Fall of the House of Usher, feat. Lil John, Kafka on the Jersey Shore, and other deliciously awful literary mashups.

A wonderful essay over at The Millions on where we write and on making do with what you’ve got.

Introducing the Facebook novel.

Here’s John Waters’ secret to reading a lot.

What reading challenging books does to your brain. (All good things, I promise.)

The Hunchback of Notre Dame‘s eponymous Quasimodo may have actually been based on a real person.

Would you be seen in public reading science fiction? This lady wouldn’t mind, but then again, I think she’d prefer to read it in private. If you know what I mean. Har.

Imagine you are a doctor. Let’s say you have known you wanted to be a doctor ever since you were a little kid, attended many years of school to become a doctor, and experience the greatest possible level of joy and fulfillment in your life when you are practicing medicine. However, let’s say that the society in which you live expects doctors to work for free. Occasionally doctors can secure gigs that pay, but it’s normal for doctors to hold down other jobs so that they can support themselves enough to practice medicine. As such, a typical day for a doctor could include: getting up early, enduring a long commute, spending 8 hours in an office working a job that consumes energy yet doesn’t stimulate intellectually, grabbing some dinner after work, and THEN performing open heart surgery at night.

This is what it can feel like to be an artist, especially in New York City.

Of course we need doctors and they perform a very important job…but so do artists. And we need artists, too. Yet it has become the accepted norm that most artists must work a support job in order to survive. This reality can be frustrating, depressing, and is something I think about a lot when I realize that yet another week has passed and I have poured far more energy into my “support job” than I have into my writing. I recently ran across a great article by Emily St. John Mandel on The Millions that explores this very topic.

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My Grandfather in Venice Way Back When

I have always suspected the missing links between the scattered parts of my being lay within the life of my maternal grandfather.

My paternal grandparents are open books – my grandmother with her inexorable tongue and my grandfather with eyes that can’t betray a single emotion.  My maternal grandmother is a storyteller on speed – something always reminds her of something else and various tangents can be made within a single sentence.  My paternal grandfather, however, was a little less clear in his communication.  My uncle used to joke that all it took to keep my grandfather happy was his daily newspaper and a bowl of mixed nuts.  For years, I believed this to be the case – but as I got older, I suspected something much more existed within his alleged simplicity.

After he passed away in the fall of 2005, my aunt emailed our family scanned photos she found of him.  The photos dated back to the forties and consisted mostly of posed portraits.  I was excited to find that I looked quite a bit like my young grandfather since I grew up looking not quite like either parent.

It was, however, in a photo where his face was less visible that I found myself identifying with him most: in the middle of Piazza San Marco, stood my grandfather in an ascot and a three-piece suit – tall and full of quiet confidence.  Though we all knew that my grandfather suffered from a hushed case of wanderlust, we never knew he ever had the means to treat it. Read more »

I have a longstanding love affair with words. Truth be told, I can’t get enough of ‘em. I love long n’ languid complex sentences, extended metaphors, adverbs and adjectives and gerunds…oh my! I like to read a lot of words and I like to use a lot of words, and I live in constant fear that I am a member of a dying breed. I have long assumed that the pillars of eloquence have been crumbling down around us as “text speak” rapes the English language and inane Facebook status updates stunt the intellectual growth of the young. But I recently read an article by Clive Thompson in Wired Magazine that gives me new hope and urges me to see the evolution of language in a fresh light. Read more »