i The Camus quote is also one of the epigraphs to Zona, the other being “I watched the film until the film itself became a kind of blindness,” from G.C. Waldrep’s “D.W. Griffith at Gettysburg.” No Dyer book is complete without a healthy helping of epigraphs that establish a base coat of serious meaningfulness under anything that follows. Out of Sheer Rage begins with “Endless explanations of irrelevancies, and none whatever of things indispensible to the subject,” a quote by Gustave Flaubert on Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, and “It must all be considered as though spoken by a character in a novel,” from Roland Barthes, two more quotes which illuminate Dyer’s approach as well as anything. The Dyer quote is my own selection. What I find curious is that, given the Camus epigraph, why don’t more people talk of Dyer’s own work lightly?

ii Dyer’s fictional and nonfictional personas are often supposed to be doing something they’re not: Out of Sheer Rage starts with a lengthy bit of indecisive waffling and the first half of Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi features a protagonist who is supposed to be interviewing an artist at the Biennale but instead spends his time seeking out the best parties. They’re first or second cousins of the dandy-dabbler who just can’t be bothered to get off the couch, a comic tradition in French (see all Philippe-Touissant), Russian (Goncharov’s Oblomov), and other literatures, protagonists in fiction where, as Mark O’Connell put it in “On Not Going Out of the House“, “nothing ever happens and no one ever goes anywhere.” Although much of Dyer’s work falls under the umbrella of travel writing, somehow O’Connell’s phrase still applies.

iii You have to wonder if this excitement for research showing fiction’s empathetic effects is related to creative writing programs’ need to justify their existence to administrators. My own first encounter with Dyer’s work came while I was on the lam from graduate school. My school had an exchange program set up with NUI Galway as part of its Irish Studies curriculum. The MFAs at the school have made an art out of carving out time to write and do work while appearing to do neither. Fortunately for us, MAs and PhDs are driven people with demanding course schedules and they just don’t usually have the time to get away for a semester. We did. I was in Galway with three other students, two poets and one actual Irish Studies PhD, the last group to get to go, as the program was cancelled the next year (they’re always trying to catch us in our wily MFA ways). I lived with two Irish third levels and spent my days reading and writing whatever I wanted, wherever I wanted, and most of my weeknights drunk. On weekends my flatmates returned to nearby Ennis to work or be with family and I sat around and moped, or went to use the wi-fi in the hostel and waited to befriend some backpackers in need of a guide to the bars. While there I read Geoff Dyer’s Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi as part of an independent study on the writers and poets coming to that year’s Cúirt International Festival of Literature. Thus my first experience with Dyer was drenched in the luxury of free time, and carried about it a feeling that I was getting away with something. It helped that the degree I was pursuing was in fiction and thus the majority of my time back in Illinois was spent writing and critiquing short stories out of one part love for the form and one part obligation to our workshop format. If I were to turn in something like Dyer’s work to my workshop, they would spend two thirds of my workshop time discussing the question of fiction vs nonfiction, as anything not properly sectioned off by genre left us stranded in the abstract, far removed from what was on the page. Thus Dyer’s nonfictional style in Jeff felt taboo, forbidden.

iv It would be interesting to count the number of quotes and references in Zonaand consider the number in comparison to Dyer’s other books. While this review was blooming outward and out of my control, I began to do just that, creating a comprehensive series of links, clips, and photos to serve as an online complement. I would provide the links that the text seemed to demand, so the reader could better follow along. This was tedious work, however, and probably unnecessary and possibly even hurtful to the text, as part of its power lies in its liquidity. Still, it seems Dyer has taken his referencing and quoting to a whole other level in Zona. My list had reached forty six references to other films, books, and photographs in maybe fifty to seventy five pages before I quit. The maze of references and quotes is so thick it makes it hard to do anything but declare Dyer brilliant.

v What would DFW have had to say in response, had he been alive to read this smack-down? (Provided Dyer would have been uncouth enough to say it if Wallace was still alive, which seems unlikely.) Would Wallace have acknowledged that his own style had become shtick and he doubted himself too? Or would he have called Dyer an asshole but read him anyway, like he did in his review of Updike’s Toward the End of Time?

