December 2009
3 posts
This is still my top Google result. Really? →
My latest Wired column: What red-blooded Americans... →
September 2009
1 post
Stoop
Handsome, the man next door, grew Elephant Ears. “The biggest leaf you can grow at this latitude,” I heard him say, over and over again.
He didn’t say this to me, but to the dozens of passersby who asked about the Elephant Ears, every day, as they made their way from Washington Avenue to the Grand Army Plaza subway station. A sample conversation:
“What is that...
August 2009
1 post
Story-go-round! (Reader's choice)
Would you like to hear a story about
a) an inhuman, though not inhumane, detective
b) an obsessive continuity editor for a comic-book publisher
c) a self-flagellating joke writer melting down at the wedding of his cousin, an intelligence officer
?
That’s for now.
Would you like to read a novel about
a) a Civil War historian fleeing a troubled marriage, who gets himself embroiled in...
May 2009
1 post
Tesla: The Pigeon Years
May 19, 1942
Day four hundred of my self-imposed exile here in the Hotel New Yorker. My patent battle with Edison rages on: I wish him worms. Compounding my frustrations, Bernice the pigeon and I are fighting. Apparently the worst sin a man can commit is commenting favorably on the plumage of any bird who is not Bernice—in this case, a macaw. A PHOTOGRAPH of a macaw, I might add! Irrational...
March 2009
4 posts
The Apocalypticist
“I’m a comedian,” he said.
“I’m an entertainer,” he said.
“Anyone who takes what I say seriously is so some kind of nutjob,” he said, adding: “We are everywhere. And we’re stronger than we realize.”
Like any good comedian, like any good entertainer, he staked out his patch. And then set fire to it. Because that’s how you...
The Bot Net
Here’s how it begins: There is preference, as there has been forever. And then there is an engine for aggregating preference. And once preferences are aggregated, there is data. There is predictive data. Everything is anticipated. Everything is provided, before it’s even wanted. And before long, there is no want, and then there is no choice. This is how preference destroys choice.
...
Lunch at the Professor's
The professor’s walls are books. How many, I don’t know. It could be a massive apartment underneath all those books. Some of the books are on shelves, but not in rows, or even in stacks—in whorls. Maelstroms of books, Bosching up against each other, burls of books trying desperately to return to their original tree-state: Books in stacks, books in screes, landslides of books and...
scatterings
“The door was open,” she said. “After I kicked it in.”
“This ain’t my first rodeo,” said the man-with-the-one-blue-eye.
“Then you know,” said the girl, “that in a rodeo, the clown’s supposed to get hurt.
He looked at her with his dog’s eye. With his dog’s eye, he could see she wasn’t lying.
October 2008
4 posts
HUMINT
…She’s got one of those big untroubled smiles, simple as a pat of butter, and yet she works for the State Department, Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs. Where, I know for a fact, nothing remotely happy ever happens. Where there is no such thing as a good day at the office. To know what she knows, to be privy to that world of infinite trouble, and still to go home with a...
EPITHALAMIUM: Stewart the Spy
Stewart’s the youngest of the Rabb boys, and the most delicate looking, face smooth as a new oyster even under the slightly ursine beard he’s grown for “the job.” His eyes are spy blue—not electric, not notable—just a steady deep denim. His eyes sit on you. They don’t flutter or fidget. And he’s funny, oh Jiminy Christmas, he’s funny, like all...
The Five O'Clock Headache, in brief
For Robert!
The Five O’Clock Headache
“I like paying taxes,” Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, “I buy civilization with it.” Think of the Five O’Clock Headache, then, as the very best kind of tax. What does civil society chronically lack? Well, civility, for one thing. But more to the point, it’s predictability. We plan for the rationally self-interested...
"Epithalamium" or "The Groom's a Spy!"
The groom’s a spy, or so they say.
Not a bad cover for a spy. A spy is never the center of attention, and neither is the groom. A spy stands near the center of attention, and goes practically unnoticed. As does the groom. A spy is modular, interchangeable, instantly forgettable yet always watched, by the powerful few, for signs of treachery. Ditto groom. And (this is key) a spy wears a tuxedo. QE...
September 2008
1 post
Garner for his own recreation
We were Gardeners before we were Garners. In the old days, across the ocean. Some half-rotten family bible proves it, though I couldn’t tell you where it is now, or who has it. Doesn’t matter: We’re Garners now, and have been for almost three hundred years. Garners we became, and Garners we most certainly have proven ourselves to be. We Garnered. We got.
