Sunday, October 28, 2007

interview at impersonal electronic communication

I was interviewed for a new blog: this is an impersonal electronic communication.

It also has other texts.

Read while wearing your goat slacks.

Below is a thing I made five years ago that I found while cleaning out my closet at my parents' house.

Thursday, October 25, 2007

Black Warrior Review 34.1

The new issue of Black Warrior Review is out now. It is the "Sad Animal issue."



I have a nonfiction piece in it, another list, titled: CURSE LOOP.

Here's a teaser:

1. Yesterday a homeless woman stopped me walking in the street and asked if she could have the root beer I was drinking.
2. When I told her no she pointed at my head and hissed.
3. She said, 'You won't feel so good tomorrow, mister.'
4. She was right.
5. Today I have a stomachache and some kind of throbbing in my head. To the point I had to sit down to keep from fainting.
6. Half a cantaloupe in the trashcan has made my whole apartment stink.
7. A sweetish stink, though. Almost pleasant. On the cusp of bad cologne.
8. That birds die by explosion from eating wedding rice is a myth, though I imagine it would be interesting to see.
9. Some days I wish I'd take time to go feed bread to ducks.
10. Some days the best thing that happens is taking your shoes and socks off after walking.
11. Some days I feel nothing in my heart.


The line-up on this issue is absolutely sick. Other contributors include: Bob Hicok, Joy Williams, Lee Klein, Raymond Federman, Danielle Pafunda and many others.

They also have a nice new website.

To receive this publication, I ate at Taco Bell and donated my gonads to a sick child.

Monday, October 22, 2007

The Hour Sets by Michael Boyko

Got a copy of Michael Boyko's The Hour Sets in the mail today. Like everything else Calamari Press has released, it looks beautiful and I am excited to read it. Review forthcoming. In the meantime, check it out. Calamari continues to be one of the most exciting and high-water marked venues for innovative text.

Sunday, October 21, 2007

Old dream log

I used to write down all my dreams as soon as I woke up. I need to start doing that again. I just found a log of dreams I wrote down from 2002 & 2003. I can surprisingly remember many of them very vividly. Certain scenes are still embedded. I can remember certain people from the dreams even though they were not people I knew in real life. Here are some I rather like:

(1) MALL WHERE THE WORLD ENDS
I am working as a security cop at a store in the mall. At some point I go down under the store to use the bathroom, and then receive an announcement that the world within a 5 mile radius of the store is going to be destroyed by radiation. I lead a crowd out of the store into an open air mall. We break into a candy store and begin hording food, then get on a subway train that will take us away from danger. The train runs over numerous people walking on the tracks, including a mermaid that is somehow swimming there. On the train Kid Rock and some other musician are sitting with a naked woman, who shows me her ass, and they tell me how good she is. When the train reaches its destination, we begin walking along a strip next to a number of people going to opposite direction very slowly in their cars. I talk to numerous people in the cars about what’s going on. My mother and sister are with me now. We run into one kid who has lost his mother. One of the men in the car with a huge family says they’ve been there for 3 weeks. Another large family is explaining to the whimpering children how they will have to eat tents to stay alive.

(2) CRUNCHES AND CARDBOARD CAR
I’m doing crunches on a cement block in front of Wheeler High School, waiting for people to get out of class. Finally they do and begin crossing the street to get their cars from the middle school across the street. I watch a guy and girl ride on a motorcycle and have an accident right in front of my parents' house, and they don’t get up. I try to go call 911 but they get up before I make it over there. I offer to take them home and go get in my cardboard car. By the time I come back they are gone, and it is night. I start going down the sidewalk to look for them, but can’t find them, and then start coming back. At some point I rise in the air and then turn around and see myself sitting in a line with 5 others on the sidewalk, playing wind instruments.

(3) KKK
On my way to school, I stop in my car in the rain to have lunch at an outdoor table. I run into Lindsey from Wheeler and two other girls on their way to class. As I am eating a group of black guys come up to me and start a conversation. Eventually they ask to see my driver’s license. I give it to them, and they make me get up and get in a black car. I think I am being kidnapped, but in the car I am told to put on a black uniform and facemask, and am then given a mace. We drive to a huge Waffle House and tent where there is a KKK / White Power rally going on. We are going to attack them. There are about 30 people with us, and we infiltrate through the crowd and begin hitting random people. Eventually I get separated from the group and go through a long path of trying to find them, including going through a plastic lobby that is too small for me.