vi Sort of a cheap shot against modern life and an entire genre of movies. Oh-boo-hoo-hoo, life is so very hard with the instant messages I get via the magical machine in my pocket and oh boo-hoo-hoo, oh why do they make so very many romantic comedies. Unless we’re talking about Cambodia, the worst thing in life I have to deal with is deciding which sandwich to eat next.

vii If I heard someone say “great cinema must be projected” at a pub I’d be overcome with the urge to smack him silly like I would a scotch connoisseur ruminating over hints of cedar and gunsmoke. On the page it doesn’t seem as obnoxious. This might be some bias inherent in books: it’s ok to sound hyper-intelligent in print, but it’s punchable in person. Or maybe that bias is only my own. As for me, I watched Stalker on my television, probably right after The Daily Show and just before some Pornhub, though I can’t remember. My TV turns itself on every night at midnight. I know this must be the result of some alarm setting that I can’t correct without the long-lost remote, but it feels malignant at times. Come to me, Shawn, come back to the Zone. If my life were a Japanese horror flick, Dyer’s face would come on screen and pass judgment on me: Really, Shawn, those sandals again? You’re reading Sade? And now Vonnegut? What are you, a naughty preteen? You find Wes Anderson movies enjoyable? You must also like marshmallow fluff. You know, if you ate less Dairy Queen you could rid yourself of that semi-truck tire around your midriff.

viii Not for Dyer those erudite studies of pop culture. It’s cultural touchstones only. “Places of uncompromised and unblemished value,” as he describes the Zone. For someone regarded as being on the cutting edge of nonfiction prose possibilities, he plays it surprisingly safe with his choice of subjects.

ix I catalog Dyer’s dismissals and praises a bit mockingly, obviously, but I’m a little envious of his chutzpah. “Man was put on this earth to judge,” Stalker says. I’d like to judge. There just doesn’t seem to be a forum or a manner in which I can do so without feeling like an asshole. What’s the point of posting something to Twitter or Facebook and saying you hate it? So you look like someone with taste? So someone who also hates it will like your post or retweet your tweet? To get embroiled in a flame war in the comments section? To discourage people from liking something? People aren’t going to stop liking it just because you said it sucked. All you’re doing is giving it more attention and reaffirming their liking of it. The last time I posted about really hating something, it was to complain about Gotye being on SNL to play the internet-hit and baa-baa-black-sheep-remake “Somebody That I Used to Know.” Noone really commented except to say they also hated it, but then one night my girlfriend brought it up while we were having dinner. She liked the Gotye song. She was annoyed that I’d put it down online. I wouldn’t have been so quick to apologize had I felt I could trust my judgment, but I didn’t. It was more likely that I disliked the song just because it was popular. Dyer doesn’t seem like he would have any problem with this. He seems pretty gleeful in his put-downs and confident of his praises. Though even Dyer’s praise sounds a bit condescending at times, as if he’s stooping to lift up something far below him, such as when he claimed (in the interview I did with him and Elif Batuman at Cúirt) that all the most interesting things in contemporary fiction are coming from America, and how it’s all so tripping mad. It makes sense, then, that he would like and write an introduction to Baudrillard’s America, which is itself chock-full of that French tradition of condescending praise about the idiotic mass culture of America being the world’s sublime future.

x At our interview, Dyer was much more of a dick. This isn’t to say I didn’t like him, and it’s dangerous to allow your sense of a person to begin drifting into their work anyway. I’d set the interview up with Batuman via a friend, and she managed to get Dyer to agree to sit in. We went back to the hotel where all the festival guests were staying and sat down at the back of the bar. Dyer said we had fifteen minutes and I got twenty onto my voice recorder before he realized how long we’d gone and asked for one more question. He either limited this because he knew anything more than that wasn’t going to be interesting, or because he didn’t like me, or because he wanted a nap, or because he has, as he describes in Zona, an aversion to personal reverence. He writes that “One of the things I thought I would love as a writer, one of the perks of the job, would be having people come up to me to say how much they loved my books. And I do like it. For about ten seconds. After that I am desperate for the conversation to move on to any other topic.” I understand that he’s writing of a general conglomerate person/idea here, but I still felt slightly implicated. He just wanted to get rid of me. Any time I’d ask a question, he’d manage to turn it into a general point. When I asked about his two part structure for Jeff and its possible relation to Augustine’s Confessions, he commented that he liked “the point, but it seems to me there’s almost an invariable rule at work here. Whenever somebody says to you ‘A-ha! Behind your book was this book,’ it’s always the case that you’ve not read it, even though that seems a peculiarly close fit.” When I asked him if he’d written any short stories, he said “I have written stories, it’s just that people haven’t tended to realize they were stories.” When I asked him if he’d taken any creative courses, he said “Oh, no, I studied literature. That’s the, you know, ‘How did you become a writer?’ question. The answer is by being a reader.” I hadn’t asked how he became a writer, just if he took any courses in creative writing, but inherent in most of his answers to my questions was a fuck you, you dimwit. At the same time, I had trouble making time for Batuman to talk as Dyer went on and on, and at several points Batuman had to step in and ask a follow-up to try to get Dyer to be less flippant. When they walked away from the table, he put his arm on her upper back in a brotherly way, as if to lead her away from the barbaric young American.

