Satire as a literary mode of expression is problematic. Speaking of humor generally, I once attempted to suss out the issue with Jensen Whelan by calling it (satire) a drunk who requires something sturdy nearby, lest it falls into a puddle of its own sick. The Shteyngart review is a chance to address the issue a bit more thoroughly.

Wissy boys from David Thomas on Vimeo.

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.

Actually, no, but I hang out with a cadre of assholes who have a blog and a thick, serious rep around town called Dude Life. Tonight I posted my first piece of writing there, about the Shane Oneill debacle (tiny inside joke). It’s about skateboarding specifically, but generally about payment for digital content, and shifting paradigms of consumption and a certain Scientologist’s fingers playing through the hair of the industry. It’s called “Three Dollars.”

I’m just back from the Banksy movie, too, after which it occurred to me: here’s an alternative to Dave Wallace’s famous suggestion about sincere, artistic anti-rebels freeing us all from irony’s tyrannical grasp. Which is tossing a grenade into the whole sincere-ironic discussion, obliterating the distinction completely. The result, for me anyway, was a stange floaty headache and desire to lean over the mall atrium’s railing and spit.

More soon. If you want a rundown on the Shane Oneill thing just ask.

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.

About a year ago I pitched the idea for an essay to St. Louis Magazine. The thought was to look at the baseball rivalry between St. Louis and Chicago, addressing it as a lifelong Cardinals fan living among Cubs faithful. There was a bit of back and forth and a long stretch of time between when we agreed on the fact of essay and the time when the essay would eventually come out, which was in time for Opening Day of the 2010 season. During that time I read a bunch of baseball materials, took silly-copious (I realize now) notes about the Cubs 2009 season, failure, the comedy of Milton Bradley, the fact of the Cardinals acquisition of Matt Holliday, and so damn much more. I’ve written about baseball before, both in The Slide and elsewhere (0ne or two of you might recall my previous stint as a baseball blogger along with the unfortunate end to that career), but addressing the Cubs / Cards rivalry was about as fun as I’ve ever had with a writing project. And so it makes me immensely happy to share it now.

Subtitled, “Contemplating rivalry — and envy and schadenfreude and life itself — amid the world’s worst singalong,” the essay is available in St. Louis Magazine’s April 2010 issue. Please enjoy: A Cardinals Fan in Cub Land.

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.

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.

I’ve got a reading coming up in February, a guest blog post on Three Guys next week, and an essay this Spring in St. Louis Magazine. The coffee shop was all full (it’s always full) but I discovered that it’s okay to sit in the bar next door and write all day long. The question remains as to whether it’s a Greek, Canadian, or American bar.

Finally, please be advised that it actually is the real Graham Nash, as far as I can tell, commenting on the last post. I hope now his Google Alert goes off again so he comes to see how goddamned tickled I am at the reality of that, and read one final apology from me about my plastic surgery accusation, which was brash and presumptuous and but holy shit, man. Graham Nash!

1. At this point, Stevie Wonder is at least a minor deity. I can’t imagine a single religion that would argue.
2. John Legend is goddamned handsome and I will admit right now that I am jealous of his handsomeness. It’s fine. It’s okay. I’m okay with it.
3. Smokey Robinson would do well to take a cue from Stevie and wear sunglasses at all times.
4. Paul Simon is looking more and more like Jon Lovitz, or rather the animated version of Jon Lovitz from The Critic.
5. Paul Simon’s guitar fingernails, which are vaguely warlocky or wizardish and not at all the sort of thing a camera should zoom upon, truly and deeply freak me out.
6. The thing about his nails, I realize the more I think about it, is that they’re sort of yellow and gray, as if jaundiced, and how exactly do nails get this color? And why is he wearing a purple jacket?
7. Said Pat of Graham Nash during his and Crosby’s cameo with Paul Simon to sing “Here Comes the Sun” in a new and harmonized but definitely not impressive way: “He looks like Ted Danson on MDMA.” (Nailed it, Pat.)
8. Mr. Nash has also had way more plastic surgery than anyone who recorded “Long Time Gone” should ever have.
9. The alternative, however, which here registers as Mr. Simon’s small country’s worth of makeup caked onto his cartoon face, isn’t much better.
10. Art Garfunkel is looking more and more like the clown from the television mini-series of Stephen King’s IT.
11. Metallica’s introduction to themselves, following the set break following a rather embarrassing moment when Aretha Franklin snubbed the shit out of Annie Lennox, I suppose for wearing a t-shirt and silly hat (not to mention grin) onto Aretha’s stage: “We’re Metallica, and this is what we do.”
12. Re: Aretha, I wish, wish, wish Smokey would’ve gone with something else (“Tears of a Clown,” say) for his song with Stevie, which would have left “Tracks of My Tears” for the woman whose version, from the really great Soul ’69 album, is far superior.
13. What Metallica does does not go particularly well with what Lou Reed does, which is wander about with eyes glazed and skin sagging (which is fine, actually, the one real solution to this “problem” of aging that Misters Nash and Simon get terribly wrong, because look these are old men after all, and so let the wrinkles be the ethical argument for why we should listen, the scars, the same weathering and evidence of use that so many boot and jacket and t-shirt companies have been faking for years) and try to sing “Sweet Jane” and kind of fail, and look confused enough that Pat and I get sort of sadly quiet there on his couch, and by this point my dog’s four eyes have burned almost halfway through my body, and it’s clear that she’s ready to go even if I’m not, and so let’s say we call it a night, huh Pat?

Is it significant that “lobster,” “fish,” and “chicken” are our culture’s words for both the animal and the meat, whereas most mammals seem to require euphemisms like “beef” and “pork” that help us separate the meat we eat from the living creature the meat once was? Is this evidence that some kind of deep unease about eating higher animals is endemic enough to show up in English usage, but that the unease diminishes as we move out of the mammalian order? (And is “lamb”/”lamb” the counterexample that sinks the whole theory, or are there special, biblico-historical reasons for that equivalence?)

Reading this essay now, contextualized by the issue’s recent Foerization and Natalie Portman’s resulting and fairly comical and completely insulting soapbox derby, is a bit like waking up from too long a sleep beneath too many blankets, wearing flannel pajamas (with cute little attached booties) and sweating terribly, then rolling out of bed into a tub of ice water. We miss you, Dave.

Here’s the video enjoy it please!

Conrow Joe from Edsel Denk on Vimeo.

Re: Dude Life, the always reliable Pretty Blog provides explanation here, but Ryan’s quote bears repeating:

The focus of Dude Life is just dudes who are into stuff, whatever that stuff may be. Primarily, it is skateboarding, babes, tacos, hot dogs, rock and roll, jobs without bosses, beers, road trips, art, and buddies.

Exactly, Ryan. That’s exactly right.

Here’s something: a recording from last week’s reading (mine) at the Parlor Reading Series, there in the Busch and pretzeled home of Green Lantern Press. Many thanks to all who came and heard me read for thirty minutes from my novel in progress, especially the skateboarders who don’t normally frequent readings. It was a rad night, totally and completely satisfying. The podcast itself can be found right stinking here.

And for those of you with eyes, here’s a video of the flashback section of the reading (that’s a Busch burp there at 0:33, if you’re curious).