(4) NAKED APARTMENT BUILDING
I am moving through a huge collection of looming apartment buldings. When I go into them, trying to find an old friends room, all the rooms have plate glass viewing windows, and inside them there are extremely gorgeous and overly tanned girls lying naked asleep in white sheets. Anytime that I stop to look at one of them they wake up and turn away from me or begin to scream out. I continually get lost in the halls and am told to leave by numerous random girls that somehow seem to be the leader of their areas. At some point I end up under an overpass and a Jamaican man comes to my window while I wait alone at red light, and taps on my window, tells me to watch myself.

(5) STRIP BAR
I’m working at a warehouse on the first day that it is being converted to a strip bar / music venue. I’m helping this redneck line up girls and bands to audition for performance roles. One guy is hired to beat the shit out of bands before they are allowed to audition, to make sure they are rough. I talk briefly to a girl wearing all brown and eating a root beer Dum-Dum.

(6) DEHYDRATED BABY
I am walking through the halls of my elementary school, waiting for a bus to come pick up and take me to my high school graduation. I am carrying a cup full of water with my infant son inside of it. Outside of the cafeteria, the cup is accidentally spilled and the baby begins to shrivel on the tile. I try to rehydrate it in another cup of water but it is too late, the baby is dead.

(7) TV CLASS & STILT WALKERS
I am guest lecturing at an elementary school on the benefits on television consumption. The kids, lined up against one wall, watch me unresponsively, not bothering to respond to my attempts to engage them in questions. They seem either sedated or scared. I rattle off propaganda about how memories are related to television programming in the mind. After the class, I go out into a Wizard of Oz type world, and head under a large bridge to a place where people are waiting outside of an open air stadium for a concert to begin. Three of the performers, Marilyn Manson, and two members of N’Sync, come out of a back entrance near us on stilts that literally make them stand almost 250 feet in the air, but they seem to have no trouble walking on them. Everyone gets excited and follows after them as they head down the street. A group of high school age girls call me over and one of them begins asking me a lot of questions, but it seems they are doing this to make fun of me. To try to impress them, I show them that I have Brad Pitt’s number in my cell phone, and then call him, only to find out that he is also outside the concert watching the stilt walkers.

(8) DRUGSTORE
Rolling around in the floor of a drugstore with a girl who is trying to get me to kiss her. Then sitting on a curb with William S. Burroughs, having a talk. He mentions The Wild Boys and I tell him that it is my favorite novel of his. He thanks me kindly.

(9) TEENAGE MASSACRE
I am walking down the street from my parents house, and I pass St. Catherine’s church. Their lot is covered with stacks of bloody teenage bodies, all dressed in blue jeans and t-shirts. People are walking around the yard of bodies, which must be in the hundreds of thousands, taking pictures and posing with the corpses. I keep walking past as if this is normal sight. I get to a mansion in the middle of a moat filled with pudding. Miriah and Lee are on a dried part of the pudding, painting it different colors.

(10) DISNEY ASSAULT
I’m at Disney World by myself, but it is more like a bunch of huge office buildings clustered together than how the park really is. I have all of my possessions carried with me in bags and its hard to walk around. I go down a flight of stairs to get to the AMTRAK, but instead it turns out to be a ride and people fill in behind me. I end up in an empty room where about ten other people come together and we start talking about things. Everything I say makes everyone laugh a lot. Matthew Broderick shows up and sits naked at a table. Then one of the girls there starts trying to assault me, and she has to be restrained. I fend her off with a torn bit of an aluminum can until she is put away inside a glass jar. Then I take the jar to be given to my lawyers.

(11) DREAM SKETCHBOOK
I fall asleep in an unfinished basement with an empty notebook in my hands. When I wake up the book is filled with all kinds of elaborate sketches that I must have done while I was asleep. The room is now filled with numerous people that I went to school with. I show them the book, then go upstairs to find my mother and show her. The sketches are all very odd (one of a parade of figures on the globe including multiples Jesuses, one of just faces in a flock floating forward, on and on). Then we try to go to a college campus, but the area between the campus and the house is overrun with bums who make it very dangerous. Riot police jumpkick certain bums in the face. One grabs my ass until I give him two dollars.

