this Graham Irvin piece . . . wow, great, you should read it

www.ayearinphilly.com/entries/grah...

Thought also of Sometimes a Great Notion, of a similar time period, and the west, and (sixty-year spoiler) features its own flooded banks. Would make a good pair taken together, the Stampers and McClellans being so similar, the perspectives/style so different. You could make a class outta that.

Copy of Joan Didion’s 1963 debut novel Run River, or Run, River as I think it was originally called on release, per Wikipedia.

Run, River (1963). Among the better debut novels I have read, and probably indebted to it are the slimmer, slicker ones: thinking Virgin Suicides or Less than Zero.

Neutral Spaces Magazine | Issue Four I Cannot Make You Famous

Every now and again I put together a collection of writing via Neutral Spaces — issue four went up today

neutralspaces.co/magazine/four/

Highly recommend both. We'll see if it's just got the shine on it of a recent completion, but I felt this book was pretty good.

Somewhere in there watched Terrence Malick's Tree of Life (on acid) which felt highly complementary (the movie, to the book) as a coming of age in America kind of thing. Lot of similarity in the depiction of fathers and sons, in Malick's signature breathy V.O. and Wolfe's more poetic departures.

A copy of Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel (1929), which is not, decidedly, a first edition.

Look Homeward, Angel (1929). An unbelievably scathing family portrait to have come out of the south. Funny to feel scandalized by it at a distance of 100 years. Frequently just said 'wow' at the page, the prose. Interesting to consider as a forerunner of today's autofiction.

Thus concludes the episode of my life where I thought I lucked into a first edition Look Homeward, Angel. Least now I can read it in the bath.

you have to read this, just delightful

a childhood rerun as a lysergic nightmare

porous is he.

maybe I was hungry?

a rightward and sort of quickly resetting spin

in a troubling development, woke up very dizzy today

Pylon (1935) William Faulkner

Pylon (1935). Faulkner’s first after prohibition, a return to New Orleans. Everybody's hammered, flying airplanes. Stuff of his youth, which you'd think would be backlooking or nostalgic, but he seemed very drunk writing this, struggling with it. Lesser work—maybe my favorite ending of his yet.

experimenting with participating on social media (first time in a long time) but also deleted all apps from my phone (nonessential) so if I'm on here I am seated at the computer (it is 2007).

Read Denis Johnson’s second, Fiskadoro (1985). Left field of his first’s Arizona heroin and bank robbing, Key West after the bomb. A millenarian, cargo cult situation. Questing for relics: books and clarinets. Poetry in the breakdown of language. What happens when the world ends and you don’t die?

view from office window

Y’all don’t want me posting

Enough of y’all come here I might start posting

greetings upworlder