Inherent Vice on film
I was gratified that PT Anderson decided to include the “dark crews” passage in the film version of Inherent Vice. However, I did regret the exclusion of the “1 percenter…
Actually we DIDN’T Pay for this…
You can get “Stories from Austin: A Collection of Short Stories from the Austin Creative Fiction Writers Group” for free, a limited-time offer that expires on Monday. Click Away!
Eye Pouches
Graham Greene buried this great description in the middle of a paragraph in A Burnt-Out Case: “The pouches under his eyes were like purses that contained the smuggled memories of…
And We Paid For This?!?
And We Paid For This?!? is not, despite your deepest hopes, the name of a new self-deprecating alt band, with a pithy throwaway name that you grumble on your way…
Co-opting the Alternative
Pynchon may be documenting the end of a specific era in American life in Inherent Vice, but there is a universal resonance in his description in which the mainstream co-opts…
Slipping into Solipsism
Rand Paul strapped on a pair of opaque ideological blinders when he posited that Eric Garner died because of taxes. Seriously, he must have matching black holes swirling two inches…
Church is cheaper than…
You’d think, here in the South, churches would not have to resort to sad and desperate messages to bring in the flock. But on a church sign, between Houston and…
Turn the Survey Inward
Philip K. Dick’s story “Survey Team” was so prescient for its time that it has completed the cycle and now seems passé. He sees a future where we are stuck…
Official “Idiots on an Overpass” Day
July 19 must be the new official “Idiots on an Overpass” day in Texas. Clumps of white people were perched on several I-35 bridges between Dallas and Austin, waving their…
Thoughts like Fish
Many awesome passages percolate up from the thick tome that is Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives (Picador Edition). “…[S]trange ideas would come to my head. Ideas that were like dead…