Dave K.'s Blog, page 3

masks that disguise their voices

Just finished my buddy Pat King's book Exit Nothing recently, and it was one of the best books I've read in quite a while. Pat used to host a reading series here in Baltimore, first alongside Nik Korpon and then alongside A. Jarrell Hayes, and he's as friendly and affable a guy as you're likely to meet. Despite being from Alabama, he's got that scruffy, underdressed Baltimore charm in spades.

That said, Exit Nothing took me by surprise. As well as I know Pat, I'm not all that familiar with his...

terrible for the average person

Jesus hell, where have I been? Well, let's see...

I've been helping the Baltimore Rock Opera Society move into/refurbish their new HQ in midtown Baltimore. Lots of knocking things down and building new things and tools and sweat and dust.

I was a guest on An Innocent Looking Bookstore , a podcast hosted by friends of mine, and had a marvelous time discussing good slang, bad porn, and encountering Whoopi Goldberg in the desert. (Warning, this thing is NSFW)

I'm also currently in a play,...

the day tanks from here

It's hard to explain Heinrich Boll's The Clown to someone and expect them to like it. For one thing, it's about a clown, and a lot of people claim to be afraid of clowns. A few actually are, but I think coulrophobia is a quirky affectation for a lot of people. Whatever, screw them. They aren't important.

The Clown's plot is also daunting, because it's essentially about this clown (Hans Schnier) who's moping over a bad review of his latest performance, and who just got dumped by his very Cathol...

a more feudalistic re-imagining

Modern literature is full of white Americans trying to find themselves, but holy crap does this essay by Laura Goode win the blue ribbon for what I can only describe as military-grade solipsism. Did The Rumpus switch places with Thought Catalog or something? Jesus Christ on toast.

No offense to Laura, who is probably a nice person with some good writing out there somewhere, but statements like "what I mean to say is I am writing an elegy for my twenties" only communicate the idea that no one s...

wholesome romances with an inspirational worldview

THE NEXT BIG THING:

What is the Next Big Thing? A series of questions for writers. The rules? You post answers to the questions below on a Wednesday. I was tagged for this by Lavinia Ludlow , one of my favorite writers and people. And so it begins...

Question: What is the [working] title of your book/work in progress?
Answer: I'm working on three books presently, but I'll use this time to talk about my western, titled MY NAME IS HATE.

Q: What is a one-sentence synopsis of your book?
A: A pregnant w...

not exactly the paragon of calm

Whoa dang, it's been an entire month since I last updated here. That's the busy holiday season, I s'pose. Here are some highlights.

- Read at Expresso Ink's broadside release party (where I was the headliner) and had a nice chat with Michael Kimball about his competitive streak.

- Got on the Twitter.

- Read at an event in North Carolina that was organized by a fan, which was cool despite the small turnout. Honestly, I was flattered that anyone would be sufficiently moved by my book to put togeth...

sometimes they don't stop for anything

Kurt Vonnegut was kind of a dick , as it turns out. A new biography by Charles Shields paints a picture of Vonnegut as a bitter, depressed man with a vicious temper born from survivor's guilt and family trauma, and it's really rattling the agreed-upon perception of Vonnegut as Literature's Frumpy Grandpa.

Or not. I mean, most of the authors we love, or have heard of, are famous for being complicated and dark. Roald Dahl, for example. Flannery O'Connor, although that's not much of a surprise to...

do away with being liked

Welp, NaNoWriMo is over and I reached my 35k word limit, so I'm feeling proud of myself. Kinda wish I'd made it to the official 50k mark, but whatever. I didn't have that many words, which is okay. Again, if Ken Sparling can get away with topping his novels out around 35k words, so can I.

Also, it looks like I'm being published in both Seltzer and Expresso Ink in the coming months, which is pretty awesome. I'll supply links when those things are made official, of course.

I'm also thinking about...

a small group of guys with limited resources

Since I'm working on a short novel right now (well, two short novels), I was pleased to see someone rise to their defense. Specifically, a Bookslut review of César Aira's The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira isn't really about that specific book as much as short books in general.

The reviewer sees long books, which he doesn't pin down to a concrete measurement but let's just say they're anything above 500 pages, as either overpopulated, overwritten perversions of Dostoevsky or "endless, sentimental,...

not always pure blacks and whites

Finished Justin Sirois' and Haneen Alshujairy's Falcons on the Floor a couple of days ago, and I must say, I have to applaud them for writing a war novel that, much like Chimamanda Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun, isn't a polemic or a Dad-was-right confirmation of the status quo. To quote the Rumpus' review, Falcons has a "single-minded focus on the damage done to civil life by war, the negation of the social."

Actually, you should go ahead and read what the Rumpus had to say about this bo...