Buying a Bed and more
by Administrator on Aug.19, 2009, under Satire
No royalty checks yet on the book. But my tuition refund came in today and now I’ll finally give up the foam pad I’ve slept on the past three weeks and buy a real bed (almost). Having learned that air mattresses are a bad investment, I’m looking at portable mattresses. Buying a full-fledged bed has struck me as a bad idea for a long time. I like the freedom of being able to move if I come to hate the apartment I live in, and grad students (as well as young “artsy” people in general) need to be mobile.
The reading in Spartanburg went well. I haven’t talked that much about Southern Literature (yes it does deserve to be capitalized) or steel mills in a while. Hub City is almost out of copies of Through the Pale Door, although their distributor still has a couple hundred copies. No doubt a hundred or more have spread across stores in the Southeast.
Don’t make fun of me, but I’d like to recommend a book called Secondhand Spirits. Maybe the best case of not judging a book by its cover to date. Not chick lit, though it pushes the envelope in places. And yet, sufficiently dark to keep me interested. I saw on it on the bottom shelf of B&N. Part of my campaign the last year’s involved reading more deeply into pop fiction – branching out from the likes of DeLillo, Nabokov, Faulkner, Atwood, Robinson, and company. And I gots to say, if the heroine from this novel showed up at my door to warn me of mortal danger, I’d let her in and then some. But I’m having to skim through a lot of the sections that talk about dresses. For anyone out there snickering, my second and third favorite books are Blood Meridian and Blood Meridian. Here’s you an idea:
The man in the brown stetson walked up to the four chuckling men. On the way he passed the undertaker and said unto him to prepare three coffins. Then he addressed the men and he said, “I don’t think it’s funny, you laughing. Me and my mule’s liable to get the wrong idea and think you’re laughing at us.” And the wind swept and it carried the scent of the men’s sweat as they fingered their guns and then they all drew on each other and a roar of gunfire filled the dusty street. The four men were fast. But the man in the stetson was faster and it was clear now why he’d asked for coffins – but not three, no, four would be needed now. The man in the stetson had miscounted but not misfired. As he left, the Sheriff showed the man in the stetson his badge and explained the laws of man here, to which the man in the stetson replied, “Well, if you’re the law, you’d better get these dirt bags under ground, before they start stinking.” The world wasn’t a cruel place. It just wasn’t over-kind. A man could get kilt for laughing at another man’s mule. The four men were now dead men not laughing; had been living fools, but now dead fools.
One Response to “Buying a Bed and more”
Leave a Reply
-
Meta
Stunning information. I’m unclear how much to ponder this method, genuinely.