Friday, October 19, 2007

Month of Weeks



Everything wants to shit on me today.
Even my Firefox browser refused to start.
I clicked on the icon and it just sat there.
I reset the computer and it didn't help.
I deleted the program and redownloaded it
and it still did the same goddamned thing.
I repeated the download and reinstall and reset
process probably 3 times. It didn't do shit.
Now I am using Internet Explorer and I feel ill.
The internet is a vital entity in my well being.
Sometimes people knock on my front door.
Tonight is somebody's birthday or something.
I think I am supposed to go sit around and be nice.
Someone has allowed a couple baby birds to live
outside my window. I am going to invest in a BB gun.
I am going to sit behind my blinds and plug
everyone that goes by and not hide my face when
they look. If I were a girl I think I'd take naked
pictures and sell them to a website for extra money.
Or for regular money, and that would be my main job.
I think tonight I am supposed to go see some movie.
Movies are good sometimes because you sit there
and just look at the screen and not talk or think.
While at movies I sometimes imagine if the screen
weren't there at all. And that everyone in room
was just sitting there looking straight forward
at nothing. I think that would be a better thing
to do. I imagine if more people paid $9.50 to go
sit in a room with a bunch of other people and sit
in nice rows of padded chairs with beverages and
just look at nothing, everything about everything
would be a lot better. I am going to take a loan
out from the bank and open the first nothing theater.
I am going to go severely in debt. By taking on the
debt and providing a service that will create a
new hole in people's evenings, I will be something
to someone sometime. There are a lot of words
you can pick to type. I don't know why anyone
picks one word instead of another except based on
small unconscious alterations in their awareness
caused by what they ate in the past several hours
and how long and well they slept the night before.
I don't know why anyone goes anywhere except to
try to make themselves feel better or to maybe
see a car accident or a fist fight or someone nude.
Next time it is my birthday I am going to distribute
my phone number on the internet in as many places as
I can think of and sit around talking to other
lonely people all through the day and into night.

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Darby Larson / Best American Nonrequired Reading 2007

Darby Larson's new short piece Your Narrator and the Mermaid is very excellent, I believe. It is one of the best things I've seen on Pindeldyboz.

I also like Your Home Pregnancy Test Results by Nathan Missildine at Monkeybicycle.

I bought Nonrequired Reading 2007 a couple days ago. I bought it, I think, so I could see who and what journals were included. No one ever posts these things anywhere online as far as I've seen. I don't know why it matters what journals did what but I tend to think about when I'm submitting for some reason. Not that I don't submit to places that aren't included. It's just one of the many dumb things I think about. I submit a lot. I have like 30 things yet to be placed. The language of submission is stupid.

Here is a list of the journals that were included. I will title it 'WHAT JOURNALS ARE INCLUDED IN BEST AMERICAN NONREQUIRED READING 2007' so people can find it when they google.

here's the list of what journals were included in actual print:

For the lists/humor section: Yankee Pot Roast, Monkeybicycle, Smith, Tin House, Earthweek, Channel 101, Opium, Looptard.

For the fiction/essay/speech section: Zoetrope: All-Story (2), Spink, Creative Nonfiction, Mother Jones, New Orleans Review, Five Chapters, Tin House, Indiana Review, The New Yorker, Barrelhouse, The Virgina Quarterly Review, Agni Online, Epoch, American Short Fiction.

And from the list of 100 Honorable mentions: New England Review (5), Hobart (3), StoryQuarterly (3), Swivel (3), The New Yorker (3), Subtropics (3), Zoetrope: All-Story (2), MOME (2), River Styx (2), Ninth Letter (2), One Story (2), Opium (2), Barrelhouse (2), Water-Stone Review (2),Epoch (2), Conjunctions (2), North American Review, Subtropics, Hugo House, Artforum, Consumed, Nimrod, Green Mountain Review, The Believer, ESPN, The Big Jewel, Sewanee Review, Small Spiral Notebook, Ploughshares, Frieze, Brainchild, Michigan Quarterly Review, ZYZZYVA, Stop Smiling, Glimmer Train, Paris Review, Agni Online, Post Road, New York Times Magazine, Lilies and Cannonballs Review, Chicago Review, Ecotone, Harper's, New York Tyrant, Avery, Gargoyle, Thrasher, Fence, Virginia Quarterly Review, Southwest Review, Willow Springs, Goth, Zahir, The Believer, West Branch, Giant Robot, Isotope, American Short Fiction, Shenandoah, Open City.

If I'd known how long that was going to take I would not have done it.

Monday, October 15, 2007

Links and etc

1. In the manner of lists, the master Mr. Donald Barthelme quite well trumped the list as a tool of fiction in The Glass Mountain.

