What's Coming Around the Ding-Dang

There are a num­ber of peo­ple stop­ping by today to read yesterday's post, by the way. Hi. No one's say­ing much, though. If you were—ahem—interested in this sort of sub­ject mat­ter, as you seem to be, what kinds of dis­cus­sions would you like to see here?

I've told you I'll be doing fic­tion, poet­ry, essays, inter­views, reviews, and also gen­er­al blog ephemera. Next week I'll have a review of Jayne Pupek's Toma­to Girl, and in the weeks after a dis­cus­sion of red­necks as por­trayed by Hol­ly­wood and the media, in which we will have much to say of Deliv­er­ance and Kali­for­nia and Patrick Swayze and Bil­ly Bob Thorn­ton, and even the web­site (warning—NSFW—warning) Dix­ie Sluts, a site that inspired events in the nov­el I'm fin­ish­ing (and yes, that's the last you'll see of me pimp­ing my own stuff here; I have anoth­er site for that).

I'll update and pub­lish a longish read­ing list I used for a hon­ors course I taught sev­er­al years ago that I called, in a bald attempt to get peo­ple to sign up, 'White Trash Lit­er­a­ture.' I taught two sec­tions of it even­tu­al­ly, as advanced com­po­si­tion cours­es. We read a deal of crit­i­cism and fic­tion, and watched films, in the process of ana­lyz­ing how the world thinks of 'white trash' and what it believes it can deduce about you, just by the way you talk or the loca­tion of your birth or the fact that, heav­ens for­fend, when you get excit­ed, you may indeed lose your edu­cat­ed TV announc­er voice and become… inter­est­ing to lis­ten to. I'm not going to promise you all the posts will be pret­ty. I'd like to get some semi-schol­ar­ly mate­r­i­al up here, too. At least semi-schol­ar­ly. It's nice to get off a rant once in a while, but some bal­ance is good, so I can con­vince myself I'm con­sid­er­ing every side of an argu­ment. If you're inter­est­ed in guest­ing here, hit me up. I have some sto­ries to read lat­er, too, when I'm not hack­ing up a lung. Thanks to every­one who's sent them to me.