July 2008

More than a year ago, my wife and I decided to sell our house, and it sold—quickly. So we found an apartment in Asheville, about 30 minutes east of our home for the previous three-and-a-half years. Being that we—plan in mind—thought it a temporary situation, we delivered most of our possessions, save for the essentials (a couple of chairs, a mattress, corkscrew and computer), to three plywood-walled storage units. What had become a fairly extensive personal library—450 volumes or so—would be sheltered from the musty 100-square-foot containers in gray plastic bins and cardboard boxes (see Boxing Up Bukowski, this blog’s forebear).

A writer’s library is a room full of muses.

But the temporary situation, well, evolved; in the meantime a challenge presented itself: finish a book I was co-writing without a little help from my friends (i.e., the spirit and words of the authors of the books that once filled the space in which I wrote). The rich red walls, lined with just enough shelves to accommodate the collection, and a regal-looking cherry wood desk had been replaced by bland white walls, with only a few books stacked on the floor, and a black square card table. Though trying at times during those months, I survived—but not without adding about a hundred new books to that stack on the floor. Read more…

“Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.”—Lester Bangs

“The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.”—William Faulkner

So you’re probably wondering what this blog is all about. Perhaps the best way to begin is to explain where its title originates. As I began to think of an appropriate name for the blog I intended to create, the answer came to me in the form of a red Netflix envelope. Read more…