Sunday 3/22/26 M.R. James loved the ghost stories of Sheridan Le Fanu like I love the ghost stories of M.R. James, even if James did overrate Le Fanu. In his essay about ghost story writers and what, in his estimation, makes for a good ghost story, James's prose practically burbles in with excitement as pertains Le Fanu's writings, which is rare for James. M.R. James set most of "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad" in the fictional coastal town of Burnstow, and then se

Saturday 3/21/26 There was a liar, fraud, and bigot at The New Yorker named David S. Wallace, with the title of fiction coordinator, which, as someone said to me years ago, is pretty funny. Sounds like something out of Orwell or Kafka, but also juvenile. You know how you know when someone's lying to you? I mean, you know when you know, right? Think of all the times in your life when you knew someone was lying to you. There were other times you didn't, but the times you knew,

Friday 3/20/26 Yesterday we had an expansive prose off entry here in which myriad related things were discussed, but this is going to be a minimalist one. Jess Row is among the chosen people of literary class system. He has no ability, the same as all of these people, which takes no time at all to prove. Everything by someone like this is the same. It will be about them, lightly fictionalized. And it's often about writers. Stories about writers. Referencing other writers. Be

Thursday 3/19/26 As one may recall, I recently likened Wendy "The Bag of Hag" Lesser, editor of The Threepenny Review , dug-in classist, unstable, cowardly bully, impressively droning, pretentious, boring writer (maybe we should start pitting some of these people against each other in Boring Offs?), Guggenheim winner (of course), bigot, hooker upper of the "right" kind of people, to the embittered human version of projectile vomit , which I feel confident in saying is the mos

Wednesday 3/18/26 I spent the other night in the company of Bertram and Wooster. Wodehouse is skilled at what he does. My issue with it, as such, is that it only goes so far. His writing is entertaining, but I wouldn't call it great art. I think of it like the comedic analogue to Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes mystery stories. There are parameters in place. Art, in my view, must put you position to experience and feel like you are witnessing what I look at as the answer

Wednesday 3/18/26 Let's look at a paragraph, shall we? A paragraph of sheer power and beauty. One that uses words we all know. Words a three-year-old knows. Words we use all the time. But there is no one who would use those words--put those words together--as I have in said paragraph. I've been working a lot on a story called "Still Good" for There Is No Doubt: Story Girls , my book in which all of the stories are about women or girls, and would have to be. That is, you could

Tuesday 3/17/26 Hello, (), It is your friend Colin in Boston again. Just writing a quick note to say that each day when I get up I hope that you have a good day. People often think that a day is just a day, but I look at a day as something that makes you that much closer to where you want to be when you are trying hard. A day’s worth closer. And that’s not a small deal. I was already proud of you for the progress you’ve made (after all, part of being a friend is being

Monday 3/16/26 This will sound impressive, but it wasn't actually as impressive as it sounds, because I had a hard time in the Bunker Hill Monument and it took quite a while--a lot longer than it should--and I was more uncomfortable by the end of everything than I ought to have been, such that I was moving back up my street Uncle Joe from Petticoat Junction style ("That's Uncle Joe, he's a'movin kind of slow..."), but still, the numbers are the numbers and they look okay. I

Sunday 3/15/26 People say Charlie McAvoy is a great defenseman. They don't think he is. People say so and so is a great writer. They don't think they are. I italicized that word to emphasis its actual meaning. To actually think. Go about the mechanics of thinking and thinking through. Do you understand? People say things. They usually aren't thinking at all. They're not vetting for veracity. When they do think, it's about what they're meant to say. What they should say. Wha

Sunday 3/15/26 America: Where there's no problem so big that 5000 more photos of yourself can't solve it. Did it ever really happen if you didn't say that it did on social media? That's where reality comes from, right? Rubber stamp that reality! Most interests for most people come down to two things: the mouth and the genitals. What can I put in my mouth? What can I do with my genitals? And that's going to be it. They're not going to read something, listen to something, think

Saturday 3/14/26 I recently downloaded a high-definition copy of Joseph Losey's 1951 film, The Prowler , starring Van Heflin and Evelyn Keyes, with a script by an in-disguise Dalton Trumbo on account of his Hollywood blacklisting, and have been returning repeatedly to it. The Prowler is one of our best noirs, and to me it's a much better picture than 1944's Double Indemnity , with which it shares some plot points. The latter is often cited as the best noir of all, though it'

Saturday 3/14/26 Jaylen Brown needs to give it a rest with the referees. Anytime I see a clip of him, he's talking about the officiating. It takes away from his focus. College basketball makes for better watching than the NBA does right now. These conference tournaments before the big tournament make that plain. There's more flow to the game. The teams go up and down the court. It's a more physical game. The NBA needs to adopt a policy of letting more go. The problem is, the

