From the driver’s seat, the hood of the Galaxie goes on forever, an empty white field with a silver ornament, three little dogs running and jumping, at the far end. I turn the key and the engine turns over. The dashboard lights pop on. The radio wakes up. It’s just me and Mandy and the moon and the mumbling of the engine. And Jeannie C. Riley. Mandy tries to sing, but I sing better than she does. She asks what a PTA is, and I tell her that I think it’s a cuss word and that’s why you have to spell it.
Knee-Jerk
Weeds by Jon Trobaugh |
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You learn that there are Filipinos in Alaska, working at the canneries. (This you read in a work of fiction, whose title you can no longer remember.) You met two bright young things from Alaska when you were a visiting professor at Santa Clara Review. They were so shy, so appreciative, so in awe, you wanted to take them in your arms and surround them with your love. But Santa Clara and you were like oil and water, and when you left, the avuncular chair of the English Department quoted the students as saying your class Literature by Women Writers of Color was a “disaster.” 
Coming this fall! Knee-Jerk Offline, Volume 1
I did say somewhere that the problem with books is that they feel like books. This is mostly out of frustration because so many new books that come out are really boring. They are stacked paragraphs of endless clichés, bland landscapes, flat sentences, zero imagination, all culminating in 220 pages. I don’t know, it’s just all really lame lately. Book as book with no surprise. People like music and film and art because those mediums are so unpredictable and wild, created by some really wild and interesting characters. All the clichés of writers and their books have come to a boiling point. When did creative writing stop being creative? 
For years the Bonecutters had been the bane of Bear County: A rap sheet stretching from Lake Michigan to the county line at Hiller Road. While it was just Todd, his grandma and brother in town, other Bonecutters—aunts, uncles, cousins and some folks with no known relation at all, just a shared last name—were spread throughout the county. They built plywood additions onto their trailers in the forest. They worked infrequently plowing snow, digging ditches and washing dishes. They were arrested for poaching deer, drunk and disorderly, domestic assault and once (Larry Bonecutter, 1974) for attempted murder. Friends of Knee-Jerk
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