How A Week Away Makes Me Think of Other Things (Almost)

I've had a copy of Harper's kicking around my room for about a month now. March. I finally got down to reading more of it while waiting for my windshield wiper motor to be replaced (yes, all you safety-conscious folks, I did finally get that fixed- in time for the rain today).

Anyway, I was lying in bed paging through it and got to the short fiction part and HOLY CRAP, IT'S A GEORGE SAUNDERS STORY. I read something he wrote in the New Yorker last year, but otherwise, once you've sucked the marrow out of his two short story collections, you're hard up until he publishes something else. I really liked the New Yorker story. This story was a little more openly dogmatic, but I have a lot of appreciation for how the man uses modern lowest common demoninator syntax. And his fixation on leisure activities and what kind of worlds they breed.

As much as I hate to be kept waiting, I do like to be able to anticipate what artists in our time will produce next. I read Northanger Abbey knowing it was the last Austen novel I could ever read for the first time. (By the way, here is the best advice page in the world. Seriously.) That is the tragedy when someone notable dies: that their contribution to the planet now has an end point and they won't ever make anything ever again.

Kind of makes you want to publish a zine, don't it?

In other news, my mummy is visiting this weekend. At this particular moment, she's at 37000 feet and going 486 knots over the Washington-Oregon border.

Oh, and actually operated a motion picture film camera for the first time today. Exciting. I could fall in love with that shutter flicker.

And finally, the man on the far right sat one table over at House of Pies today at lunch. He did a crossword. A man after my own heart.