Ellie, my seven-year-old daughter, has become quite a dedicated reader. Yesterday, she was so wrapped up in whatever she was reading that she totally forgot to come off the school bus in the afternoon. The bus normally drops her off with the neighbor's girls at a spot between our houses, but although the neighbor's girls got off, Ellie did not. The bus took off before we had a chance to flag it down. Alison, my wife, quickly called the school, which radioed the bus driver to make another swing past our house, but for a few minutes we were frantic.

Thanksgiving here was really nice. It was just our family, no visitors. I made the turkey, stuffing, gravy, and a creamed spinach dish that was quite tasty, and heated up a couple of cans of corn. Alison made this homemade cranberry sauce recipe that she makes every year, plus she did the mashed potatoes and pumpkin pie. I think there was something else too, but everything turned out fantastic. At one point during the meal, my 13-year-old Stephen turned to me in shock. He just had a bite of the creamed spinach and was shocked that he liked it. "I thought I wouldn't like it," he said, dumbfounded.

Writing-wise, I’ve been bouncing between work on a couple new stories. Monday was a real downer for me for some reason. I just felt sad/depressed until, at night, I started playing with Ellie. Sebastian, my 11-year-old, came in the room and started talking about "forgiveness." His youth group had been talking about it, and he had his own ideas about the subject. It was actually a pretty good conversation, and between the Ellie playing and the Sebastian talk, I just really perked up.

Yesterday, Alison was driving the boys somewhere when a story came on NPR about families who use their children as drug mules. The boys were shocked. We talked about it at dinner. And it made me feel good, in a weird way, knowing that we're not the kind of parents who would even think about using their kids as mules. I guess in this day and age, that qualifies us as being successful parents, no?

My review of Luke Geddes's I AM A MAGICAL TEENAGE PRINCESS is now up at The Collagist.  Luke's stories are inherently fun, populated with pop culture icons like Scooby Doo and Fred Flintstone.  Here's his story about Elvis Presley.  And here's one about a group of teenagers exiled into outer space.  Or, better yet, buy his book!

I've also got a review of James Tadd Adcox's THE MAP OF THE SYSTEM OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE coming out shortly in Mid-American Review.  Adcox's flash fiction is wonderfully inventive, and I recommend it to everyone who cares about the form.

Saturday began on a tense note.  At 7:30, I woke Sebastian, my 11-year-old son, up to watch the morning’s Arsenal-Tottenham game.  We are diehard Arsenal fans who have survived the last few weeks in a state of shock.  Although the season began on a promising note, Arsenal has been dropping points left and right.  We’ve been conceding goals out the wazoo lately and our offense has been sketchy at best.  Sebastian and I had been anticipating this game with a sense of dread.  We expected the worst: a drubbing.  And indeed, the game started out poorly.  Tottenham dominated the early possession and were quickly up 1-0.  The game had all the makings of a disaster.  In my mind, the narrative had already been set: it was going to be an ugly drubbing, owing in no small part to poor offseason personnel moves that have rendered Arsenal a second-class Premier League squad. 

But then something unexpected happened.  Emmanuel Adebayor, who scored Tottenham’s early goal, made a reckless senseless midfield tackle on Arsenal’s Santi Cazorla and was ejected from the game.  The narrative of the game had changed.  Playing a man down, Tottenham totally fell apart.  Arsenal dominated possession from then on and went on to easily win the game, 5-2.

We were happy, Sebastian and I.  Nay, we were elated.  Football is like a drug, filling the diehard fan with either ecstasy or despair depending on the state of his favorite team.

Still, thinking about that Adebayor tackle now, I just have to wonder what game Adebayor thought he was playing in—until that moment, Arsenal’s attack was toothless.  They could barely string together a couple of passes, let alone mount a serious challenge on Hugo Lloris, Tottenham’s goalkeeper.  Nothing in the game indicated that Adebayor’s reckless challenge was necessary.  Until that moment, Tottenham appeared in all likelihood en route to an easy victory.  So why did Adebayor think it necessary to mount such a reckless challenge? 

I’ve been working on a story again.  It’s actually something I started a few years ago and abandoned, only to rediscover again recently while weeding through some files.  The story is kinda wonderful but kinda icky.  Icky, as in, it’s just not performing the way that I want it to perform because the story’s protagonist keeps making butt-headed moves that are totally inexplicable given what is going on around him.

Last night, I read a David Foster Wallace essay, “The Nature of Fun,” that’s now online at The Guardian.  In it, Wallace labels a story-in-progress as “a cruel and repellent caricature of the perfection of its conception.”  Which I guess pretty much describes this particular thing I’m working on.

But anyways, after watching the game, I was back to work on my repellent caricature when I became aware of a commotion in the house. 

Sebastian was in a huff. He was sitting in the living room watching television when he heard a car drive by our house. Moments later, he was startled by a loud whack on our front window, which now sported several glossy reddish-orange splotches about the diameter of a silver dollar. Instantly, he surmised what happened: SOMEONE HAD EGGED OUR HOUSE. Which he proceeded to scream as he ran around the house, outraged.

I've never lived in a house that had been egged before so I was, frankly, shocked. Halloween, the season in which I imagine most eggings occur, has long since passed. And I couldn't imagine anyone we had offended so grossly as to provoke an egging. But still my mind raced. Stephen, my 13-year-old who's got a very flimsy grasp on social awareness, is always ranting about some real or perceived slight he's suffered at school. And of course, being social awkward, he's rubbed a few feathers in the wrong way himself.