xi Another example of his insider humor comes when he discusses “T.S. Eliot’s overquoted lines about the end of all exploring, how we end where we begin but know the place for the first time.” If you’re familiar with these lines from “Little Gidding” (“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”) then you’ll get it. If not, you won’t. It reminds me of Robert Frost’s ambiguously composed “The Road Not Taken” that is often quoted as inspiration, when in fact it’s more of a commentary on people’s retrospectively-rationalizing and self-mythologizing memory. For instance, I could say that by choosing to leave New York and pursue an MFA, and then deciding not to pursue teaching composition and instead moving abroad to teach TESOL and travel, I am “taking the road less traveled,” but in fact I would only be saying it’s that way to make myself feel like an adventurer. In fact, nothing I’ve done so far hasn’t been done before. My life is a compilation of stereotypes: English major goes to New York to work in publishing; twenty-something leaves his work to do a grad degree; American teaches English in Korea. All these scenarios have been run before.

xii Dyer likes this “I don’t read” or “I don’t finish things that I read if I don’t feel like it” joke quite a bit, having deployed it in at least seven different contexts. He’s also redefined “reading” to apply to anything, so even when he’s not holding a book he’s still enriching himself culturally. You can analyze or “close read” a picture, movie, or song. Or, as the postgraph to Zona from David Markson’s This Is Not a Novel goes: “Or was it possibly nothing more than a fundamentally recognizable genre all the while, no matter what Writer averred? Nothing more than a read?” (This is just getting greedy: not enough to have two epigraphs; now we get one after the text too.) I can understand the desire to redefine reading. I usually feel like I should be reading but also that my friends’ and my motivations for doing so seem questionable. I can’t tell if we’re picking something up because it’s good and we want to, or because it’s gotten a lot of hype and we’ve defined ourselves publicly as writers and readers and so we must read the latest and most endorsed.

xiii My own experience of reading Zona was much more convoluted and Dyer-ish. He mentioned it during our interview, but once it ran and I was finished feeling special for having gotten to sit down with the two of them, I forgot about it. I didn’t think about it again until I picked up an issue of The Paris Review featuring an interview with Nicholson Baker, an essay by Lydia Davis, and an excerpt from Zona, a trifecta that put into effect the three strikes rule and made me buy the issue. I read that excerpt religiously while making notes for techniques to steal borrow make use of in my own essay about the spoken word album Listening to Richard Brautigan. Later when Brian Hurley here at Fiction Advocate wrote asking if there were any books I wanted to review, I asked for an advanced copy of Zona, eager to read more. Hurley requested a galley on January 10^th and the book was in my hands by January 13^th with all the due promptness of a book in mid publicity-push. Pantheon’s galley, consisting of a plastic sheet covering a still from the movie of Stalker’s daughter reading a book, held together by black plastic binding and lacking any external publication info or blurbs, struck me as looking like someone’s fifth grade science report. This did not help my sense that I’d just signed up for work. Nonetheless, I sat down to read.

The first bit was the portion I’d read in the Paris Review excerpt, a description of Stalker’s opening shot: “An empty bar, possibly not even open, with a single table, no bigger than a small round table, but higher, the sort you lean against—there are no stools—while you stand and drink.” At the words “bar” and “single” and “drink” I found myself parched. This was before I met the aforementioned girlfriend. I wanted a beer so I got a beer. I returned that night to make a drunken attempt at reading more only to promptly fall asleep somewhere around the third sentence: “We are, in other words, already in a realm of universal truth.” (Another good reason to read Dyer: to fall asleep. Who doesn’t love falling asleep with a book on your chest with the light and your glasses still on? I’ve been doing it since I was little.) The book then entered a pattern of rotation between falling off the edge of the bed at night and getting kicked under it in the morning until I moved it to a stack of other books I was supposed to review, where it occasionally surfaced on top of the stack to be browsed through before being put back on the bottom.