1.5. (The new issue of McSweeney's #24 features an anthology of remembrances and meditations on Barthelme by David Gates, George Saunders, Gary Lutz, Padgett Powell and others, as well as two previously uncollected stories. It is edited by Justin Taylor, and is so far quite the shit.)

2. Moreso who I've been occasionally cribbing from, Mr. David Markson, speaks on his work in an old but still excellent interview at Dalkey Archive Press.

3. A new update today of the so far fantastic TITULAR magazine has Jimmy Chen's V. which rather remarkably takes on Pynchon's mind.

4. On Saturday night I saw Subtle, who if you haven't heard their last album FOR HERO FOR FOOL, you really should. Doseone may be the best frontman currently at large.

5. Also saw another famous "musician" perform earlier Saturday morning but I do not feel that I should speak of it aloud as I'd rather keep it right here in my stomach, but let's just say the performance took place at 11 AM at a Down Syndrome fundraiser walk and was absolutely amazing.

6. I have been experimenting with writing while asleep. More later.

Saturday, October 13, 2007

Journal Preorders

You can now preorder copies of the following journals being released in the next 4 weeks that I have work in by clicking on the following links:


Caketrain #5: containing my short fiction pieces 'Hive' and 'Anniversary' as well as work by Shya Scanlon, Myfanwy Collins, Lisa Jarnot, Alan Deniro, James Wagner, Andrea Fitzpatrick, Peter Markus and hordes of others


NANO Fiction v1 #2: containing my short piece 'The Way the Ruin Came,' as well as work by Josh Maday, Brandon Scott Gorrell and many others


Quick Fiction #12: containing my short piece 'Gravel' as well as work by Chris Bachelder, Girjia Tropp, Kim Chinquee, Seth Fried, Cami Park, B.J. Hollars and many others

Thank you in advance for supporting these excellent magazines.

All of these pieces are from a collection that hopefully will work as a novel in stories that I am currently busting my ass on. These four are the shortest ones. Right now there are I think 20 stories in the book. I am working to write more to lace them together. Instead I keep writing new things and thus end up with more to lace. By the time I am done I will either have something wild and amorphous or something very very long. I wonder which I think is better.

Thursday, October 11, 2007

Rejection letters

Lee Klein has posted his latest batch of his famously fucked Rejection Letters over at Eyeshot. If you've never read these before, they are always entertaining. I particularly like the less over-the-top honesty of this one:

There's something about your language that seems really young, an innocence to it. What you sent isn't really a story. It's a handful of sentences sort of about a dog, like you maybe read some Lydia Davis and then saw a dog and started writing? Maybe I'd suggest to really only bother writing something that seems necessary to write, not to screw around with anything other than what must be written, and also while writing keep in mind that you're trying to affect someone you've never seen, either make them laugh or agitated or randy or sad? There's an innocent manneredness to what you sent that seems like a barrier between you and writing something good, or enjoying and gaining anything from the whole process of writing maybe? Write because you have something to say, is what I'm saying, and try to make it affect another person. But thanks for sending this and hope all's well!

The others are more mean/ridiculous/weird/funny/random.

Lee Klein was the first person to ever publish one of my stories. He is also a good writer.

I have received a decent handful of form rejection from big places this week. It doesn't even phase me anymore. I kind of like it.

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Copper Nickel 8

I got my contributor copy today for the brand new issue of COPPER NICKEL. It looks very nice. I have two lists in this issue: BIRTH LOOP and QUESTIONNAIRE. There is also cool work by SARA VEGLAHN and MATHIAS SVALINA among several others.



Some of the writing is about Hurricane Katrina. There are pictures of destruction. You can see the issue and who else is in it here.

here are two lines from BIRTH LOOP:

45. Signs of the preactive phase of death: (1) increased restlessness, confusion, agitation, inability to stay content in one position and insisting on changing positions frequently (exhausting family and caregivers); (2) withdrawal from active participation in social activities; (3) increased periods of sleep, lethargy; (4) decreased intake of food and liquids; (5) beginning to show periods of pausing in the breathing (apnea) whether awake or sleeping; (6) patient reports seeing persons who had already died; (7) patient states that he or she is dying; (8) patient requests family visit to settle "unfinished business" and tie up "loose ends"; (9) inability to heal or recover from wounds or infections; (10) increased swelling (edema) of either the extremities or the entire body.
46. Those qualities which I've exhibited in the past two weeks: 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 10.
47. Perhaps also 9, if you consider chapped lips and/or endless monological inner-commentary a kind of wound or infection.


-----

I don't feel like excerpting any of the rest of it or the other list.

