Postcard

I could call this rebirth or resurrection, revision or restoration, rewriting or reincarnation, but this blog's return might most aptly be described as a reboot.

This blog will host two genres of posts that I shall refer to here as the Tuesday posts and the Thursday posts. (If you are curious about these two genres, you should read the blog's Abstract.) All the Thursday posts are now visible and, believe it or not, two more have already been written, uploaded, and scheduled for publication.

I will start adding the Tuesday posts right away. I plan to post them in chronological order until I overtake the Thursday posts, which I will continue to publish on their actual publication dates, and, at that point, both Tuesday and Thursday posts will appear on their regularly scheduled dates.

Until that time, I would ask you to please be patient with a number of links that, right now, work only for the administrator and the editor. The Bibliography holds the most dead links (and still lacks its annotations) and the tags will remain problematic for a while, but, given the degree to which the guts of this blog have been remodeled, it became apparent that the easiest way to move forward was to go live with what was ready.

If you are familiar with my writing, much of what you see here, now, may not be new, though some of it has been altered. But, even if you think that you understood and understand still what I'm about and what I'm up to here, keep in mind that this revision is all the things that I told you it was but none so much as it is a reboot. Things have changed.

Thanks for coming to Eat the Sun.

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Misfits

A reader who wants to read Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" in the manner in which she intended needs to first understand that it contains no theological revelations. Only then will the story make sense.

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This Wheel’s On Fire

Jack London's classic short story, "To Build a Fire," about a newcomer to the Klondike who, traveling solo through the sunless day freezes to death from foolish hubris, is ultimately more profound than its premise suggests. Its main character's "trouble," the narrator of London's story tells the reader, "was that he was without imagination" (463).

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Sin City

There are two readers in this world. The first, were you to ask her for a list of the greatest short story writers ever, will name Leonard Michaels and wag the finger with which she points you toward him. The second reader has never read Michaels. A look at "City Boy," one of Michaels's finest stories, won't show you why Michaels has such an ardent following, but it might persuade you to read him. The rest will follow.

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White Line

"Hills Like White Elephants," perhaps the best short story that Ernest Hemingway ever wrote, is elegant in its simplicity. In Spain, a girl named Jig and a man, whose name we never learn, drink while they wait on a train and discuss whether or not she should abort their child. This is all there is to it. This is enough.

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Badlands

There are two great story cycles in western literature. The first is the Matter of Greece, whose greatest achievements, The Iliad and The Odyssey of Homer, came out of the Greek Dark Ages to be the foundation of classical Greek literature. The second is the Matter of Britain, which includes the stories of King Arthur, the Knights of the Round Table, and the Quest of the Holy Grail. These stories took root in another Dark Age and peaked during the Alliterative Revival, but the greatest single work of Arthuriana would not be written for another six centuries. It is a novel called Arthur Rex by a writer called Thomas Berger.

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Things Have Changed

Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" stands as his most iconic story. It fuses elements of banal domestic boredom with surreal danger and strangely distorted — but still palpable and threatening — fear. Kafka's aesthetic has so permeated our culture that his name as an adjective — kafkaesque — has come to describe the kind of bizarre, grotesque, disturbing, and oppressive situations that we, as humans, find exceptionally unnerving, for, indeed, there is no story that better describes and explains your life — nor mine — than does Kafka's "The Metamorphosis."

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House Of The Rising Sun

On 20 December 1921, the young Ernest Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley Richardson, arrived in Paris. Hemingway had served his brief apprenticeship as a reporter on the Kansas City Star; had gone to Italy to drive an ambulance for the Red Cross during World War I where he had been wounded at Fossalta before his recovery in a Milan hospital; had returned to his hometown of Oak Park, Illinois just before Prohibition and the Chicago Race Riots of 1919; and had briefly studied the craft of fiction with Sherwood Anderson, who had armed him with a letter of introduction into the circle of the Paris literati. In The Paris Years, the second volume in his five-part biography of Hemingway, Michael Reynolds notes that shortly after their arrival in Paris, where he would gather material for and write his best novel, The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway sought out the Café du Dôme "where Sherwood said the right people drank" (10):

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