Hobart has just posted a nice, healthy roundtable discussion among twelve writers who either have a book out recently or one coming soon. Some truly interesting people in the group (who I won’t link here because it’s work, but you’ve got fingers, you’ve got a search bar), and I thank them for the experience: Jedediah Berry, Andrew Ervin, Roxane Gay, Rachel B. Glaser, Julia Holmes, Caitlin Horrocks, Holly Goddard Jones, Tom McAllister, Laura van den Berg, Kevin Wilson, and Mike Young. And then me. Too.

Also: I’m a blogging machine over at Dude Life. Travels and photos and skate videos and a huge amount of bullshit. Swing by.

Also also! On Saturday, June 12, I’ll teach a three-hour workshop on dialogue at the University of Chicago’s downtown Gleacher Center. Would love to see you…info here.

I’m wondering the word for the process by which one stops knowing anything about bands as they emerge, and coincidentally begins critiquing trends so terribly similar to his (it’s me) own from a time not too I don’t think long ago. Pull up your pants!, one thinks, as they walk in front of me on my way to the train. But one’s own pants! How they once did sag! How many were given glimpse of my ass thanks to my keen fashion sense!

I know the word, okay yes thank you. The word is aging. The word for everything is aging.

Yesterday Serengeti‘s little brother told me he never reads, ever reads ever, but that he read The Slide twice. Once when depressed and once when happy, so he got a good handle on it from two perspectives. I can’t tell you how happy this made me.

Today the world lost a precious, beautiful woman. Lost a laugh and voice it will miss. So please turn on Abba and feel free to cry along with we who were lucky enough to know and love her (there was no knowing without loving, that much I promise). Love you, Violet. You were a miracle in every way.

Sometimes I think of my grandmother’s hands, and the way a teacup shakes, now, when she carries it from the kitchen to her chair. Because these days my grandmother is growing older in a way you can see it happening. I see her and think of a very big number, and my reflex pulls me backward into history, hers. I hear air raid sirens and smell black-market tobacco and fried eggs, then I see a great expanse of Indianan field and the smell of hamburgers, then think of that moment when I was a kid standing with my grandmother in Spicer’s 5 & 10, and I asked her to buy me a toy, and she said she didn’t have money for the toy, and I said, then can’t you just write a check? And she looked at me as if I was some alien boy who lived on a planet vastly different from her own, but now my planet was hers, too, and since it was a planet on which she could knit, and brew tea, and laugh uproariously and dance and drink shandy, she decided to stay.

In explanation but not exactly defense of this, which I just had handed to me and have no clue of its origin, though I’ll just bet it’s a Cub fan…

Mark McGwire got a standing ovation at the Cardinals’ fan convention. In the wake of calling out McGwire and other juicers as liars, cheaters and phonies, Jack Clark was booed. As you can see, Cardinals fans check their brains at the door.

…I will add that: Jack Clark made the single gravest error in Cardinal fandom which is talk shit about another Cardinal (two, really, since he goes after Tony, too), something that is not ever ever done without grave unrest. See: La Russa basically has no comment on Ozzie Smith, and wisely so. See likewise: Ozzie is widely regarded as the villain of that situation, essentially because he was vocal in his criticism of the way Tony handled the end of Ozzie’s career, which to be fair Tony did sort of shit the shortstop bed there with Royce Clayton and maybe hadn’t by that point quite learned the fundamental rule in discussion, here. See finally, though: how Ozzie seems to have recently moved on from the subject, and wisely so.

UPDATE: The Post-Dispatch’s Bryan Burwell gives fans a stern talking to and receives a gabillion comments, many of them testy.