Bread and Bread

Kind of like Shutter Island, but funnier. Quality over quantity, these past coupla months. Madhouse Fog by Sean Carswell: What made The Matrix amazing wasn't the revelation that the world we know might be fake, but the idea that we can use that knowledge to manipulate hyperreality. The Matrix sequels kind of forgot about that and got hung up on saving sweaty, dingy Zion. But Sean Carswell's appropriately dubbed "metaphysical thriller" seizes the fun part and runs with it. Madhouse Fog is narrated with tight language and humble humor by a punk rocker-turned-grant writer who takes a job in a mental institution and stumbles upon research into the "collective unconscious," a space that opens up all sorts of good and evil possibilities for philanthropy, advertising, personal healing and wacky interactions with Einstein and African griots. Although the plot can be a little hard to follow, I was always happy to be along for the ride, thanks to th...

The last time I had a reading planned, I canceled it to stare nervously at the wall while waiting for biopsy results. We all know how that turned out. But the first hint that I might be slowly turning the dial away from the all-cancer-all-the-time-cancer-channel phase of my life (knockonwood) came the other day the frozen yogurt shop. “Excuse me, can I just say—” began a woman at the next table. Here it comes , I thought, bracing myself for a comment on how brave I was to have not found a way to magically keep my follicles from releasing my hairs while on chemo. “I really like your purse,” she said. Friday night I gave my first reading in seven months, opening for Sean Carswell at Skylight Books. It was a friendly, mellow, well attended reading, with a bucket of PBR fresh from the liquor store and no ice. I read a little bit of my near-future story about genetic testing. Jim Ruland read about karaoke in Alaska. Sean read from his new book, Madhouse Fog , which promise...