Spotlight on … Tristan Egolf Lord of the Barnyard: Killing the Fatted Calf and Arming the Aware in the Corn Belt (1997)

 

‘To have published two novels by the age of 30, and recently finished another, could be the stuff of dreams, but not for Tristan Egolf, who has shot himself, aged 33, in Lancaster, near Philadelphia. Lancaster was the town that provided partial inspiration for his fiction, and to which he had returned after living throughout the United States and Europe.

‘Such a fate recalls the end of John Kennedy Toole, who gassed himself before the publication, and success, of A Confederacy Of Dunces. That novel’s rumbustious hero, Ignatius J Reilly, was perhaps a precursor of Egolf’s John Kaltenbrunner, the freewheeling protagonist of events in the gross-out incarnation of smalltown America that is Egolf’s first novel, Lord Of The Barnyard (1998).

‘Egolf was born in San Lorenzo del Escorial, Spain. His father was a peripatetic National Review journalist, and his mother a painter. They divorced in Egolf’s childhood and he took the surname of his stepfather. In his youth, the family moved from Washington to Kentucky. It was life in Philadelphia, however, that inspired Egolf, along with summer visits to his father’s new home in Indiana.

‘On leaving Hempfield high school in Landisville, Pennsylvania, in 1990, Egolf went to Temple University, Philadelphia. He soon dropped out and relished playing with a punk band – whose record contract also gave him pause for thought.

‘Fearful that touring would mean that writing slipped from his fingers, he quit and headed for Europe, physically distancing himself from his material’s setting. Holed up to write in Paris in a small room, he paid the rent by playing in bars and on the streets. In 1995, he was on the Pont des Arts when Maria, daughter of novelist Patrick Mondiano, chanced by, sensed something in what Egolf was doing, and asked him to come for a coffee, after which he returned to the US to fortify the novel’s setting.

‘Back in Paris, he got in touch with her again; she introduced him to her father, who was encouraging – all the more so for not asking to see the book until it was finished. Egolf continued to write, and eventually showed Mondiano Lord Of The Barnyard. It was promptly taken by Gallimard, and, after scores of rejections, by Picador in England and Grove in America.

‘With the subtitle of Killing The Fatted Calf And Arming The Aware In The Corn Belt, it is seemingly rough, even formless. It tells of Kalten- brunner, whose father dies before his birth. The boy shows a knack with chickens and sheep on the family farm, raises hell at school – so much so that the homestead falls victim to predatory Methodists and he is consigned to work on a barge. But that is only a quarter of it, mildness itself compared with Kaltenbrunner’s subsequent work at a poultry plant, veritable sweetness beside garbage collecting, which sets in motion a strike, and more uproar. The book is not perfect, its manic energy precludes tidiness; it has its own volition, and editorial neatness would have made it sludge.

‘That first novel, for which Egolf had recently completed a screenplay, works without any dialogue, but his second, Skirt And The Fiddle (2002), is top heavy with it, obscuring a tale about a wild-living pair of rat-catchers – Egolf had a thing about rats – one of whom so falls for a woman that he reaches once again for his violin. It was enough, however, to make one eager for Kornwolf, due next year.

‘Kornwolf was written amid Egolf’s activities with the Smoketown Six, whose anti-war protests in Lancaster, Philadelphia, included burning an effigy of George Bush and posing, near-naked, in a pyramid similar to that of the Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. They were arrested, released, and their subsequent lawsuit for violation of civil rights is yet to be resolved. That, and his writing, was the upside of the manic depression which had him reaching for the gun, and leaving a fiancée and daughter.’ — Christopher Hawtree

 

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Further

Tristan Egolf @ Wikipedia
Obituary: Tristan Egolf
Podcast: Tristan Egolf interviewed on Bookworm
Tristan Egolf @ goodreads
Embrace Your Madness”
A Toast to Tristan Egolf
Tristan Egolf, itinéraire d’un écrivain-météore
A tragic, and familial, ending
Modiano et Tristan Egolf
Petit biquet deviendra grand…pourtant
Long Live the Underwolf: On Discovering Tristan Egolf’s Kornwolf
Lord of the Barnyard @ NoveList
KEN STRINGFELLOW’S FOREIGN CORRESPONDENCE: TRISTAN EGOLF
Buy ‘Lord of the Barnyard’

 

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Music by Tristan Egolf

KITSCHCHAO – GONE SANE

Kitschchao – White Boy

Kitschchao – Riverbottom Nightmare Band

 

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Interview

 

The story of your discovery as a writer is almost like a love story: Young, beautiful Parisian with contacts to the publishing world meets young American, who plays guitar under the bridges of Paris and accidentally this novel in the drawer has … how was the thing really?

