There Was No Way I Wasn't Going to Post This

But in other more serious news, there's a new literary magazine being born and it is called Kitty Snacks.

Also, here's a discussion of David Foster Wallace's unpublished undergrad thesis in which he deconstructs Fatalism, at least Fatalism as proposed by one Richard Taylor (not WETA Richard Taylor mind you, but a fatalistic Richard Taylor with far more bees and far less ability to conjure Orcs and Oliphaunts). It turns out that fatalist Richard Taylor was an internationally known bee collector.

Listen and watch an audio slide-show of writers' rooms.

Read about James Wood's angled modifiers( such as "royal fatalism"), his unfortunate bias towards realism, and why it'd be nice if critics sometimes criticized in the old ways of Edmund Wilson or Elizabeth Hardwick, i.e., thought about the worldly and human context of literature instead of "treat[ing] the novelistic canon like one giant Keatsian urn, a self-sufficient aesthetic artifact removed from commerce with the dirty, human world."

If you ever wondered what would happen if Buffy Summers met Edward from Twilight, now you can find out. [via Shaken & Stirred]

Have a sparkly weekend, readers.

Everything Is Green

This is what it means to start a blog: when someone famous dies, you feel sad, and then you think, I know what my next post will be.

This is what it means to be a writer, too. A teacher told me a story once, of a drunken, sobbing friend calling him on the phone from a bar. He told my teacher he and his wife were getting a divorce, that his kids would stay with her, that he kept forgetting to breathe. And then his tears stopped, and he said, "I'm getting a lot of great material for writing, though."

I don't know why so many great writers kill themselves. I'm not even sure so many really do, or if that's just the way it feels right now. I don't think any of this is supposed to make sense. That's why we have stories.

Here's the end of one written by David Foster Wallace:

Everything is green she is saying. She is whispering it and the whisper is not to me no more I know.

I chuck my smoke and turn hard from the morning outside with the taste of something true in my mouth. I turn hard toward her in the light on the sofa lounger.

She is looking outside, from where she is sitting, and I look at her, and there is something in me that can not close up in that looking. Mayfly has a body. And she is my morning. Say her name.