Almost Halloween

Thanks to Carolyn Kellogg for the shout out in the Jacket Copy blog from the LA Times about the first book interviews.

As I said from the beginning, I'm hoping there's enough interest in this for the word to spread as more people find out about it, both at Kate's site and my continuation of it, without me having to spam people or make a Facebook group and bombard people that way for others to go to it.

Not only that, but I found out about Kate's interviews when she had already conducted around forty or so. You can image how thrilled I was when I had all that reading material to go back to in the archives.

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Took the GRE Lit Subject Test finally last Saturday. I always find the process and the dynamic so interesting and weird with these tests. We were in a room I've probably taught in before in the new VCU Business Building, and there were maybe 20-25 of us. Most were taking tests like Biology or Physics, and only a few were taking the Lit Subject Test. I wondered how everyone's future would go, how far some of them drove for a test, what everyone's reasons were for taking it, whatever the subject was.

There were a decent amount of questions I knew. Per the ETS policy, I shall not speak of such specifics regarding those questions here, but many of the everyone-talks-about-this-writer-or-this-poem-being-on-the-test folks were indeed on the test in some fashion. Either way, now I can focus on applications and the rest of the application process. High five for no more standardized tests. Borat style.

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The new Helios record, Caesura, and the new Near the Parenthesis record, L'Eixample, may just end up being at the top of my year-end best-of list.

Beautiful stuff all around, and perfect for the fall. Both of these guys have such a knack for writing gorgeous music, and though sometimes (in the best possible way) a band like Hammock can be sleep-inducing, there's usually more bass and background keyboards and computerized drums and drum machines and percussion sounds like that to make it listenable in so many environments. Reading, writing, road trip. But I think these records coming out in the fall months are melding into some ineffably perfect soundtrack for me.

They'll be getting a ton of plays as the months go on, and you should do your favor and check them out.

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There are a few manuscript contests coming up that call for about ten more pages than I have for the minimum to be considered. It's weird to beef it up for contests now that I trimmed so much off. Like putting deleted scenes back into a movie once you've already cut what you deem as the final print.

But I'm trying to figure out what I can put back in, since I really haven't written or published much new stuff that would fit with the first manuscript. Many poems have come and gone, as they do with the manuscript process, so I don't feel like the poems necessarily don't belong again, but it's just an odd feeling: putting poems back in when you haven't seen them for so long. Maybe some of them will make a case for a permanent stay. I'm not sure yet.