MillSweeneys
Pulitzer Prize-winner and my former writing professor Stephen Millhauser has a story in the most current issue of McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern. McSweeney’s is edited by the polarizing Dave Eggers and sold in highbrow periodical sections of the most rarefied booksellers. Actually, the only place I’ve ever seen a copy of McSweeney’s was in Cambridge’s cluttered comic book store, Million-Year Picnic, which, despite its maze-like selection of odd, independent comics, hardly qualifies as “rarefied.” The only thing hard to come by in MYP is room to swing a cat, or, indeed, turn around in a narrow personal revolution without knocking some DC Direct action figure from his personal nail.
Hipper people than I read McSweeney’s, and so I am pleased that this may introduce them to his work. Previously, the best chance a random acquaintance of mine would have had of encountering Millhauser would have been in the fiction section in The New Yorker, and I know I never read the fiction section in The New Yorker. Reviews, yes; cartoons, obviously; but anything that’s longer than two pages? Highly unlikely. Still, if any of you have random issues of The New Yorker kicking about, see if you still have the issues from April 19, 2004 or November 22, 2000. That’s my guy.
Should the above publications be unavailable and should you be too bleedin’ lazy to go to a library, I picked up three spare copies of Enchanted Night from the remaindered fiction pile specifically so that I could give them out to people. Interested? Drop me a line.
February Thaw
Apologies for the lengthy delay in updates. My previous resolution to make sure I had at least one new entry every week has been partially scuppered by the destruction of the BenCam. The BenCam is a cheesy Logitech webcam that I was sent in the mail — Free! — years ago for ordering DSL or something. The corporation that sent it to me didn’t care that I had a Mac; they sent a Free! webcam to every new subscriber, and if it wasn’t compatible it wasn’t their fault. Things probably only cost 47¢ to manufacture anyway. And while it was not wholly compatible, I was able to find a couple of freeware workarounds that at least enabled me to use the thing for its intended purpose: low-res, low-quality pictures to be uploaded to a website.
Then I upgraded to Mac OS X, and I had to find a new workaround, which required me to use a cam module that recorded Quicktime films, and then save a frame from the movie. And then when I finally upgraded to Panther last month, even that functionality was lost. If I want a webcam now, I probably have to drop $144 on the iSight, something that’s not going to happen in this lifetime. So, no more pictures unless I have film developed and then scan the prints. Which is hardly going to keep my ongoing plan for web-portraiture current.
N.B.: The real snarl about the upgrade to Panther is that my OS no longer supports my ATI XClaim (Pro) dual-monitor card, which was probably my favourite thing about my set up. A 15″ monitor may be lame by today’s standards, but two of them combined into one desktop is a whole lot of real estate, and I’m still adjusting to the sudden halving of my virtual property.
And while I haven’t had the ability to sling any photos up on the web, my usual ‘blog-thoughts have been directed towards homework, as I am required to write semi-weekly internet entries for my current class on YA literature and development. Said entries can be found over on what I’m calling m3lbatoast west. (My teacher needs to be able to make comments, and I can’t seem to enable comments successfully on this monster.) So if you’re looking for Ben Content for the next twelve weeks, you’re much more likely to find it there, even if it will primarily be book reviews.
So, for alternate entertainment, I offer you the following: firstly, the probably obvious photo of my brother and his pudgy genetic receptacle. Judging from all the reactions to her from her most recent visit to New Hampshire, cooing is apparently mandatory behaviour. So… coo.
Secondly, I point you towards Aileen “Ozymandias” Chute‘s most recent ‘blog entry about attempting to push-start her drained vehicle. I found it highly amusing. I have probably twenty letters and maybe three times as many e-mail messages from her, all written in a slightly more frenetic version of this storytelling style. I hope she gets famous so that I can publish our correspondence and she can lob lawsuits at me. I feel certain that her grounds for Cease and Desist would be based largely upon the legal precedents of “Shut up!”, “Because I say so!”, and “Oh, yeah?!? Huh? Huh?” Which, actually, succinctly describes about a quarter of our correspondence.
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