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.