Zombies Ate My Brain

Not literally of course, but I have to say that I've had zombies on the mind for the last couple weeks.

I can't remember what triggered it, but if I had to take a guess I would say it started when I read The Road. There are no zombies in the book, but it put me in a post-apocalyptic mood. I recently read World War Z, which I enjoyed. I asked my Librarything compatriots for suggestions along those lines and someone said I should read Cell. I hate to say it, but it was the most unsatisfying read I've had in as long as I can remember; psychic, floating, pseudo-zombies "infected" by cell phones? Not exactly what I was looking for.

A book I read shortly after it came out was Everything Is Illuminated (about an entirely different kind of apocalypse). When I met Jonathan Safran Foer he said he'd merely written a book he wanted to read. That's the best advice I've ever heard about writing.

So here's my plan. I'm going to write my own zombie story, in serial form. I'll post it here and to my website as I finish each chapter. I have no timeline and only the vaguest idea of a story. I only know that the infestation has begun and is in full swing and the first-person narrator is a journalist housed inside a concentration camp, not as punishment but for his own protection, along with a number (hundreds? thousands?) of other refugees.

Wrrrrgghh!

More Cormac

I found this interesting link. Wes Morgan apparently walked around Knoxville taking pictures of settings from Suttree.

If you want to know with what frequency and on what page a particular word occurs, John Sepich has put together a concordance for Suttree.

If yyou're really interested in such things, you can find a concordance for each of McCarthy's novels.

Cool.

At Home Without The Man

It's been said of Cormac McCarthy that he is such a reclusive writer that he's not even famous for it. Well, that's all changed.

Maybe it was the Oprah Effect, or maybe the great mass of people have caught up with the writer, but it seems these days you can't step out of your house without hearing or seeing his name. I guess winning a Pulitzer, having your book picked by Oprah (or is it 'blessed' by her?), and having a recent novel turned into one of the most universally praised films in a decade will get your name out there.

With all the exposure (hell, people even know where he hangs out), there's still a lot about the man most people don't know.

The Knoxville News Sentinel has apparently been trying, unsuccessfully, to get an interview with their hometown hero for a while. Even without his input they decided to run an interesting piece, including some old photos of him and the houses he lived in.

Top 10 of 2007

Time Magazine has released its list of the top 10 books of 2007. Sadly, I am not on it. Just as sadly I haven't read any of these books. (I'm so embarrassed.)

1. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao By Junot Diaz.
2. Then We Came to the End: A Novel By Joshua Ferris.
3. A Thousand Splendid Suns By Khaled Hosseini.
4. Out Stealing Horses: A Novel By Per Petterson.
5. Tree of Smoke: A Novel By Denis Johnson.
6. House of Meetings By Martin Amis.
7. No One Belongs Here More Than You By Miranda July.
8. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows By J.K. Rowling.
9. Like You'd Understand, Anyway By Jim Shepard.
10. The Post-Birthday World By Lionel Shriver.

8

Things can get a little, uh, boring at work.

Other than paying my bills (and some measure of social interaction) my job is a humongous waste of time. Sure, I get a lot of reading done during my daily 90 minute commute (which the CTA has kindly extended to two hours on occasion...you know, to allow me more time to read), but other than that, it is essentially a giant pain in my ass.

My biggest decision is usually what time to eat lunch.

But today was productive. Hell, by my usual standard today was a red-letter day. I decided I'm going to change the way I write the number eight.

I've always made my eights as two small circles, one above the other like a tiny, headless snowman. But today I decided that was too sloppy and inefficient. From now on my eights will be made with one stroke of the pen, a small, upright infinity symbol.

Who says a day at work can't be productive?

Coming Soon

Dating Courtney. March 27-30, 2008. La Costa Theatre Company
A coming of age story about a girl learning to find her way in the world of relationships.

These are a couple of very (very) rough draft mock ups for postcards and the poster. The idea is the pics would be of the five different dresses Courtney wears during the course of the show. This is just a dress Penny pulled out of her closet so I could play with the layouts.

America The Ignorant

A teacher in Texas (does the city really matter?) has been suspended for the unforgivable crime of allowing a student to read a book.

Kaleb Tierce "is being investigated for allegedly distributing harmful material to a minor after the student selected Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Cormac McCarthy's "Child of God" off the list and read it."

Tierce, an assistant football coach, is a third-year teacher at a place named Jim Ned High School and is apparently popular with the students. But that's beside the point.

Coincidentally I recently re-read Child Of God.

Now that I have a son people ask me if I would allow him to do this or that, often these questions are directed at things that I have done, not books I've read. Would I let my son read a book about a necrophiliac murderer who lives in a cave where he stores his victims?

The answer is unequivocally yes. I will let him read anything he is capable of. If he wants to read Child of God I will not only allow it, I will encourage it (after all, McCarthy is my favorite author). Here's my question for the idiot parents of this poor kid - is Child of God anymore violent than the book allegedly handed down by God? A book loaded from front to back with infanticide, genocide, fratricide, war, incest and more miscellaneous murder and mayhem than anything else written since the advent of language?

Are these people afraid their son will start murdering people and having sex with the dead bodies? If that's the case they need to look a lot deeper into their lives (and their son's) than a high school reading list.