Short Story Reader has a write-up about my story “Are You Somebody?”, which Juked was kind enough to publish.
Last year the site also posted this piece about my story “Mexico,” which appeared in Failbetter.
About “Are You Somebody?”: I’ve periodically wondered if there’s a novel seed in there. That’s never happened to me before — a story growing into a novel — but who knows.
Murray Jay Siskind is a character from Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise. He’s one of the funniest and most memorable characters in the book. He says stuff like “TV offers incredible amounts of psychic data.” A former sportswriter turned visiting college lecturer, he studies Elvis and supermarkets and cereal boxes; reads American Transvestite. (He also appears in Amazons, a novel attributed to one Cleo Birdwell but actually written by DeLillo and a friend/colleague. I have a copy buried in a book box somewhere, and they’re pretty rare, so you can get some decent money on eBay for them, but I haven’t been able to part with mine yet. Amazons is screamingly funny, perhaps even funnier than White Noise and End Zone, and that’s saying something.)
Anyway.
A review of David Foster Wallace’s short story collection Oblivion appeared in a 2004 issue of the academic journal Modernism/Modernity. The reviewer? Mr. Siskind. Moreover, the piece included several allusions to White Noise, as well as some Murray-eseque digressions. Obviously a hoax.
But no one got the joke apparently, because the review started getting cited in graduate theses as a “real” academic review.
More info from this Gawker article: “Adorable Literary Hoax Goes Entirely Unnoticed.”
Btw: Both the Gawker article and another article refer to the White Noise character as “Jay Murray Siskind.” It’s actually Murray first, then Jay. I’m thinking that whoever wrote the review twisted the names around (another little joke) but nobody caught that either.
Okay, I know that lately it’s been a bit heavy on the family life posts, but damn…
This morning Ethan asked, “Can we do a lemonade scam again today?”
Been meaning to mention this site for a while.
Black Cab Sessions features clips of musicians who take a cab ride (in England) and play one song while in the back seat.
Musicians include Ryan Adams, Bon Iver, Death Cab for Cutie, Fleet Foxes, Richard Thompson, My Morning Jacket, Grizzly Bear and many more. (And has anyone mentioned that Death Cab’s Ben Gibbard looks just like Tin House editor Rob Spillman?)
I still haven’t spent much time checking out the site. But I hope to soon. Maria says the Calexico clip is pretty cool.
Babies cried for the last three hours, but we finally made it home late last night. On Sunday we drove from Oceanside to San Francisco, and yesterday we returned.
Overall the traveling went well — something like 700 miles with three kids in the car. No major meltdowns, no poop incidents, no flat tires, etc. (When we stopped at McDonald’s Ethan asked if he could have an Angry Meal instead of a Happy Meal. Wow. He’s all about opposites right now.)
On the downside: Maria and I both got sick (she was much worse); I listened to Raffi sing “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” and “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” about a billion times; I scraped the side of our van when backing out of a skinny S.F. driveway (will probably cost $500-$800 to fix); and Maria and I didn’t have as much of a “date” as we would’ve liked, though we did sneak away for a couple of pints of Guinness at the Blarney Stone (an old Irish bar in the Richmond District, where Maria’s family lives).
One of the highlights was renting a boat and going around Stow Lake in Golden Gate Park. I lived in San Francisco for 10 years but never did this. One of those things you do when you have kids, I guess.
It was a lot of fun. We saw blue herons and turtles and ducks and egrets. Ethan steered, I paddled…
Stow Lake Waterfall…
And here’s Ethan patrolling the mean streets of San Francisco with his scooter…
(Photos all taken with my camera phone, which is why they suck.)
