Three reasons the online literary community makes me nervous sometimes:

Writers write in order to be read. This is obvious. But the speed with which words, once written, are now being read — a speed shaped by technological innovations long before the Internet turned the quick turnaround into the virtually instantaneous turnaround — has set me to thinking about the extent to which writing, for the writer, ought to have a freestanding value, a value apart from the reader. There is too much talk about the literary marketplace, the cultural marketplace, and the marketplace of ideas. We need to remember that a book — or a painting or a piece of music — begins as the product of an individual imagination, and can retain its power even when largely or even entirely ignored.

~ Jed Perl

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As brilliant an auctioneer and entertainer as Simon de Pury can be, he needs to reconsider his snappy comment that “in a split second I can tell whether a work of art is great or not.” All I have to say to him is: Louise Bourgeois.

The artist, who died last week, was the antithesis of the sound bite, and didn’t “make it” until she was well into her 60s because no one saw the importance of her work until the next generation of (women) artists began to cite it as an important influence. De Pury should remember that some things happen slowly, and not all artists — or their work — can be recognized as “great” or “genius” in a split second. Art is about slowing down time, and thinking — neither of which television does very well.

~ Ross Bleckner

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[Flann O’Brien’s newspaper] column gave pleasure to a great many people and occasionally perhaps authentic delight to a few, but it must have been a terrible burden, and as ruinous in the long run as the drink. The penalty of journalism, and kindred activities, is that it gives its author a certain amount of warranted creative satisfaction. Having done a nice, neat, expert job with a good joke or two in it, you are inclined to turn on your heel and walk away feeling pleased with yourself, and of course entitled to leave it at that for the rest of the day. I am not speaking contemptuously of journalism now; indeed a writer who has practised it hardly ever does. He enjoys it in fact perhaps too much, and he can hardly ever bring himself to do a sloppy job, knowing too well that those who inure themselves to doing sloppy jobs sooner or later become incapable of doing anything else, in any medium.

~ Anthony Cronin

Maybe we should ignore each other more often?

Now I’m going about the agonizing process of starting a new [novel]. I say “agonizing” because it takes a while for the little cluster of ideas and half-impressions to gather momentum, acquire critical mass, whatever, so for the first few months it seems like you’re clutching at straws. One good side-effect of this is that it makes your last book seem (by comparison) like a masterpiece. It’d be good if you could just jump the present one and go on to the next, so that the present one would be conferred masterpiece status retroactively before it was even begun; then it’d be easier to write.

~ Tom McCarthy

When my 2.5 year old daughter experiences something confusing or frightening, she recreates the experience almost immediately with her Lego people and animals, acting it out over and over, casting herself in different roles including sole audience member, until she is comfortable with it.

Meanwhile, it takes me years to distill an experience into some germ, approaching it from different angles, writing about characters both human and animal, and hoping — much later — to end up with a story worth telling and an audience willing to read it.

I wrote a sentence about a sentence I love, over at Big Other. It’s from Flann O’Brien’s The Poor Mouth.

The online bonus materials for Hobart #11: The Great Outdoors! have been published, including my own “Appendix 3B, The Instructive Incident Of The Lawn And Its Necessary Lessons.” If it piques your interest, pick up the print issue to read the story it appends, “An Encyclopedia of Urban Farming.”

And if it really piques your interest, go read Ted Steinberg’s book American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn.

My story “Calamity Comes Home” appears in Emprise Review #14 alongside stories and poems by some fine writers.

“Calamity” is part of an ongoing series of shorts about American tall tale figures. “Big Blue,” about Paul Bunyan, appeared recently in Camas: The Nature of the West, and stories about Mike Fink, Davy Crockett, Pecos Bill, and others are in the works or in submission.

Meg Pokrass was kind enough to interview me for the Fictionaut Five series. I said witty things like, “who doesn’t love a novel with a lion?”

Who indeed!

It’s strange that all birds don’t fly in the same way. After all, the air’s just the same at the same place and the same time. I’ve heard that the wings of aeroplanes all conform to the same formula, whereas birds each conform to a formula of their own. It has undeniably required more than a little ingenuity to equip so many birds each with their own formula, and no expense spared, either. Nevertheless, there has perhaps never been a bird that flies as correctly as an aeroplane; yet all birds fly better than aeroplanes if they can fly at all. All birds are perhaps a little wrong, because an absolute once-for-all formula for a bird has never been found, just as all novels are bad because the correct formula for a novel has never been found.

~ Halldór Laxness, Under the Glacier

I’ve admired Hobart from afar for about as long as I’ve been submitting short stories, and have received several thoughtful, generous rejections from editor Aaron Burch over the years. So I’m thrilled to see my story “An Encyclopedia of Urban Farming” in Hobart’s “Great Outdoors” issue, alongside the work of so many great writers.

And yeah, if you detect shades of Stanley Crawford in there, you aren’t imagining things.

My saga of database mismanagement and genocide “All About Anyone” appears in issue 7 of The Los Angeles Review, and I couldn’t be more pleased to share this TOC with so many great writers — Rick Bass! Barry Lopez! And me?! How did that happen?

Also, this story is unusually autobiographical for me, at least up to a point (I’ll let you read it to determine which point that is).