Monday, May 15, 2006

You know you and your litblog have made it when...

...you get a tag named in your honor at MetaxuCafe. Which pretty much means I, and this blog, shall not be "making it" any time soon. Because, see, one would have to blog things. Things worth tagging, see. Which I don't particularly do. Unless slumping becomes taggable. Which, let's not let it come to that.

I will take a moment to tell you that I really liked Philip Roth's new book Everyman, but I liked it in the way that, I theorize, a touristic masochist might like a good swift kick to the junk. However much one might like or appreciate the experience, there's really no way to honestly label it as "pleasurable". Or, really, "good". Call it what you want, but the fact remains: it hurts like a bitch. And may cause nausea. And, for the truly touristic masochist, once may be more than enough.

Uh, beyond that, nothing's really inspiring right now. I read Dave King's The Ha-Ha and I liked it, and I liked his reading a week or so ago, and it was all very nice. I read Allegra Goodman's Intuition and, well, I'm sort of eh about it, without much knowing why. Now I'm reading Mary Doria Russell's A Thread of Grace. It's good. But I've been in this slump, see--a blog slump, a life slump, a work slump, an "I just finished writing a story that might be the best thing I've ever done or maybe it actually sucks all rocks and maybe it makes me look like a huge tool but now I don't know how to follow it up anyway so I'm gonna eat all the ice cream and bleah" slump. So maybe I'm just not too inclined right now to be inspired by what might otherwise be inspiring. Plus you can add "I just got outbid on an item on eBay" to my slump list. Bleah!

Otherwise...uhm...I'm thinking about dealing with The Poetry Question here for a while. To shake things up. Like in a really diligent studious overachieving "I'm actually gonna say smart people sorts of things" sort of way. Like maybe for one month this summer. In a sort of "setting aside all other worldly concerns" sort of way. All worldly concerns, except maybe for delicious nachos. Because I really do enjoy nachos.

1 comment:

Arethusa said...

I've been theoretically interested in Everyman but the cover design doesn't look as cool on the actual dust jacket. Will probably wait for the paperback (or Sabbath's Theater whichever one comes into my hand first).

I'm now on Han's Christian Andersen's Fairy Tales (from the bitchin' Penguin graphic classics line). No one told me that "The Little Mermaid" didn't have a happy ending. *cries*