With no particular deadline and no financial reward forthcoming, I returned to work on my thesis, teaching, and various other projects, such as drinking, cavorting merrily, and wooing a new girlfriend. From time to time I attempted to read another Dyer book in preparation for when I would read Zona and write my review, feeling that I needed to read more of him before weighing in. I put Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage in my water closet with the best of intentions of reading it while raging on the toilet, but instead repeatedly opted for something faster like W.W. Norton’s Sudden Latino Fiction or lighter like McSweeney’s Mammoth Book of Lists.

Eventually I took Zona with me to Chicago for AWP 2012 only to instead opt for reading portions of Otherwise Known as the Human Condition on my Kindle while skipping panels to read and nap in my hotel room, savoring with particular irony the act of lying down to read Dyer’s essay on staying in hotels, “Sex and Hotels”, while my roommates for the weekend were all out responsibly schmoozing. “Hotels are synonymous with sex,” I read, and chuckled, because instead of going out for drinks and attempting to find some hot young literata   to bed, I was napping and going to bed by eleven. I left AWP dedicated to finishing a draft of the review and reread the first half of Zona on the train ride back, feeling that I had to start at the beginning to get it cued up in my mind. I fell asleep almost exactly at the point where I’d previously left off.

Upon return to Carbondale I had a thesis to edit, grades to turn in, graduation to experience, and friends to say goodbye to. There were a lot of other things to do. Now it’s summer and no one is in town and I broke up with my girlfriend for no particular reason except I’m leaving the country soon and my best friend has moved away and so there is nothing better to do but read the second half of this book, a book which Dyer says he wrote because he had nothing better to do.

In short, what happened was I received the galley on January 13^th, 2012 but never got around to exerting the willpower necessary to finish the book until just last night, May 26th. I am now drafting up my review on May 27th, and assume I won’t finish it and it won’t go up until June, making this review five months in the coming, and maybe four months after the pub date. (Update: it’s now the beginning of September and I’m only just now putting the last editorial touches on this beast, making me more like nine months late.) In the meantime, it has been reviewed positively nearly everywhere (see the listing on the Amazon page, including James Wood’s rhapsodic passage on the unique nature of each Dyer book) and has exited the publicity mill on the other end, waiting for a paperback reprint which, according to this other Amazon page, is forthcoming from Vintage in 2035. I am therefore unfashionably late for the release party and unfashionably early for the paperback. I comfort myself with the smug knowledge that any prompt review of a Dyer book is not in the proper spirit of Dyer.

xiv I’m fairly certain—let’s say 80%, for giggles—that all these thoughts are ones I had while reading and thinking about Zonaon my own. But I’m disturbed by how close they are to thoughts expressed by Dyer. For instance, in “My Life as a Gate Crasher,” he discusses his career as a generalist and expresses many of these same sentiments. In his intro to Otherwise he discusses his desire to showcase his variability in one volume. You could crack your knuckles and splay your fingers all day while trying to think of a way to describe Dyer’s writing better than he already has. It might be that the best one can do is rephrase things Dyer has already said and try to convince yourself they’re your own thoughts. Although, even then, it’s not like those thoughts haven’t been had before. In the introduction to his anthology The Art of the Personal Essay, Phillip Lopate lines out recurrent elements he’s noticed in the form, including the conversational element, honesty and confession versus privacy, contrariety, egotism, cheek, and the idler figure. Most of the things I’ve pointed out about Dyer aren’t exclusive to him. They’re inherent in the genre. Essentially Zona is a personal essay masquerading as film summary and analysis.

