) WOW2 and NICE
ANOTHER CHUNKY EXCERPT from KOOTCHIE TOWERS (a novel halfway done)
It is spring of 1974. Hip college prof Benji is grieving and confused the morning after having walked in on…
ERM… WHAT?
One of the cluster of linked novels I’m about half-way through is set in 1974. I got nearly (a…
ANOTHER COUNTRY SMELL (a short story from the collection EVEN MORE DIFFICULT TEXTS)
1. Every day of a school week, a yellow girl ran up the street toward the Chalfonts. She ran with…
CANNIBALIZED NOTEBOOKS (2015-2018)
A) Putney Swope vs Tropic Thunder …has anyone made the connection? B) Writing exercises: Describe the difference between the…
morning news: a pome
sipping i read Jerhonda Pace was just 15 when she met her musical idol, R. Kelly, outside…
HOMO ZERO
for Comrade EC, who’s happy in Heaven with Francoise Sagan now PROLOGUE: I am Born, Elvis Reports to Nixon, Primates…
At Least 23 Cases of Mistaken Identity in the Golden Age of the Genome
1. Berlin, 2003. It is winter and very cold. Friday night. I’m walking from cafe to cafe with a…
VERA, NORA, ZELDA, CAITLIN, VIV or HUGO or TESS? (a pome)
1. Vera, Nora, Zelda, Caitlin, Viv or Hugo or Tess? which of the famous Lit Wife Archetypes was…
LO the MIGHTY BULWARK of EPHEMERA vs the GRAFFITI of the COMMENTARY DESPOILING ITS PRISTINE SURFACES
Around the World in 35 Minutes with my Occasional (and occasionally well-argued) commentary on YouTube threads (edited for length)… 1.…
SNAILS in the COFFIN: SUNDRY ICKY, DISTURBING and/or BLASPHEMOUS THINGS
Take the case of the cultural jingoist and editor of The New Yorker David Remnick, who noted in his letter nominating TV…
THE INHERITANCE (a short story from the novel GERMANTOWN)
A cloud of noise from the far corner of Golders Park, a jangle of plaint and controversy. The vivid disturbance…
INCREDIBLY CAPABLE CRONE: a book review
Lizibeta Snitt’s surprisingly popular Incredibly Capable Crone series is a trilogy of graphic novels in free verse. The title character is…
incredibly capable crone (a super hero pome)
“Give them time, Bella told herself, they’re only young”. – Jenny Diski, The Dream Mistress “Over wine at dinner…
30 under 30 (a pome)
There are two kinds of neat endings: the satisfying circle that ends where it began, and the straight line that…
Hats off to Denis Rancourt: They’ve Ground him into the Gravel for Years but He is STILL. AT. IT.
MACROAGGRESSION needs to be a thing. #macroaggression #obama #BlackLivesMatter #racism pic.twitter.com/KLN3UmwOAn — Denis Rancourt (@denisrancourt) January 5, 2018 Is…
DON DELILLO v CHICKEN NUGGETS w/r/t PYNCHONIAN ERRATA & SYNCHRONICITY
Early today I had to pre-heat the oven for the frozen chicken nuggets that Daughter has favored for the past…
THE AWFUL GULF between public BLACK MUSICAL GENIUS and public BLACK LITERARY MEDIOCRITY
As ever: Black Musicians are at the intellectual forefront while prominent Black Writers remain pathetic Third-Stringers, reliant on the…
THE BEST OBIT REGARDING THE UNEXPECTED DEATH THAT HIT ME THE HARDEST in 2017
The Writers Joseph Ramsey and Boyd Nielson have done a salute-worthy job of honoring the lost presence and important work…
BUT THE DOUGHNUTS ARE CHEAP and the PORN IS FREE, SO…. (a quick aggregation of Horrors)
Think of the worst, most violently selfish and dangerous people you’ve ever known or heard about and realize that those…
WHERE IS YOUR AWARD-WINNING SOB-STORY, POET? (a pome)
WHERE IS YOUR AWARD-WINNING SOB-STORY, POET? where is your award-winning sob story, poet? your artless re-collection of shit-luck’s local…
The Novel Excerpt: a few more chapters from THE BROTHERLAND MIRACLES
[O’Sirus is in town with her lover Katryn, invited to the wedding of the two heads (SETH and SHEM) of…
KUBRICK, THE FUTURE and HIS BLACKEST COMEDY
In the late spring or early summer of 1980, like quite a few people, I saw Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining…
WHAT IS LEFT
I’ve never been a swooning fan of Cornel West’s presentation (like those other On-Camera Academics, Slavoj Zizek and Camille Paglia,…
THREE MINI-ESSAYS on GOURMET VARIETIES of ABSOLUTELY PREPOSTEROUS BULLSHIT
1. GENDER BULLSHIT Solidly-mediocre purveyor of Normative Pap, Hollywood asset Matt Damon, recently took the risky step of addressing…
HEAVEN vs UTOPIA: a parapolitical investigation
Utopia is a Left-Leaning young man’s dream and it is the Earthly analogue for Heaven. No one older than a…
THE NOVEL EXCERPT: from THE BOMB COLLECTOR
[The Bomb Collector is a Novella featured in THREE POSTMODERN MURDER MYSTERY NOVELLAS] The only thing I like more than…
RAISED in a REVOLUTION
Unlike many reading this, I was raised in an actual Revolutionary Movement. My father and his comrades were Black…
THE WRITER, HIS KILLING and HIS FRIENDS: a brief review of a book and a video
In order to understand DFW’s writer’s block, you have to understand his relationship with Jonathan Franzen; in order to contextualize…
ME TOO, TOO
It’s good to see power-drunk psychopaths like Harvey Weinstein fall before they’re too old for the comeuppance to mean anything…
FAILURE IS WHERE ALL OUR BEST POETRY COMES FROM (and this source will never dry up)
In the following video (linked below), Yanis Varoufakis does a good job of displaying an ornate intelligence that might…
DON’T TELL CHLOE: a short story
Henry was already famous for having used a logical argument to get out of church every Sunday and now…
LAKE ZURICH: a short story
The last photo in the row of photos in cardboard frames on the windowsill was face-down on the sill…
THREE MYSTIFYING PUBLISHING PHENOMS EXPLAINED
Karl Ove Knausgaard (code name: KOK) Karl Ove Gump. Or Chauncey Knausgaard? A little of each, cannily packaged as one…
Time: A Mortal Straight Male’s Perspective and Counsel
Any fan of Martin Amis’ “Experience” will remember his father, Kingsley’s, character, in that book, as a craggily-lovable figure of…
COLLECTED APHORISMS and OBSERVATIONS of PASTOR PRIME [continually updated]
1. “Convention is the death of possibility; convenience is the death of passion. Modern life is both.” 2. “A Gifted Child…