But still... Stephen is a 13-year-old boy.  If the narrative of a drive-by egging were to hold up, it would require that whomever Stephen offended have access to a car.  Which I thought was questionable.  Not that Sebastian was able to ID the make and model number of said automobile, but by this time it had become an essential part of his story--someone drove by and hurled an egg at us!  He hadn’t so much as looked outside to investigate, yet already he was prepared to call the police so they’d nab the perp. 

There was something glorious in Sebastian’s outrage.  He had been unjustly wronged!  Which gave him the right to a sense of indignation that all worldly martyrs must feel. 

But there was a problem.  Once we looked outside, we saw no egg shells or egg yolks.  What we saw was a mass of red feathers on the ground below the window.  When we investigated further, the feathers turned out to be affixed to a very startled female cardinal.  For reasons unknown, the bird had flung itself at our window.  The bird must have thought she was flying into open space.  She never saw the window.  Sad, isn’t it?  How something could be so unaware of the reality around them, that they could fling themselves into an optical illusion.

Needless to say, assertions of an egging diminished upon seeing evidence of the bird. 

My children huddled around the woozy bird.  Already they were hatching plans of its rescue.

“Don’t kill it,” my wife whispered to me. 

Don’t kill it?

For all my faults, I am not one to snuff out the life of a feathery if woozled creature.  Even just suggesting such at thing went against the reality I was experiencing. 

Still, the bird seemed injured.  So we called Virginia Tech’s Emergency Veterinary Services, which suggested bringing the bird into their facility for care.  Yet when I tried to gently usher the bird into an old shoebox to transport it, the cardinal hopped away.  My children were watching and I did not want to harm the bird, so I was being extra-special gentle.  Every time I tried to capture it, it hopped further into the bushes. 

If I were trying to write this into a piece of fiction, I’d change the narrative into a tragedy.  The protagonist would become frustrated.  Perhaps he would worry that, in front of his children, he was being outsmarted by a bird.  The children would laugh at how foolish he looked crawling through the bushes with his paltry shoebox.  He would become more rash, more reckless in pursuit of this cardinal that’s making a mockery out of him.  Out of frustration, I would have the protagonist slam the box over the bird, injuring if not maiming the bird.  The children would look up at him in revulsion as he yanked the bloodied bird by its wings.

“Why, Daddy?” they’d blubber.

Wallace talks of nascent stories being like deformed children, “hideously defective, hydrocephalic and noseless and flipper-armed and incontinent.”

But this blog post is not a short story.  It is real. 

After a few gentle attempts to nudge the bird into the shoebox, the bird flew away.

And my wife?  The woman who feared I’d kill the bird?  She went off and made cupcakes with the children.  I hope they give me one.

This morning, I clicked on a story about tonight’s National Book Awards ceremony in New York.   Buried in the story were the sales figures of the five books nominated for the year’s Best Fiction book award.  And I was shocked.  All five nominees received a fair amount of public praise, and all are published by reputable presses, yet of the bunch, only one has sold more than 27,000 copies.  Indeed, one of my favorites, Ben Fountain’s BILLY LYNN’S LONG HALFTIME WALK, has sold the fewest—only 11,000 copies. 

Here are the figures:

Junot Diaz, This Is How You Lose Her 48,000
Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King 27,000
Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds 18,000
Louise Erdrich, The Round House 15,000
Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk 11,000

Seeing figures like this can be depressing.  Of course, art should never be judged solely on measures of sales, but it just made me feel out-of-step with the society in which I live.  Years ago, Philip Roth posited that, at most, there were 120,000 readers of serious fiction in this country.  Today, not even Roth classifies himself as a serious fiction reader, having declared that he will no longer read fiction.

Last night, I took Sebastian (11) and Ellie (7) to a screening of THE CITY DARK, a documentary that explores the consequences of light pollution, which, especially in urban areas, diminishes our ability to look up at the sky at night at see the cosmos. (You can see the movie’s trailer here.)  The visually-stunning documentary talked about the health consequences (both to humans, and others inhabiting our planet), but one question more than any other stayed in my mind afterwards.

To wit,

Nearly every civilization before ours could look up at the night sky and feel dwarfed by the sheer majesty of stars in the firmament.  How will it affect us, philosophically, to no longer experience that sense of being dwarfed by the cosmos?

Years ago, I read some column or another that suggested that we no longer give books as gifts with the expectation that the recipient will actually read them.  To be fair, the book in question was Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.  Instead, the columnist suggested that when we give a nice leather-bound volume to Aunt Sally or Uncle Joe, it is given as a complement, suggesting that we’d like to think Sally or Joe is capable of reading the book.

But what happens after we cease the charade of thinking ourselves as a race of people actually capable of reading a great novel?

I’ve been working a lot on novel revisions, which is one of the reasons I haven’t blogged much lately.  One of the questions I’ve inserted into the particular novel is what are the consequences of the eclipse of the book.  Perhaps it’s a question I should insert more forcefully into the work, but what does it mean when one no longer looks at oneself as being capable of reading, say, a 250-page novel?  The book might very well have been the most important “discovery” invented by man, enabling people to hold within their hands a vast compendium of human thought.  But what good is it as we ebb closer to our post-literate age?

Sad news.  Salon is reporting that Philip Roth will write no more.

Roth told a French interviewer,

“I decided that I was done with fiction. I do not want to read, to write more,” he said. “I have dedicated my life to the novel: I studied, I taught, I wrote and I read. With the exclusion of almost everything else. Enough is enough! I no longer feel this fanaticism to write that I have experienced in my life.”

I'm actually kinda speechless just thinking about this.  All I can say is,