Friday 3/13/26 Latest cheapie noir for me: Monogram’s Fall Guy from 1947, based on Cornell Woolrich’s bluntly titled story, “Cocaine.” Narcotics were an unusual subject for a film at the time. Here they’re under the surface, so to speak, but you know what’s what and it isn’t good. *** Stayed up late (for me) to watch the Celtics-Thunder game. What a tilt that was, even with White and Tatum out of the C's line-up. If Shai Gilgeous-Alexander gets to his spot around the free thr

Thursday 3/12/26 I'll be getting to the people in charge of Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series , these being the people to whom I proposed a book on stairs, who sent my email all around the country. Someone sent me a letter about them recently. I'll be burying these bigots. Exposing them in full, and making that their legacy, as such. I have a lot to get to. A lot to write. But I get to it. And when I bury you, I make sure I bury you right. I also bury you for all to see who

Wednesday 3/11/26 Presently I've made a request of myself for hours. To put in hours. The time. To keep moving and doing things that contribute to what I'm trying to do for hours. Lately I've just been killing hours. I haven't been alive. I've been giving in, not fighting, which is forcing myself to try. To keep trying. So that is my plan right now. Not working from lists of what needs doing. But to be moving again. To be using the hours. It was what I would call unseasonably

Tuesday 3/10/26 Whoa, what's going on here? It was two years ago that I gave up pizza. Why make a note of this? Why not? Have you tried to give up pizza? The spur for this decision was a fellow at the Golden Goose, which sounds like the start of an enchanted tale, but as I've mentioned before merely pertains to the market around the corner from me. This is the market where I acquire Swiss cheese, the only kind of cheese I will eat, because it's the rare cheese that is low in

Tuesday 3/10/26 I saw a headline for an article this morning about the relationship between alcohol and exercise. Specifically, can one exercise to a degree such that this exercise cancels out their alcohol consumption in terms of their fitness. Can the exercise win that race, if you will. I went to click on this article, but it was behind a paywall and why would one pay money for what is almost certainly to be formulaic writing that resembles the rest of the formulaic writin

Monday 3/9/26 I mentioned the Colorado Avalanche's power play earlier. Watched them go zero-for-five on the power play yesterday. All that skill and they don't score. No one wants to shoot the puck. It's strange and, I suspect, maddening for an Avalanche fan. They do many of these width-of-the-ice passes, like they're trying to create open net situations. It's way too finesse. They should get back to some basics and have someone--Makar--hammer it from up top. Don't be stagnan

Monday 3/9/26 An observation, but I think it's a telling one. I don't go to a gym, as is documented here about as thoroughly as possible with my writings about stairs. I understand that one may encounter people of many ages and body types at a gym. But as I'm outside, either running stairs, en route to running stairs, or walking the many miles I walk, the people I see who are running are almost always--with very rare exceptions--people who are in shape. I don't see overweight

Sunday 3/8/26 We speak so often of time, but nearly just as often we fail to consider--let alone understand--that time isn't necessarily about seconds, minutes, hours, years, decades, etc. It takes about an hour-and-a-half to listen to the complete recorded output of Blind Willie Johnson , but what does that mean? How is it not a hundred years' worth of time, and so on, in a different but real regard? We can do the same with word counts and fiction. Not all word counts are cr

Sunday 3/8/26 The Bruins got a much-needed two points yesterday in their matinee win at the Garden over the Capitals. They came into the day a point ahead of Columbus for the final Wild Card spot, with both teams having played the same amount of games (Columbus picked up a point in an OT loss later in the day, so the Bruins are now two points ahead). It's close to fifty-fifty, I'd say, whether the Bruins make the playoffs or not. You're going to need close to 100 points this

Saturday 3/7/26 The big sports story in Boston yesterday was the return of Jayson Tatum to the Celtics' line-up nearly ten months after he torn his Achilles tendon. I stayed up to see how this went. Obviously Tatum was rusty. Everything will be off. Your timing, your cardio. You could see that he wasn't fully trusting his leg, which makes sense. He'd favor the other one, try not to come down on the one he injured. Had a nice stat line of 15 points, 12 boards, 7 assists. So no

Thursday 3/5/26 People are starting to look like AI. Were it to be factually revealed that eighty percent of the profiles on the likes of Threads are AI, I wouldn't be surprised. I could see it being up to ninety percent. Yesterday I saw a guy--who I'm pretty sure wasn't AI, and just a typical American--asking if nuclear weapons were real, because if they were real, why didn't Russia just use them on the Ukraine and the US on Iran. So maybe they're just this made up thing and

Thursday 3/5/26 People have a bottomless reserve of cruelty. They can and will tap into this bottomless reserve of this over the slightest prompting, and the lightest perceived slight, which can be of their own mental making and not an actual slight. Nothing will potentially satiate their hate, their blood lust. They'll keep going, dishing out hate, rage, until they forget or move on to something else, because they're all very stupid and can't maintain focus. If and when the