Right now, when people ask me what I'm reading, I tell them this book from the 1960s on the history of the funeral industry. That or that I’m just trying to plow through the February and March issues of Harpers, which arrived at the same time after I finally got myself a damn subscription. Or sometimes I’ll say I’m reading the latest AWP Bulletin or this December ’07 issue of Glimmertrain, or George Saunders’ The Brain-Dead Megaphone, which is truly excellent, or sometimes, if that “sometimes” is in the past two days, I might say Tobias Wolfe’s This Boy’s Life, which is also true. Also usually always true: I’m reading both forty papers by undergraduate students and essays and short stories by my fellow MFA programmers.

Really true: I want a cabin to just sit in and read and read books and magazines only and to fall asleep and then maybe wake up and read some more and then maybe eat some meat loaf and mashed potatoes while listening to a little Silver Jews’ Bright Flight and drinking a little wine at the end of the day and fantasizing about doing a needlepoint project involving Silver Jews lyrics, which, whoops, I guess I’m doing, now.
Instead of reading.

Also reading this ongoing ethnographic account of the habits of white people, which you’ve probably seen by now since you’re a thousand times more tech-savvy than I, Henshaw. Anyway, I find it startlingly accurate.

Tales from the Dark Side only, please.
So, howdy, Henshaw.
Somehow I ended up spending the one free day I have during the week doing teaching preparation things: grading papers, planning the next units in both classes and. And. And that’s about it. If-they-knew-would-they-care-no.

Meanwhile, the highlight of the whole day?

Receiving in the mail from Powells, my very own copy of The Last Great Necessity, this stellar history of cemeteries in the United States. I had a copy from the school library and took so very many separate notes in a separate notebook that it was just ridiculous. All like, “pg. 90: Victorian sensibilities/diff. Puritans.” “Pg. 91: Cemetery cave-in/Paris!” Notes like this for every single page. The book rules so hard that I knew I had to buy it but then discovered it was out of print and therefore goddamned expensive and so changed my mind.

But then I changed it back again, Henshaw. Because I’m damn fickle in my affections, that’s why. Or just have Youngest Child Syndrome, and find it hard to turn down my own cravings.
Actually, the first one can’t be true. This thesis-deal requires obsession, which I’m actually frighteningly good at. Heh. Um, heh.

Now that I’ve sent any potential suitors among you running, the rest of us can talk. See, it doesn’t matter. The thesis is like Christine the evil Stephen King car. No other love allowed. Seriously: I’ve been reading nothing else. I come across as a complete moron to my fiction-writing MFA friends at parties. I complained to a professor that I hadn’t found a way to balance the good fiction I enjoy so much with the death-practice reading, and she said, “You can’t. You just can’t. When I’m researching, I have a completely monogamous relationship with my topic.”
Still, I’m sneaking some Harpers and George Saunders essays in on the side. Shh! Don’t tell!

St. Patrick's Day Log
Beachtown, Carolina
In the late afternoon, the public radio station left on in the bedroom turns to Thistle and Shamrock-style new age flavored Celtic-lite. Dangercat leaves the room immediately. Upon arrival home, he is found on the sofa instead of his usual spot on the bed. The fiddling from beneath the bedside table explains all.

Later, Marshall emails these photos from Oakland cemetery in Atlanta. The tornado damage is really bad, much worse than he'd thought, he says. It's hard to look at them.

Album of the Week
Or, Misery’s delicate company
Do I have about six things on my to do list for today that I’d planned on getting around to in the noontime hour? Yes. Am I so overscheduled it’s laughable? You betcha.
Am I going to stop everything this moment, just for a moment, to gush to you about Elliot Smith’s first album and how I cannot stop listening to it this week? Oh, and how.

The self-titled album was the first of his I heard, and it’s still The Record, in my book. All rough-hewn acoustic guitar strumming—fingers slipping down strings as each song moves from chord to heartbreaking, cathartic chord, here. On later albums, I tire of his subject matter: how many fingerpointin’ heroin blame-numbers can one stomach in one sitting, even when the singer’s pointing at himself? Listening becomes like trying to remain friends with a junkie; after a matter of time, it’s up to him or her to figure it out, but you have to separate yourself.

