Most of my posting these days is on Tumblr. So that’s where I’ll turn my attention, while reserving this space for the sort of longer-form writing for which it’s best suited.

Until I figure out the difference between this blog and my Tumblr—and decide whether to continue maintaining one, both, or none of them—you might as well head over there. If you return to this blog it’ll be because I linked to it from there.

But at the end of the program, during the “constructive rest” segment, comes “Bad Days,” by Timo Mass, the gorgeous closer to his all-killer-no-filler 2002 dance freakout, Loud. And while it’s ideal music for “letting my body undulate on the waves of my breath while my brain sinks into my heart” (the DVD’s words, not mine), I may have to swap it out with a less potent, emotionally loaded piece.

Because “Bad Days” actually connotes very good days: the sunny spring of 2002 when I didn’t have much of an agenda beyond drinking beer with Neil and playing drums in a party band. There were some bad days back then, too: I wasn’t so much on a career track so much as wildly derailed from it, and I was letting a number of personal relationships deteriorate for various reasons.

But euphoric recall allows me to only remember the sunny afternoons and the bacchanalian nights in Iowa City bars, and seeping in through the cracks between the dance anthems and the sweaty rock songs was this one—bright, patient, searching.

* That is an actual sentence I typed, on a blog with my real, full name on it; a blog that anyone in the world can read.

He’s also been quietly carving out a (side? solo?) project called The Wapsipinicon, named for a river in Iowa. The other day, Shawn walked straight into my workplace and handed me the band’s first album, San Geronimo, hot off the presses, and I was abundantly grateful. The Wapsipinicon is playing a CD release show at the Kitty Kat Club on March 6. Here is my favorite track from San Geronimo (so far), called “Get Out of My Town.”

The first one is Mary Karr’s Lit, which I was looking forward to for a while, and which I received for Christmas. Her first two memoirs are among my favorite models of the form, and I was eager to see Karr’s singular voice brought to bear on her adult struggles with alcoholism and spirituality.

So maybe my high expectations were part of the reason I was a little disappointed that Karr’s account of her salvation seems almost too tidy, when in fact motherhood, divorce, addiction, and the writer’s life are extremely messy things. It’s a truism in literature that happy lives don’t make for narratives nearly as compelling as tragic ones, so maybe after watching Karr navigate such a spectacularly fucked-up life across three books, we don’t quite buy it when she actually finds peace.

Nevertheless, I can’t imagine I’d be able to do a much better job, nor am I about to tell her how, so I’m more than willing to set aside a few qualms when the bulk of the book is so satisfying.

But I, like Christa at Minnesota Reads, had ulterior, perhaps more sordid, motives for grabbing at Lit so eagerly: I wanted a glimpse at those disappointingly few pages where she addresses her short, tumultuous relationship with David Foster Wallace, whom she met during a smoke break outside a 12-step meeting. The ugly details of their brief courtship are admittedly quite lurid, though nothing you wouldn’t already know from reading DT Max’s profile last year.

But what I didn’t know was the extent to which Ennet House, from Infinite Jest, was modeled after the house where Wallace lived, and where Karr visited him. Here’s poor Burt F. Smith—whose fate is so grisly I just assumed it was one of Wallace’s dark imaginings—in the form of “a disbarred lawyer who’d once passed out in a snow bank and woke in a hospital with neither hand nor foot—the blackened appendages having been amputated.” And Ennet’s crippled matriarch, Pat Montesian, is a hyperbole of the Mustang convertible-driving, shaggy dog-owning, house director Deb, partially paralyzed by a cocaine-induced stroke.

Lit bears other, more shadowy echoes of Infinite Jest—Karr overhears Wallace, after a meeting, bemoaning the logical fallacies of the 12-step model in much the same way that the too-smart-for-his-own-good Geoffrey Day does. And Boston isn’t rendered quite as vividly by Karr as it was by Wallace, but you see her scrabbling through the same dirty, cold city that the residents of Enfield and Ennet do.

So there we go. A slightly deeper glance into the world that DFW mapped. And that, my friends, is how to hijack an already half-assed review of a pretty great book.

More here.
Art Shanties here.