LAFAYETTE, LA-

Today, the events of a Certain Novel were dramatized on the streets of Dublin celebrating the day on which they purportedly took place in 1904, and a certain Frederik Colting (née J. D. California) formally defended his novel, 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye, against a certain Mr. Salinger’s lawsuit. According to Poets and Writers, Colting states 60 Years Later is a “complex and undeniably transformative exposition about one of our nation’s most famous authors, J. D. Salinger, and his best known creation, Holden Caulfield.” Salinger states the novel is a “rip-off, pure and simple.” (more…)

LAFAYETTE, LA -

I turned thirty-one last Sunday. Last Sunday was Easter. And I am nothing if not a cheap date. Plus we don’t do Easter dinner. So last Sunday, on the eve of my big bus  trip, and the anniversaries of Christ’s resurrection and my being dragged mournful and resistant onto Planet Earth, I made my husband take me to the recently reopened Pancho’s in Metairie.*

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LAFAYETTE, LA -

It is very hard to take pictures through the window of a careening rectangle. Especially with a not-quite-but-almost-expired five-year-old digital camera. But I tried.

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LAFAYETTE, LA -

This afternoon, aside from running my dog, all I did was sleep. 

After a temporary hiatus from caffeine for health reasons,[1] I had bought a twelve pack of diet coke the week before. I’ll just have one a day, I told myself, all smiles and rainbows in the artificial light of the grocery store. Everything will be fine. But everything was not fine. The first day I had one can.  The second day I had two. By the third, I was hitting the soda machine at the college where I teach like a crack fiend.[2] (more…)

LAFAYETTE, LA -

Neurosyphilis. Recently, in an attempt to keep my brain occupied (read: prevent utter mental paralysis) while my agent shops my novel, I decided to begin researching my next project. So now, instead of lying awake in bed at night, staring at the ceiling, pondering the terrible economy and my dumb luck to finish writing my book this of all Novembers, I am lying awake in bed at night, staring at the ceiling, pondering my awesome luck at being born in twenty-first-century America where no one ever gets neurosyphilis. [1] (more…)