But somehow--if it's not just teetering on the edge of huge, tacky metaphor to say so, which I think it is--this record is like the halcyon days of said-friendship: you know, when it was about something else, too. Somehow here it all coalesces into this ramshackle, controlled mess of passion: Smith’s voice low and straining up to sing these simple melodies contrasted so beautifully with his strumming.

The sun out every day lately, way up high in the cold sky, and we’re having these beautiful bright , clean-smelling evenings and driving from one place to another in town in my car, it’s all I want: the steady build of “Christian Brothers,” or the slow, crumbling convergence of those opening chords of “Clementine.” For some reason, the obvious misery here blows right by me and I’m nested for the moment, instead, inside the sheer beauty of it. The sunset, the high sky with its snakes of cirrus clouds, the green trees and this, this, this. Let’s hear it again. Gah.

Can you hear me S.O.S.?
I was literally on an island this weekend with zero cell phone reception or media, assisting with this writers' retreat, and someone says something to me Saturday about there having been a tornado in Atlanta.
"A tornado." I say this really more than ask it, sure this person's either got her storm-system-type or her town wrong.
"Right through the downtown!"
Well, mmmaybe, I think. A bad storm. But certainly not an actual honest to goodness, Beware Dorothy, hide-in-the-bathtub tornado.
I come back to Beachtown today, to become the last person in the nation to find out that actually yes one did: Friday night, hitting not only downtown, but also my favorite, dearest neighborhood, sweet Cabbagetown, where a number of friends live (all fine, thank god). I'm glad you guys are okay. Jeez. Still kind of in shock, though. I came home a half hour ago and I'll I've been doing is staring at internet footage.

Anyone know: What's the deal with Oakland Cemetery, though? I actually visited there just last week to write about the place for part of The Book, and now, apparently there are trees down all over the beautiful old place. Any other damage? Atlanta peeps?

I’m sitting here in the campus coffeeshop, and two young girls start a conversation while standing right in front of my table. Before I’ve thought about it, I’m watching them. Rapt, like I was meant to turn my head, from you, gangly ponytailed girl in jeans laced up on the sides, to you, bobbed blond girl in teal t-shirt. The alacrity in their gestures and voices; they’re so young. They’ve gotta be freshmen. Maybe nineteen. Then I remember my manners; you can’t just sit and stare at people while they carry on private conversations, (at least not overtly.) And then and then, I think: I’m probably not really offending them at all. When you’re nineteen, your whole life feels on display. It’s something of a given. You assume all the world is watching you at every moment, anyway.

In case of insomnia, go here.
Ubuweb is a wonderfully eclectic mix of sound and art and lost and foundness, one of the most eclectic sources you'll find for such things on the web. Actually, not really so much an anecdote for insomnia as much as something to make your addled hamster-brain feel like maybe it's in good company.

City-Dwellin' Vagabonds are We.
Not American Apparel models. At any rate, something in this series of photos comes very close to the core of whatever it is about this town that fills me with both a deep satisfaction and an ineluctable longing. I'm back visiting Atlanta this week, the city where where I lived for six love/hate/hate filled years. The dirty politics, the unplanned development, as if all decision-making is taking place in a vacuum with no template or precedent whatsoever, meanwhile, everything just vibrates with this burgeoning hum, of art, community, kudzu. The way crumbling old buildings with decrepit storefronts sit cheek-by-jowl with crumbling old buildings with shining new storefronts. The side-streets lined with crazy old houses with original works of arts-and-crafts beside ancient oaks in the front yards between the porch and the broken sidewalk. And right nearby, those old train tracks, and crawling all over everything is the kudzu, whose leathery green bulletproof leaves curl around all of this: old industrial-era architecture, Civil War shells half-buried in the woods in the backyards, the Wal-Mart up north of the city.

9:52 a.m., this local coffeeshop: The punks and the climbing businessfolk clad in bluetooth and the clutch of neighborhood men whiling away the morning at the local coffeeshop arguing about economics and local politics.

It all just makes me sigh and sigh, even as I'm here again, visiting. There's something telling you you can grasp it but it all moves so fast. Any. Way.

Here're some observations from Creative Loafing's Ken Edelstein that link to this series of eerie photos.
Drink and enjoy, Henshaw. And I hope you're having a nice week, too, and thinking of your own only love sprung from your only hate.