Gray skies again in Riverside.  We’ve had a lot of rain, enough to make your cowboy hat-wearing protagonist get comically splashed by passing cars, and enough to make him thankful he brought his leather hat. (I’m like those old Batman action figures.  I come in Original, Rainproof, Snowproof, and “Jesus fuck, it’s 106 degrees and [...]

Taking a leap from the Best of 2009 Blog Challenge, presented to me and you by 20SB, I give you my year in reading, approximately.  I say approximately because there’re a few here I can’t remember if I read in 2009 or the close of 2008.

The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan.  The only non-fiction [...]

A little late, but I just stumbled upon this article at Huffington Post, detailing the suppression of footage that followed the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  You can find a video and smaller article from the author here.  The video is graphic.  Then there’s this photo series at the Denver Post, following a new soldier [...]

There is a tendency for people to call me by my last name.  I don’t know why this is.  Furthermore, they have a tendency to shorten my name to Shonk, or Shonky.  I hate this with a passion.  What I don’t hate, though, is when my name gets turned into a verb, which has now [...]

I imagine some of you folks aren’t familiar with that name.  Let’s rectify that.

That Evening Sun is an adaptation of one of Gay’s short stories.  I can’t believe I haven’t heard about it until now.
Here’s an excerpt of Provinces of Night, in my opinion, his best work.  In Provinces and in his first, The Long [...]

It’s the colors that I remember most.  The room is dim but lit sourcelessly. I can see the walls, cream colored, and the sheets I’m tangled in as pink like a conch.  And your hair, dark as the corners of the room, dark as the door.  You get into bed and I put my arm [...]

You’ll find I’m not one for titles.  I want to preface all this by saying that I am a writer–shock– and alongside sleeping, breathing, eating, and the latter’s natural follower, writing is something that keeps me together.  Like all writers I fuck with things a little.  I smudge here, smear, stretch.  My novels are never [...]

“Bonedriven” from Bush’s second album, Razorblade Suitcase.  I grew up on this band.
I know there’s no reason for things like this.  No higher order, at any rate, than cause and effect.  But I like to weigh things, proves they’re real, maybe– being heavy.  I took a wonderful trip last year that ended in a speeding [...]

It’s been a topic whirling around the various lit-and-writer’s blogs lately, what with the economy, the Kindle, and, well, technology as a whole: what role does the writer play in this climate? Comma, what role does the writer play beyond his or her own writing?  Comma, what is all this technology doing to us in [...]