Seven Things

1. My favorite Batman artist: Kelley Jones

2. My favorite Russian writer: Gogol

Click here to go to R. Sikoryak's Masterpiece Comics, featuring an adaptation of Crime and Punishment starring the caped crusader.

3. My favorite HOF-snubbed baseball player: Dale Murphy, Atlanta Braves 

4. My favorite burger in Atlanta: (tie) the Double Bypass Burger (two fried eggs, four slices of American cheese, five slices of bacon, with two grilled cheese sandwiches replacing the bun) at Vortex Bar and Grill and the Ghetto Burger (two-patty, bacon-chili-cheeseburger) at Ann's Snack Bar

Click here to listen to Atlanta's 1983 Top Ten Country Music hit "Atlanta Burned Again Last Night" which features a one night stand between a woman in her thirties and a seventeen-year-old boy.

5. My favorite Penny Nichols book: Penny Nichols and the Black Imp

6. My favorite debut collection of stories in 2008: Kyle Minor's In the Devil's Territory

7. My favorite Sufjan Stevens song: "The Lord God Bird"

Click here to buy the hardcover Devil Dinosaur Omnibus, featuring a giant red dinosaur and his best friend, the ape-like Moon Boy.  My god, it's impossible to resist.

Hills Like White Elephants: Matthew Rohrer

"It sounds like a boxer punching a horse

through the top half of a barn door."

from The Ideograms by Matthew Rohrer

Tin House

I've got a story, "No Joke, This is Going to Be Painful," in the current issue of Tin House, and it's the featured story on their website so you can read the entire story online.  

Shuffle

I listen to my Ipod on shuffle and I have an audiobook of Cormac McCarthy's The Road on there.  It is always bizarre, as happened today, when I go from The New Pornographers "All the Old Showstoppers" to a two-minute, soul-crushing section of The Road that includes the phrase, "carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell," to Prince Paul's "More Than U Know."  

The audiobook version of The Road, as well as No Country for Old Men, is narrated by Tom Stechshulte and, good lord, he is awesome.  He also narrated Kent Haruf's Plainsong and Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried and Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers and the twenty-three hour recording of Edward Conlon's memoir, Blue Blood.  Basically, if you've got something tough and violent, he's your voice.  

Keyhole: The Handwritten Issue

I'd been waiting for this one since I heard about the format.  The pride of Nashville, Keyhole Magazine, released their fifth issue, completely handwritten.  It is a wonder.  I haven't had time to read much of it yet, but the award for best handwriting goes to Jenny Hanning.  The words look like a modern font, printed by a computer.  Her two stories are, also, really great.  The ending of "Garden" is so hypnotic that I found myself saying, all day, "Three to three to three is nine.   Nine sisters which are us-we-mine."  If I were you, I'd treat myself to a holiday present of Keyhole Magazine.

Hills Like White Elephants: Julia Cohen

"Halogen lights zigzagged the canopy like leaking stars."

from "Sleep Disemboweled in This Forest" by Julia Cohen

Word Spaces

Ryan Call, who is awe-some, asked me to write something about my writing space, along with a picture.  So I did and, true to his word, he put it up on HTML Giant (which I check about twenty times a day).  You can read it here.  

At some point, I'll write about why we named our kid Fodder-wing and hopefully it will be sincere enough that you won't think we've ruined our child's life with our fake weirdness.  Plus, it's just his middle name.  It's hidden.  He can be Griff F. Wilson if he wants.  

Lamination Colony

The brand-new, double-sized issue of Lamination Colony is now live.  I've got another section of Tommy Explained and I'm really, really excited to be in Lamination Colony, a journal that I love.  There's stuff from all-stars like Elizabeth Ellen, Brandi Wells, Ryan Call, Zachary Bush, and a bunch of other people.  It seems that Blake Butler will be changing the site after this issue and I'm interested in seeing what comes next.

Six Sentences and Seventy Two Words

I've got pieces of the Tommy project up at Six Sentences and Seventy Two Words.  

A website

I was told, by people who take care of me, to get a website.  "Something nice, up and running by January."  This was on Monday.  I called my cousin.  We worked together at Network Computing Services at the Vanderbilt Medical Center when I was in college.  We also shared an apartment.  This was around the time when he was eating nothing but peanut butter crackers and listening to The Chemical Brothers and I was sleeping on an inflatable mattress, eating Milky Way Darks in my sleep (From age 14-22, I would sleepwalk and eat tons of candy bars and then wake up in the morning with shards of chocolate in my hair), getting really, really obsessed with The Real World: Seattle.  He is one of my favorite people in the world.

He made me this website, simple and effective and not too full of myself.  Kevinwilson.com (org, net, etc.) was already taken.  So was kevin-wilson.com (org, net, etc.).  www.tunnelingtothecenteroftheearth.com seemed too long.  You can look at the website if you want to see what people have said about the book, and it's got tentative tour dates.

Hills Like White Elephants: James Iredell

"We pulled up at the cabin, a pre-fab sentried by pines, a pair of old skis X-ing the apex of the roof, like something on a cartoon poison bottle."

from "The Cabin" by James Iredell

Students

I'm wrapping up my teaching for the fall semester, and it's easy to complain when you get a stack of stories about what people did during their semester abroad or a big party that results in drunken hijinx, but there was something weird going on with a faction of the beginning fiction class.

I had students turn in stories about:

a) a woman who joins an "Experience Club" where one of the exercises is to retain as much water as possible.  So she makes careful incisions all over her body, takes a day-long bath, and fills herself up with water.  Later, she and her husband have sex and the water seeps out onto the sheets.

b) a woman who moves into a house where a group of slightly insidious, wish-granting gnomes live in chicken coops in the back yard.

c) a nine year old sent from the future to assassinate a senator in the hopes of preventing a meteor from hitting the earth.

d) a minister obsessed with a strange mating dance that he read about in National Geographic who ends up buying an elephant gun and then burning down his house.

I'd like to think the Aimee Bender, Brian Evenson, Kelly Link, and Padgett Powell stories we read in class had some effect on them but they might just be a strangely-wired bunch.

Hills Like White Elephants: Jillian Weise

"Us, like a bad mix tape without slow songs."

from "Us, Like a Bad Mix Tape" by Jillian Weise

The Nuclear-Battery Baby

I've got a story, "The Nuclear-Battery Baby," in the Pocket Field Guide for Cold Weather 2008/2009 edition of The Duck & Herring Co.  It is a wonderful object to hold and to read.  There is a small hole punched in the top left corner of the journal so you can hang it on your wall when you're not reading it.  There is a recipe for Pungent Soup.  And there is a story by Eric Howerton that has the line, "My last gang, The Satin Pantomimes, had thirty-seven members.  It was doomed from the start."

Publishers Weekly

PW reviewed Tunneling to the Center of the Earth.  They were very nice.  I'll take a comparison to Sam Lipsyte any damn day of the week.

If the bad reviews come for me, I have a feeling that I will not be talking them up on the blog.