Bandy-legged, built...
August 2008
2 posts
Something different...
…a palate-cleanser, while I figure out who my Terminal City characters are.
*** LET’S GO FLORIDA
In the old days, there was paper, which some of us still remember, and there was Florida, which most of us would rather forget.
Florida, any easterner of a certain age can tell you, is where the family went for lack of a better idea—it was the vacation of last resort, when pets...
R.I.P. Alexander Solzhenitsyn →
An infamous lecture he gave at Harvard in ‘78. Today, we’d describe the tone as “neoconservative,” but that doesn’t quite say it: He was probing the dead patches in the tissue of modernity, pointing out the moral lacunae in all forms of postindustrial materialism that would soon be filled by Islamic radicalism, the Religious Right, and the new nationalism. And his...
July 2008
2 posts
The life you solve may be your own. →
DEREG (2)
The Five O’Clock Headache was different for each and every citizen of Terminal City, unique as a snowflake. Everyone’s pain was very special, and everyone loved discussing their special pain. It was even better than relating a unique dream, and also easier, because unique dreams had ceased some months before, around about the time the Five O’Clock Headache began. Ever since Feng...
May 2008
3 posts
Declension
“This is how it starts,” Garner said. “And everyone feels it. First, they’ll sell their stocks, and put everything in bonds. Then bullion. Then bullets.”
DEREG (1)
Dereg. Dlinda pitched it as a pilot program, and the results stunned everyone, especially Kartago: The Roundhouse area, the neighborhood around Shanks Stadium, and the whole Shanksville district at the west end of Grand Metropolitan Avenue—all coming back to life, for the first time since ’68, and in the usual evolutionary stages: Artists, then young professionals, then families, then condos, and...
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
Celebration time! I’m now officially more afraid of stupidity than of death. We’ll see how long this lasts. DeReg is coming. And that funny hum on the speakers? You brought it in with you, brother. You’re all a-judder. Now what are we going to do about that?
April 2008
2 posts
Fire in The Quay: Try, try again
Decker Wills’ world is on fire. To be precise: his worlds are on fire. At least two of them, burning: this one, the ugly fuck-all one, of course; but also the other, better place, where he spends the better part of his time. Trailers burn fast. Trailers packed with two decades of cheap paperbacks burn very fast. And here are Officers Pogue and Classon, running towards him, looking to lay hands on...
Terminal City 2: Delinda, Deck, Fire in the Quay
Of Delinda’s two offices, he liked Four Blackshank best. It smelled strongly of uncured tobacco, because it had been a Summit and Godwin warehouse not ten years before. Uncured leaf is a thick and greasy smell, more of a coating than an odor. Inside and outside Four Blackshank, it made tongues tingly and, in more delicate staffers, numb. (“Smoke the Summit!” the Phipp St. wall still screamed,...
March 2008
7 posts
A story I wrote a few years ago
SPLITSVILLE, aka ATOMIC MARRIAGE! Well, the world’s ending. No drill this time. And, for the record, I don’t blame my wife. No more than I blame the weather, that is. Or myself. Funny, blame was one of the things we said we’d avoid, my wife-of-ten-days and I. Weather, too. And now look at us: We’ve got both in excess. And what weather! It’s even in the ground now, this storm, the...
The making of Superman
“Well,” said Dr. Hamilton, “we had to tell you something. Something to motivate you. And our psychologists studied the problem, and decided that if you though you were the last of something, the end of a great line—if you felt you were alone… well, a functional god needs a solid sense of abandonment…”
Terminal City, 1: Garner
ONE HOUR TO DEREG Falls Lake was an ugly lake full and uglier low, but Garner had never seen it like this, down to sucking mud, old refrigerators and Reagan-era Big Gulps visible. The lakebottom was already coming in with stubbly green marshgrass and wild onion. But the Baptists didn’t seem to mind any of it. They came in twos and fours, pant legs rolled up, Sunday skirts hitched to the knee, mud...
What I do for fun and money.
I write for magazines like Entertainment Weekly and Wired. I wrote Gutenberg! The Musical! with my good buddy, Anthony King. I like to write silly songs. Some of the silly songs I write with Anthony King end up on the internet, which is run by Charlie Todd.