xv “I confess I do not believe in time”, Nabokov wrote in Speak, Memory, a quote which I confess I found while Googling “Nabokov on Procrastination” because I’d read that Nabokov was a great procrastinator. It is a quote which in fact has nothing to do with procrastination and is instead about the handling of time in writing. “I like to fold my magic carpet,” Nabokov continues, “after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip.” I started this endnote with the hope of defending my procrastination and instead found myself with a way of describing the means by which Dyer handles time: pausing the movie—sorry, film—when he wants to quote other writers or espouse ideas of his own or go on an autobiographical aside. He has time under control. He folds it and kneads it as necessary. I don’t like time as it’s forced on us: clocking in at work, making appointments, looking at your phone, having to find and start a new job now that I’m done with my MFA, having to exit the life of the writer and reenter the life of the worker. I read Dyer’s accounts with a longing for his freedom. I wish I had time under my control, but I think it’s got me.

xvi Advice is autobiographical. Criticism is autobiographical. When you start down this lane, it’s hard to imagine what isn’t autobiographical, how hard it must be to get outside your head. Maybe this is OK. Maybe it’s beautiful that we’re all stuck in our own heads and can only share with each other our subjective impressions. After all, the only reason this review is getting so insanely long is because I’ve just finished my MFA and am wondering why I decided to do it and why I’ve decided to go teach abroad next.  These sorts of transition times always make me ask myself again why I want to write. So many MFA graduates stop doing so soon after graduating. What’s going to keep me going? Have I killed my love of writing by earning an MFA? It doesn’t seem like I have, thankfully, but still I find myself in a lyric mood, feeling a bit lost, losing hours on Google Street view looking at old addresses and on Facebook perusing ex’s profiles. Soundtrack courtesy Explosions in the Sky.

xvii You could extrapolate some good life advice from this. I haven’t. When I returned to Carbondale, Illinois, from Galway, I was even more unhappy than when I moved there from New York originally. I had been on a responsibility-free cloud, able to read and write as I wanted, living in an absolutely gorgeous city on the west coast of Europe. I was a fifteen-minute walk from a stroll on the beach and a quick bus ride from the Cliffs of Moher. Now I was back in Carbondale. There’s beauty here, but you have to know where to find it, and you have to be very open-minded. I took my letdown out on my classmates, dismissing stories and comments offhand in workshop. It was immature to do, but I was pissed to be back at the very program that was nice enough to send me there,  back in a setting which I now thought was barely related to the actual work of writing. We spent our time teaching, grading essays, critiquing stories in an unnatural fashion, and talking about our rejections, and none of it really mattered. What mattered was reading and writing (and living, in a distant third). Of course, there were times when I was miserable in Ireland, like when I first got there and the sun was only up for seven hours a day and I slept through five of them and I missed my friends. And there were times when I hated New York for the opposite reason that I had so many friends I didn’t have time to slow down and be with myself. I too often hate wherever I am and love wherever I’m not. Rather than just letting the setting set, “being in the moment,” I hate it. And here I am, picking apart the act of writing a simple review and a decision to move to Korea I’ve already made and the “life of the writer,” which I have no right to do, considering I’ve only published a handful of stories and articles. I’m overthinking the thing before I’ve done the thing. If there are three sides to a subject: the subject itself, the analysis of the subject after the fact, and thinking about the subject before experiencing the subject, I am stuck squarely in the last.

xviii This often happens when I review something, so much so that I have to consciously fight against it. While discussing Deering’s Samuel Ferguson, Poet and Antiquarian in his lectures To Ireland, I, Paul Muldoon describes Deering as “the classic example of a thesis writer who tires of his subject almost as soon as he engages with it.” I’m that kind of guy. Anything I read for review immediately threatens to become stale, an enemy of that which I’d rather be spending time on. I find reams of things to hate in the margins, even though I’ve loved the author’s work in the past. The worst moment usually comes when I feel I’ve figured out the author’s style and every page after that begins to look like self-parody. Lately I’ve had to keep in mind Updike’s 6 rules for reviewing just to keep myself positive or at least analytical, and really try to stop faulting an author for exhibiting their style/voice. By the time I’ve written and published the review, it’s become positive or at least objective, partially by my own effort and partially by the external force of a word count that prevents me from giving time to faults. The easy answer would be to stop reviewing, but I like doing so, perversely, and it usually helps me work out an issue in my own writing. It also doesn’t require a degree in psychology to see that my annoyance with others comes in part from an annoyance with my own already noticeable tics, so finding something to praise in someone else’s work is in part finding something to praise in my own. I fear becoming like the main character in Tobias Wolff’s “Bullet in the Brain”: completely dead to the world via nasty reviewing.

