The Charles Wonder Phenomenon

I saw Charles Baxter read once, in Minneapolis, I think. During the Q&A he mentioned that his early unpublished novels sucked, and when someone asked why, he said that he went about writing them in a little too Stevie Wonder a way. Then he mimed Stevie Wonder.


Closed eyes, lifted chin, lolling head. Fingers moving freely over the keyboard.

I thought that was funny.

I'm not going to say why the memory arises just now.

Wow, and Wow Part II

I don't think I'd realized until this new one how much ass Six Little Things kicks.



And Caketrain--they have 14 (!) pieces from the new one online.

My Favorite xmas Gift Ever for Now

A while ago I saw that N and L were wrapping up washable markers and such to give to each other for Christmas and I thought, All well and good. And I thought that that was what was going to be in the tape-smothered rhombus that N presented me w/ on xmas morning--one of her own toys or implements. Instead she'd made these two awesome necklaces. Don't know if you'll be able to see. The longer one has a heart at the bottom. The shorter one spells out 'DADDY.'

N Pulls Back the Wizard's Curtain

The Magic 8 Ball, which came in her stocking, was put to the test in this way:

I didn't ask it a question, she said. Then I turned it over to see what it would say. I knew if it didn't say anything it was real. I knew if it said something then it was just saying things.

Heard on Fox News

"In Iraqi culture, throwing shoes at someone is a sign of dislike and scorn."

My Very Momentous Day

This bulletin board is in the room where I just gave a final. They tear all the fliers off at the end of the semester, I guess.

Maybe the thing I remember most from the documentary Crumb is RC talking about how he could never remember how transformers and power-line architectures and such looked because he never really saw them when they were in his vision. He had to get somebody else to go out and take photos for him so he'd know how they looked.

Here's one of the passages you'd have had to ID if you were in my class:


"Then they said, but isn't death, considered as a fundamental datum, the means by which the taken-for-granted mundanity of the everyday may be transcended in the direction of—

I said, yes, maybe."


B. likes to look at the IDs and see how many of them she can guess without having read the stories. This time she guessed 3 out of 10.

While my students were working I corresponded with Avery #4 issue-mate Jamie Iredell and coded for Wigleaf and evenutally added the new Lauren Becker stuff. I hadn't read her postcard carefully before today. It made me laugh.

When everyone was done I walked back across campus and saw this guy.



There were two guys there originally, standing in front of that truck. I guess they were w/ a third guy who was laying salt in a little motorized cart -- because they were looking in his direction. But they didn't look interested in the third guy, or in each other, since they weren't talking. As I got closer to them it seemed to me that they might be standing for a portrait, and I said that as I came up to them, I said, You guys look like you're standing for a portrait. Then it occured to me that I might be the photographer, so I got out my cell asked if it was okay. One of them, the one who would have been there to the right of the guy pictured, turned his back to me, chuckling, and walked off.

That made me feel like a partial asshole. A 15-20% asshole, maybe. The one who stood for the picture said, What's this for? And I said, I don't know. Maybe my blog. And he repeated that word, Blog, while thinking about how I was right then commodifying him and how he wasn't going to make a penny.

Maybe 25%.

I made that joke in a story once, the first version of a story called "Johannsen's Plant" which nobody except Steph at Avery and my grad-school friend Andrea Karafilis has ever appreciated. But they didn't read the first version. In the first version, this somewhat skeezy guy approaches a girl, who for some reason--I'm forgetting--calls him an asshole, to which he responds by giving her a stricken look and saying, Yes, I'm half asshole. My father was one. I didn't think people were still so prejudiced....

Top 50 Notes

* Longshortlist: over 250 already and growing..... (has to get down to 200)

* The excellent Ravi Mangla has posted a list of his Top 5 Wigleaf stories this year (the idea being that Wigleaf stories aren't considered for the W top 50). Go check it out! Leave comments!

* Darlin' Neal has signed on to be the Selecting Editor for the W Top 50 of 2009. She's a knock-out writer, as some of you know. Her story, "Red Brick," from SmokeLong, was chosen by Chad Simpson for the first Wigleaf Top 50, last year, and she gets all sorts of love from other prize outfits (her nonfiction piece, "The House in Simi Valley," has been selected for the upcoming anthology, Online Writing: The Best of The First Ten Years). Darlin' is an assistant professor of CW in the U. of Central Florida's MFA program, and has work in or forthcoming at some fine, fine places, including The Southern Review, elimae, Puerto del Sol, Juked, and Shenandoah. Oh, and Wigleaf (I can think of a few particular readers who would argue that her February story, "Powwow," should be added to Ravi's discussion).