"Sweet Potatoes" and some stuff

(Cross-posted from HTMLGiant)

My desk is really messy but on Wednesday Joe and I did a lot of work around HQ. We took down the old artish and put up some new pictures and my favorite thing was finally figuring out a way to display my chapbooks. I kept putting in chapbooks that I had in boxes and getting excited and showing them to Joe. Like, JOE! LOOK AT THIS TITLE "FALLING STARS TO SMASH MOTHERFUCKERS IN THEIR FACE"! AH HAHA AND LOOK AT THIS ONE! "CONGRATULATIONS! THERE'S NO LAST PLACE IF EVERYONE IS DEAD" - okay so maybe those titles are kind of pessimistic but there are a lot of other ones that I liked. I kept also being like JOE! THERE'S A LOT OF CHAPBOOKS IN HERE A PERSON WOULD ACTUALLY WANT TO READ!

Life is moving too fast. I can't keep up with things like the Internet. HTMLGiant is moving beyond me. I don't know what's going on anywhere. I don't like the feeling. I feel like I'm withdrawing into my own small world of rush. I can't talk crap about people anymore because I don't know what anyone is doing.

How's everybody doing? I thought about taking a picture of my new chapbook library but I decided that is like trying to take a picture of a hill -- you can never really show how steep it is and you will always be sad then poof.

This morning I reread "Sweet Potatoes" in Timothy Willis Sanders's book ORANGE JUICE which EVERYONE LOVES. I mean for real. If you were wondering if TW is well loved, then go to Houston and they will be like yeah he is awesome.

I reread "Sweet Potatoes" maybe for the fourth time and something clicked in me a lot extra. Not just about that story -- though a couple things I wondered about w/r/t the story specifically is why does the narrator choose white wine at the grandparent's house and then insist on it. He says "White" after being insecure about the grandparents being racists, and I also wondered about the relationship btw the speaker's mother and her bf (?) Bill -- so are they the same ppl as in the first story, "Orange Juice," but perhaps in a different stage of their relationship, as in not so turmoiled out?

And how is that story "Orange Juice" so effed up. I've read that story probably a dozen times and just reread it and I only think I really know what's happening. Dang, when I was in Houston with him I should have talked about this with Tim he would have explained it to me. In the order of great writers who excel at ambiguity Sanders and Hemingway are abut.

The other night Joe and I went to a bar and at one point I think I thought okay instead of a round of beer this time I'll buy a game for my phone so I got one called Wave Runner -- it's boat racing -- it's gyroscopic or whatever -- you turn your hands and the boat turns. The thing is I am still terrible at video games. When I was a kid I walloped my whole body to make Sonic try to do a loop and I kept pulling the Genesis off the TV till I didn't even want to play anymore. I admit I use to sneak into my neighbor's basement to play Mario on their NES cuz we were Christians and didn't have one yet. (Later when we got the Genesis these Christian rappers came to stay at my house and they played football with my brothers and said things like "that's madd _____." I think at the time the word mad had two "D"s to signify "extra." The Christian rappers explained that to my mom.) Anyway I was just playing Wave Runner and crashing into things and jamming my whole body and I guess video games are just not my thing, I should have had the beer.

So how about them Orioles am I right? John Dermot Woods invented this thing called Fantasy Baseball 2011 and I am pretty into that. I probably check my stats pretty often. I'm going up against like the toughest guy in the league who has three starting pitchers going today. When I was in sixth grade I started to stop being cool/having friends and I didn't know it yet but thankfully we got into a discussion about it one day at the lunch table. Dan said "I'm cooler than you," and I was like all "What" and Brian R goes, "He is you know." That was pretty much when I stopped following sports.

But I've never read a book by Barry Hannah or that lady whose name I can't remember but I really want to read a book by her, I think it's kind of French sounding. I'm working on a novel though, about a white guy and a black guy who come up hard but strike it big with a website but then the white guy goes missing (is he dead?) and people think it's the black guy did it because no one really liked him since he was a jerk. Anyway it's pretty good there's no narrative it's all told in like receipts and emails and invoices and travel vouchers and spreadsheets. It comes in a box. It will be out in 2013. It's called "Baby Takes a Nap."

Last night I told Patrick King about this when he was here at the HQ, King is aces, he just finished his own book, and he was like, "Oh like Dracula," and I DIDN'T EVEN KNOW THAT ABOUT DRACULA!!!! I know that Frankenstein is epistolary but I never read DRACULA! I never read DRACULA and yet I don't know anything about SPORTS. I feel like this is a major problem. If you're going to be a botard that doesn't even know Adam Wainwright is on the DL ALL YEAH then you better have at least read a book by Barry Hannah or whatever -- DRACULA.