No man is an island, but many boys and girls are. The function of validation and attention is to raise awareness of one’s responsibility to that continent of humankind. Of course attention can be bought for the shock of a fifth grade moon, and validation sold for a song, but the reap is thin and spent before the confetti hits the ground. Praise? Pah. Best not require that variable. Better to keep one ear closed if you’re going to...

Last night my wife and I held our dog Boo one last time. I kissed her on the head as her heart slowed to stop. We’d been at this same emergency  hospital, staffed with wonderful people, just six months before with our thirteen -year old Italian Greyhound Teddy after a cancerous tumor hemorrhaged in his abdomen.  We would decide the next day to end his suffering.  Boo came as an unexpected gift into our lives while we were...

I went to my first reading in early 2001. In general I was a cocky little shit back then. I still believed that I was destined to win the Nobel Prize. I would surely have been committed for grandiose delusions if I sat down across from a psychiatrist in a bad mood. The reading was for some hotshot neophyte named Dave Eggers. I was unimpressed. The writer kept referring to something called “McSweenys.net” as if it were...

Lia Purpura could write about dental tape and I’d be interested in it—for her angle of perspective, the texture of her syntax, the way the mouth becomes “any mouth” in the holy repetition of that code of human language: “the shout comes, the chant, tune and refrain: these words are the world.” And what a world, another and yet the same. Had I read a book like hers when I was nineteen, would it have seemed more possible for a...

Go read this brilliant and hilarious blog. Go on. Do it right now. If you like what you see, I suggest dropping what you’re doing and immediately reading every single story in the “Best Of” list on the right-hand side of the page. You won’t regret it. You’re welcome in...

I didn’t take my first writer’s workshop until I was a fifth-year junior at University of Michigan. I did not take to them right away. I had never faced the sadomasochistic barrage that is a session of such a class. There seemed to be no correlation between talent and vileness. Being able to do something and being able to help someone else do likewise are disparate talents rarely joined in an individual. So it was that one of...

Son Lux is the classically trained musician Ryan Lott.  Unlike his first album At War with Walls and Mazes, which took three years of tinkering to create an unclassifiable mix of hip-hop chamber pop with an indie sensibility,  We Are Rising was composed and recorded, as part of The RPM Challenge, in exactly four weeks.  What strikes me is that the new album sounds equally, if not more, meticulous in its arrangements.  Lush string...

For a long time I thought writing was all about the inspiration of the first draft. There is something to this idea. A turd cannot be made a diamond through polish. We used to call them that in grad school. Polished Turds. PTs. I have crafted my share with the anus end of my mind and left them on the table just stinking and demanding something be done about them. Still, something that seems to be a turd can at times be just a dirty gem....

So it doesn’t look promising for me to become Lady Gaga’s editorial assistant for an issue of Metro. What? I know it surprises you that in spite of my qualifications both with language and with knowing myself thoroughly enough to answer her prime interview question, “Why were you born this way?” with forethought, hindsight, and panache—that in fact, some other monster would be preferred. I really thought I stood a chance....

And to be moved by the stars was to have one’s soul stirred by some divinely wrought swizzle   A thought does not have to be thought. In fact, a thought is not—as we thought, a product of the reasoning mind. The mind is a collection. Merely and as much. Infinite, given that even the finger that traces a line in The Poetics of Trespass, follows a path that is nowhere, and is endless. A passage among passages, a project of...