I wrote a story called "The Reception," and it is in the new volume of Pendulous Breasts Quarterly, a literary journal for the discriminating breast enthusiast.

If you are an elderly relative of mine reading this: take heart. It is not actually a pornographic magazine. It's just a hilarious title thought up by one John Howell Harris, formerly of the Onion and a comedy guy in New York (City). The first volume was great and I expect this new one to be the same. My copy has not arrived yet so I am not going to straight up lie and say it is awesome, but with writers from the Onion, the Daily Show, the Colbert Report, 30 Rock, and what not, Volume II is very likely to be killer. BUY IT HERE.

Back in November, 2012, I meant to write some reflections on Adam Kirsch’s essay “Rocket and Lightship” in that month’s Poetry magazine. It’s a meditation on the inevitable oblivion that all writers face and on the rapidly increasing irrelevance of literature and culture in the contemporary world. The fact it has taken me over 18 months (and that I have read the essay at least four times already) is a complimentary refutation of both premises.

Kirsch depicts the act of writing and of literature in general in grand, austere, spare, and intense language (however contradictory those words are) that you rarely hear in daily American speech outside of a freshman dorm. I mean that more as a dis to contemporary American speech than to Adam Kirsch (or to college freshman). Kirsch is but a pup, born in 1976, but statements like these make him sound like he was born in 1846 in one of Germany’s more bookish regions:

St. Bartholomew Catholic Church
Guided by faith. Called to love.

Pseudo-Volunteering Program
Frequently Asked Questions

What is Pseudo-Volunteering?

Pseudo-Volunteering is for people who love the spiritual satisfaction that comes from volunteering but hate the tedium of volunteering.

How does it work?

Each Saturday a group of pseudo-volunteers from St. Bartholomew visits the Little Sisters of the Needy Scholastic Workshop.  We tutor photogenic, disadvantaged youths from 9:00 A.M. to 12:00 P.M.  

Oh, man. That’s way too early for me. Do you do anything on weeknights?         

I am reading The Atlantic right now, an online American magazine founded in 1857.  It more preceded than anticipated the Internet, but still.

The article is “Malaysia 370, Day 10: One Fanciful Hypothesis, and Another That Begins to Make Sense,” by James Fallows.  Really, it’s a blog post, a phrase that would have befuddled Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and the two other* triple-named founders. 

If at any point during my perusal of his insights into this most mysterious flight I grow bored or impatient with Mr. Fallows, The Atlantic conveniently offers a few suggestions right here on the page.  You gotta look for them, but they’re there.

There’s James Hamblin’s “The Toxins That Threaten Our Brains” plus “Making the Big Bang Seem Human,” by Megan Garber.  There’s a “JUST IN” crawl that reads “Man Who Thought He Signed Up for Obamacare Now Owes $407,000 in Medical…” I assume the last word is “Bills,” and that it will get no play in the conservative press. There’s a banner below The Atlantic logo up at the top offering a few categories:  “Politics,” “Business,” “Tech,” “Entertainment,” “Health,” “Education,” “Sexes” (YES), “National,” “Global,” “Video,” and “Magazine.”  Each offers six headlines, from “Why Isn't the Fourth Amendment Classified as Top Secret?” to “How to Make a Simple Cup of Coffee: It's subtler business than you might think.” The “Video” offered right now in a box beside Fallows’s title is “Computer Syndrome on You: Save Your Eyes. Take Breaks.” They evidently have a store because the top left corner says “SHOP The Atlantic.”

This is a Belgian Dubbel in my five-gallon carboy.  I had it in a six-gallon for the primary then moved over here to… I don’t know, let it clarify or something.  The recipes tell you to do shit, so I do it.  Being only three recipes and less than two months in to the hobby, I don’t have a firm grasp on the reasons to use a secondary fermenter (and evidently the homebrewing message board scene doesn’t either).  The science is, likewise, beyond me.  The Oxford Companion to Beer (which is fantastic) notes as an afterthought in the entry for secondary fermentation that, “Amateur brewers often use the term… to refer to the aging period after the primary fermentation.”  The real thing has to do with the reabsorbtion of diacetyl by yeast and/or the addition of actively fermenting wort once primary fermentation ceases. Duh. So I guess I am aging it and that homebrewers are idiots.

Whatever I’m doing, there is a good chance I am the fourth Floyd.  My very first brew, an American wheat, was boss, and I am stone cold optimistic on the pale ale I get to crack open the second day of Lent (unless I stupidly give up beer).  And this dubbel?  Oh boy.  When I racked—[brewer slang, means “moved”]—this to the secondary it smelled so good I almost cried. 

Teller, of “Penn and…”, has an excellent essay in this week’s New York Times Book Review assessing “Undiluted Hocus-Pocus,” an autobiography by Martin Gardner.  I’d never heard of Gardner, and now I feel like I missed out.  Perhaps I’ve stumbled across this “beloved Scientific American columnist, journalist and author or editor of more than 100 books of philosophy, humor, mathematics, poetry, puzzles, fiction, science, anthologies and annotations (e.g., “The Annotated Alice”), and essays on topics from logic to literary criticism,” but I don’t think so.  He died in 2010.  I missed my chance to be excited for his next article, puzzle, or annotation.  But, it looks like there’s plenty catching up to do.

I highly recommend the article—which at over 1575 words is 1575 more words than most of us have ever heard Teller say.  Not only does it make you want to read the book—as any favorable review should—it presents an inspiring portrait of a life well lived.  Gardner seems like a man filled with both curiosity and joy for life.  This article itself makes me more curious and brought a little bit of joy.

What drives me to my keyboard, though, is not to tell you to read it, though you should, but to assess this strange sentence in the second to last paragraph of an otherwise glowing review: 

In which no dire analogy is quite apt enough.  Click me or the picture and get magically transported to the article!

On Friday night my wife and I stopped for a drink at a specialty cocktail bar in Lincoln Park. She got a La Louisiane, which is like a Sazerac with vermouth, and I got a Brooklyn, which is like a Manhattan before Giuliani and Bloomberg ruined it.  Between the two of us we had less than 7 ounces of booze.  Total cost: $24.  Before tip.

While we sipped our drinks and took in the scene, Donn’ique (not her name) pointed out all the good looking people around us.  An idle “Where do all these people come from?” turned into a long discussion on the Nature of the Sublime.

Donn’ique wondered: does wealth beget beauty, or does beauty beget wealth?  And if beauty is a means to acquiring wealth and attracting other beautiful people, will Darwinian forces kick in?  Will the beautiful pair off and create more beautiful people, both in number and degree of beauty?  If they lose wealth, will they-- and their--offspring lose their beauty?  Or will the beauty ensure that a certain social standard is always met?

She’s very smart, especially with a glass of rye in her hand.

I posited, “Za combinashun o’ bofe.”  And then I passed out.

I can tell you with reasonable precision the moment I learned that I was not like other boys.  

It was November 30, 1985 in the late afternoon.  I recall that it was a cold day, and the almanac gets my memory’s back here.  My birthday earlier in the month was the second-latest of all us sixth graders. (Ryan Lockwood’s was, of course, just before Thanksgiving).  I sat with the Swell Guys and Ryan—and probably Bill Butler and Tom Clemons, and maybe a few others—in the center of a theater at the Chicago Ridge Mall watching two muscular, hairless men—one black, the other white—pummel each other on a giant screen.  It could have been Friday, the 29th, but… I guess it doesn’t matter. 

For this brief period, before the December and January birthdays began, we were all 11 years old.  All the same age.  All on the cusp of our teenage years.  Yet one of us was quite different.