Thanks to Jake Adam York.

I don't know what else.

Today in traffic behind a truck carrying two long blocks of wood I had to fight off the urge to drive straight into it and impale my windshield.

To receive this publication I punched a baby in the chest and collected its tears with a confederate bandanna.

Monday, October 8, 2007

review of Steve Erickson's ZEROVILLE / The Famished Road

My review of Steve Erickson's new novel ZEROVILLE is in the new update of Bookslut. I really enjoyed this book. I read it straight through. It is relatively short and made up of short sections so you could have a good place to stop reading on almost any page if you had to though I did not. Steve Erickson is an excellent writer and this may be his best. He is also an underrated writer who was even more underrated several years ago. He still has more coming to him. You should really buy and read this book. If you like it you should read AMNESIASCOPE and ARC d'X and then read others.



Right now I am reading THE FAMISHED ROAD by Ben Okri, after Derek White's praise of it. It is incredible. It is magical realism with simple sentences and perfect rhythms. So far I am very jealous of it. I am 100 pages in of 500 and I think it is already in my top 5 favorite books.



My sleep right now is so fucked. I haven't slept more than 2-3 hours a night in almost 2 weeks. I am beginning to feel squashed.

Saturday, October 6, 2007

Things i like on Bear Parade

I spent some time this hour reading or rereading things on bearparade.com.

There is a lot of good shit on there. You should go read it if you haven't.

Here are some of my favorites things on there.

i'm going to touch you very hard by TAO LIN: i like this, like i like a lot of tao's poetry, because it rambles and yet seems to maintain a thought, and uses easy language in a new way. i like the line about destroying a house with an aluminum chair and it being the greatest week. this is a common feeling expressed in a way that absorbs the feeling better than trying to use intangibles. i think a lot of the reason why the kind of writing on bear parade is good is because it describes intangibles without intending to and does a good job.

i want to sleep by ELLEN KENNEDY: i like this because of the title and because of how the story seems to have nothing to do with the title but kind of exactly explains the emotion of wanting to sleep abstractly, which makes me think ellen kennedy maybe has had insomnia or at least mild trouble sleeping. since i was a little kid i've wanted to be able to carry a bed above my head that i could stop and climb into that existed in nowhere and nowhere is a place.

the last two lines of II by MATTHEW ROHRER: the last two lines of this poem are: "At night I make a little sound. It sounds like a witch opening a birthday present." i like those two lines a lot. i'm not sure why.

i want the glass panel tinted by OFELIA HUNT: i like this story for the explicit description used in the first paragraph and the way i laughed inside myself when it transitions out of the description and she says "It was a joke" or something like that. i think this does a better job explaining relationships than whatever modern writers write about relationships. i don't read modern writers who write about relationships like i guess jonathan franzen or something. i can't stand reading stories about relationships unless they are written in a way like this and this is good.

I have no idea what I am doing or why I just wrote all of that except that I think more people should read that stuff.

I like a lot of other things on bearparade but this will be where I shut the fuck up and start doing work.

Fuck.

Friday, October 5, 2007

dick enlargement persuasion

Some days I want to crush something.
I don't even have a specific stimulus causing the impulse.
I just get up with the vibration in my blood.
I haven't slept worth shit in almost two weeks.
I am back inside the box.
I lay in bed and watch the ceiling and am not even thinking of anything good.
I try to concentrate on the color behind my eyes.
The man that lives next door knocks and squeals and moves around.
We hardly have a wall between us.
For a while I was convinced there was a woodpecker.
Being awake for several hours in bed until the sun comes up and you still haven't even felt drowsy is a sensation that could inspire terrorism.
I need to be flushed out.
I need something to crack my sternum.
I should apply my desire for crushing to myself.
There are two spots on symmetrical sides of my body just above my armpits where my flesh is very sore.
I don't know why.
I haven't lifted anything.
I can't even think of the right words when I am trying to explain myself.
I have to sit and try to think of something similar and then use the Microsoft Word thesaurus to find the simple common word I am looking for.
I need a better outlet.
I am going to begin a spam email operation.
I am going to email people the things my brain in off mode wants to shit out.
I am going to text message random phone numbers with my babble.
There might sometime be a reply.

Thursday, October 4, 2007

Laminationcolony.com

Lamination Colony got a small face lift and a new url: laminationcolony.com

There is also a new group of work. Prose from Dave De Fina, Jimmy Chen and Benjamin Buchholz. Other text from Juliet Cook and Brandon Scott Gorrell.