xix In most cases, though, Dyer preempts   your arguments. By already having the same doubts you do as a reader, he heads you off at the critical pass, so the book forms a closed system which can’t be critiqued. Instead everyone surrenders their praise. In “When Bad is Good,” Richard B. Woodward describes a certain kind of contemporary art as being “made in a riotous spirit of bad taste,” which “not only undermines academic notions of correctness and stability, but also renders itself virtually impervious to criticism, arming itself against attack from realists, modernists, Minimalists, and Post-Minimalists alike by gleefully confessing to its own intentionally questionable quality.” For instance, later in the book Dyer admits that he’s guilty of the very thing he’s accusing the director Andrei Zvyaginstev of in his films: “being so absorbed by Stalker that I can see nothing but Tarkovsky, so steeped in his view of the world that I mistake it for the world itself.” By doing this he makes anyone critiquing him run a high risk of sounding like a dullard. All Dyer is doing is analyzing a film and tracking his chaotic set of associations with it, and it’s difficult to fault a guy for the foibles of his mind. You could say that he’s guilty for exhibiting them to others, like you could say someone describing the dream they had last night to you is a dick, but then you’re just scolding them for doing what they set out to do.

xx Still a dangerous defense. Sure, this might be an admirable quality in a writer or a magician, but this sounds suspiciously like a politician throwing up a smoke screen of spurious facts and soundbites. You’re encouraging people to just sit back and take it.

xxi Or not. This could just be a bullshit idea and bullshit advice. Blake Butler makes a good case for all advice being bad advice anyway, over at his column for Vice. Still, I want it. I want guidance. It’s like asthma when you’re young: one hopes it goes away as one ages. It does seem to have gotten weaker lately. But maybe it sticks around. Who knows? I do know that what I’m attempting to do, to pass through Dyer’s style to arrive at my own, is beginning to seem like a bad idea. How can I push myself to something even more profound and blended? Dyer’s style simply is what it is. Maybe I should just strip myself of this attempt at hyper-active intelligence and go straight for the matter itself, cycle back to a plainer style. Or maybe, or most likely, I should just stop thinking about this and go to Korea and write because I like to do so and not worry about it. Actually, definitely that.

xxii I sincerely wish there was some way to do that here in the States. You could live on unemployment for awhile, I guess, but I have a bad tendency to quit jobs voluntarily rather than be fired. You could live on a trust fund, but I’m thankfully free of that. Apply for fellowships? Move in with my parents? The first is a long shot for a smutty and jokey writer like me, and the second would be too humiliating. Start an organic farm and live off the land? Write erotica and sell it as ebooks? Move to a cabin in the woods and learn to hunt and eat wild berries? But I have credit cards and student loans to pay off, accrued from a decade of living above my means. I could cash out my tiny IRA and hide my books, my only assets, and declare bankruptcy, but the loans would remain. The feds would find me wherever I went, whatever I did. I wouldn’t be able to hold them off for long.

xxiii Since Dyer has managed the unthinkable and got a book-length summary of a film published, he says he now holds new hopes: that it sells well and that he gets a reward. The latter is highly possible. The former is highly unlikely. But I know the feeling. There’s a wee troll in a dark narcissistic corner of my brain. He rambles about salaries and freelance checks and press and publications and awards and attention. He wants to gobble everything up. He’s yelling at me to keep working on this review, even though no one will likely read all of it. He wants to gobble you up. He delusionally believes someone will read this and it might lead to more paying work with New York publications, shorter and more ruly pieces, like my work for the Fiction Writers Review sometimes leads to paid articles, reviews, and interviews within the MFA world. That little troll helps keep me going. Otherwise all I would have is the monkish idea of a higher calling, which is hard to embrace unironically, or else I really am wasting my time, which seems too cynical a conclusion.

xxiv Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go post this to Facebook, Google +, and Twitter along with random excerpts and see if anyone likes, plus ones, or retweets it, and set up a Google alert to see if it gets linked to. I’m now in Korea and I’m too fat and hairy for the women here and my grandmother has passed away and I can’t make it home for the funeral. It seems as though I’ve chosen writing over life, or writing as life. The troll hungers.

– Shawn Andrew Mitchell