kill author

i've got a new story up at kill author. there are many fine words in this journal, it's one of my new ones i always read. i'm very pleased to be there. i have some other things that i want to say about quietness and how i need quietness, and something about prose and stories of quietness, but i have not learned how to say these things yet. it snowed here, then melted.

calf heart attack

for the past year, i've been having bad calf problems. actually, it's not the calf, it's right below the calf, i'm pretty sure it's the soleus muscle. in any case, when running, i've been having intense cramping in both calves for a little over a year. what happens is: i go for a run and then in the middle of the run, the muscle feels like it explodes. no reason. it can just happen on a steady run. i'll go two or three months with no injury, then bam, muscle blows up again. i stretch well, i eat well, all that. it's been just an intensely frustrating year of working out. right when i feel like i'm getting to a kind of peak, the calf blows. and it's not just one, it's both. either. doesn't matter. anyway, i finally found some reassurance that i'm not just crazy and this actually does happen and is sort of a condition, so i wanted to put this up: Chronic Calf Spasm/Strain. also, this: Calf Heart Attack. the calf heart attack article pretty much exactly describes what i've got going on, as well as almost all the commenters on that running forum. i did a six miler yesterday and with less than a mile remaining, completely blow my calf and now it's weirdly swollen (never had the swollen part). but, i'm hoping this The Stick device actually does work. if any runner comes across this, any words of advice on this chronic and strange injury?

why are there random asian language comments on my blog

i don't know why this is. is this something called "bots"? i have not deleted these asian language comments because it feels just strange enough to keep up. i would not advise clicking on them though.

i have read some books.

Brautigan's In Watermelon Sugar: beautiful otherwordly fairy tale; gentle souls abounding; let's all have a nice time, let's eat together; when someone hurts someone or misuses someone, say sorry, okay?; let the ladies be lovely and the men be not-so-distant; let the villians be cleareyedly crazy and obviously wrong; let us live in watermelon sugar. my only complaint is that the prose was never as dense as the first few sentences, which clearly seemed worked over or lucked into. either way, i wished the prose a bit thicker. still wonderful.

Jamie Iredell's Prose. Poems. A Novel: hard-edged hard-edginess of the west. ingesting of drugs and alcohol. what else does one do in the west? climb a mountain, but not well. how could one, all boozed and drugged? those heat-eating landscapes, those long stretches of mountain road, those stupidities among policemen. all that catches up to one, unless it doesn't, which it didn't, for our narrator, who slips out of his destructive life (yet somewhat funloving and awe-filled life (possibly over-reverent of it all - oh, it's beneath things, but it's there)) just in time. saved by the girl. the pictures are pretty, the poems, but it's no novel. it's something else. and that's good.

Patrik Ourednik's Europeana: a compressed history of the twentieth century. with prose slung with heavy death tolls and absurd communities and nations of people, it's hard not to be amused by people, to see the absurdities Ourednik wants us to see. oh, the prose: Ourednik sings to the reader this baffling history painted in enormous strokes. there are no characters, no plot, save for the paradigm shifts in human thinking - and those shifts, well, i'll keep reading all day to get the quick on human thinking. and myself, i kept thinking, He must have done a ton of research for this thin book. the book cycles, repeats, almost restarts, and yet takes you just about as everywhere as you want to be.

winter cold like a dog bite

winter is long shadows, the day always ending. a greyness dulls me down. and for the realist who feels like a representationalist, nothing happens. there is a cold day. and another. and then another. and so, little happens on the page except that continuing blankness that is winter. i've been thinking a lot about confidence. to write well, i have to be really confident. there's no other way. you have to believe that what you're putting down, whatever it is, is something that needs to be there, has to be communicated, some story unheard, some words unread. but winter, the small warm rooms, that stopped-time, heavy blankets and sweaters, a colder you, it allows for way way way too much thinking. and so rejections pile up and, yeah, my confidence has been a bit shaken the last month or two. which is okay, necessary. i got a rejection on my novel manuscript, not a real personal word in it. i think the manuscript was out for five months or so and i got the rejection new year's eve. not the best day for a rejection, especially one so impersonal (which is basically like saying 'no, badness'). and yet, yet....this the time, that hour, when the day is short and blue with long shadows, the sky is a sickly pale grey, and there are sirens, or too much time alone, or too much time with other people, or there's a man on a bike some sleeting night, asking you for money, pleading, gloveless and hatless in the cold, and when you tell him you have nothing, he scoffs at you, maybe even spits, and you have to think this is fair, and find some way back to the page.