I like this issue. I am excited about it. I am glad to have a real URL. I don't know why I didn't before. I already had web space, so it only cost me $6 through godaddy.com.

Read and share and encourage yourself and your friends to submit, please. I'm trying to do this more regularly.

On another note, 3:am published a cool poem by Zachary German about posting shit on craiglist. I always wanted to do that. I like the poem.

Wednesday, October 3, 2007

review of Robert Lopez's PART OF THE WORLD

My review of Robert Lopez's PART OF THE WORLD is now up in the new online edition of RAIN TAXI. You know you want to buy it.

Tuesday, October 2, 2007

Ninth Letter & Phoebe news and links and so on

So last night I about shit my pants when Andrew Ervin from one of my favorite literary magazines Ninth Letter called on the phone to let me know that they wanted to take my story 'The Gown From Mother's Stomach' for publication in their Spring 08 issue. I've never had a phone call acceptance before, and 9L is an amazing journal, so I've been in pretty great spirits since then. To the point I couldn't sleep last night. Supposedly my story was one that was unanimously voted to go in, which rarely happens without contention in their meetings. Thanks to Andrew and Jodee and all others involved with that. I feel blessed.

Not to mention that as soon as I got home from where I was when I got the phone call, I had another acceptance letter from Phoebe saying they wanted to publish my story 'Seabed,' which is the longest story I've ever had accepted anywhere, right around 6000 words. I think before this I'd never published anything longer than 2000. Another awesome journal. Thanks to Ryan Call for digging my stuff enough to take it.

Anyway, enough gloating, but I'm pretty fucking stoked.

Other things:

Anais Nohant blogged about me, particularly my David Lynch story and my sex pervert list. Thanks to Anais.

I now have a job writing a blog about poker (for a small amount of money) that you can look at here: Allpokeraddicts.com. I get more money if the site has a lot of traffic. You should click on that link. You should come back everyday and click on that link seven or eight times an hour while you're at your desk at work. I'd love you a lot. Allpokeraddicts.com Allpokeraddicts.com

Now I'm going to go eat sugar and feel okay.

Monday, October 1, 2007

Night Train 7.2

The new issue of Night Train is now online. I have another list in it, #18, this one titled INCOMPLETE CONFESSION.

It will also be available in the new Night Train print edition in early 2008. The issue has 12 fiction pieces and 12 poets. Of the bit I've read so far I like Reb Livingston and Andrea Fitzpatrick's contributions. There's a lot there.

It contains information of a slightly personal pornographic nature, including masturbation, so if you are baby, don't look. Though these days, with the influx of my porn hungry readers, it should be welcomed whole-heartedly. (Today's keywords bringing people here: boy erection, erection boy, perfect anus (yes!!!), pamela porn, is my child dumb?).

By the way, if you're looking for instant traffic that has absolutely nothing to do with people who actually want to read your site, add pamela anderson porn tapes and something about a boy getting an erection. It's a pretty steady flow.

To receive this publication I chained my mother to a Volkswagen and drove through the streets of a small Cambodian settlement, blaring her wounded wailing over a PA system in campaign for the presidential platform of Richard Simmons and Cyndi Lauper.

Liam Rector

You may have heard last month how Liam Rector, the director of the Bennington MFA program, where I got my degree, shot himself with his grandmother's shotgun while his wife slept in the next room. It was strange news, if not surprising, exactly, to those who knew him. Liam was the kind of man who would rather go out his own way than be sick and trudging, though it seemed particularly oddly timed as he'd just beaten a bout with cancer.

I remember the day he called me on the phone to let me know I'd been accepted to Bennington. He immediately began telling me to read up on the classics, and then went on to list a bunch of names I'd never heard, and certainly did not know were classics. He was an encyclopedia of language. It was kind of amazing, the way he could spout off quotes and ramble about them in front of the entire student body while perched in the loft of the room where we gathered. There was a running joke among the students about how you rarely got to talk to Liam except in weird circumstances: frequently, the men's room. He seemed to like to pop off and hit you with a weird question or comment when you weren't expecting it. He was a strange man.

Today, Newsweek ran a piece by the brilliant David Gates, who couldn't have written a better elegy.

At the beginning of each Bennington residency, Liam showed the students the Alec Baldwin 'Always Be Closing' speech from GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS. It always seemed to befuddle people: why he was playing it, what it had to do with anything. I think I got it. Besides anything else, it's goddamn funny. Liam knew what he was doing.