Yes, I almost can not hear it anymore. On my book tour in Spain, journalists asked for nothing but the luscious details of a story that never happened before.

In fact, after school, I lived in Philadelphia and did a thousand things, writing, playing in a band, trying out the possibilities of this city, and one day I packed my backpack and set off with $ 600 and my guitar Europe, as many young Americans do to hitchhike around the area and make music on the street. After some time in Italy and Amsterdam, I ended up in Paris; Among other things, I worked there on a text that later went into the novel.

As a street musician you get to feel the most different reactions: some spit in the guitar case, the others are pure money, take out which threaten you and so on; but I also met some great people, including Maria Modiano, the daughter of French writer Patrick Modiano. We talked, made friends, and that was all.

The novel actually did not exist at the time. I drove back to the US, to the city in southern Indiana, which is the role model for Baker, to research carefully. On the day I arrived there, I discovered a camp of the river rats, and thought, oh well, I’ve done everything wrong, I have to start all over again. So I stayed in “Baker” for half a year. I worked for a while in a factory called Velvet Elvis and Polkadots Inc., making giveaway scrap for a TV shopping channel, including the eponymous portrait of Elvis, multi-colored sprayed on velvet, a bad joke. So I tore my shifts down the assembly line and spent the rest of my time going to the library and reading, walking around the city, meeting lots of places, talking to people, gathering material. A distant cousin of mine lived there, he led me around, because he knew approximately what I was looking for and put me on the right tracks; So I experienced scenes like the pub brawls.

After almost six months there, I returned to Paris, and the only truly amazing thing about the story of Maria Modiano is that I did not lose her phone number, it probably all had its deeper meaning. I contacted her, but we did not become a couple. Later we moved together for a while, and by the time we finished the rough draft of the novel, eighteen months had passed, from October 95 to March 97.

I returned to the US and sent the novel to about 75 publishers, unsolicited. Since I had no agent and was completely unknown, it is no wonder that nothing came of it. As an unpublished, young, white man with no special marks, I was in the category with the worst opportunities in the field of fiction. And within a week I already had the most answers; unopened back, publisher sealed up, rejected unread, all that. Later, the press in Europe made a lot of noise out of me to a prophet, who does not count in his own country; I do not think so dramatically.

On the contrary, I was very lucky – it was accepted only two months after I finished the manuscript, but not in the US. Actually, it was actually about the modianos, who are really a wonderful family and helped me a lot with things that you can not manage yourself without a residence permit. Of course, Patrick Modiano had noticed that I was working on a novel and was curious to read it, so I gave him a copy of the manuscript. And without my knowledge, he checked it with Gallimard, where he works as a lecturer. I’ve been back in Philadelphia by now, researching the second novel I’m still sitting in-no pause for years, that’s idiotic-when I got a call, Maria said, “Are you sitting?” And told me, Gallimard wanted to buy the world rights and had already planned the deal with Picador for England.

I was overjoyed and wanted to run and tell everyone, but I did not have anyone to say anything; At the time, I was living with a TV junkie who was guarding the house for his mother. I gushed with enthusiasm, and he just looked up bored and said: Huh? So I ran through the streets and did not know where to go, and in the end, the one with whom I celebrated success was a very nice homeless man, we smoked one and rejoiced.

This is a funny coincidence, but the romantic PR story, which wants to make me a bum with literary ambitions and Parisian noble friend, has nothing to do with me anyway.

Gallimard bought the world rights, sold the novel to about twelve countries, I do not remember that much, and about half of these translations have since been published. In France, the book was successful, not only on the sales figures, but as for the whole hype around it, so I had not expected. In England, sales were okay, but otherwise it was rather cool, and in the US, it was much better than I had ever thought. And the press has reacted pretty well everywhere.

In a first novel, one always likes to ask the question of possible literary role models, and the literary critics in the various countries have also done their utmost to keep their theses to themselves. What does the author say – are there role models, and which ones?

Of course, writers have influenced me, but these are different names from those often quoted; apparently they do not let themselves be read directly from the novel. I also count filmmakers among the aesthetic role models who have left their mark, in particular Charlie Chaplin or the early Werner Herzog; Céline comes to mind among the authors and also someone like the critic and novelist HL Mencken, to whom I owe a few good sayings and the courage to stand for my own words and pictures.

But why should it be only the fine art? Things I read in the paper, or just stories people tell me, are so often in there, it’s hard to believe. Not to mention true events; a shockingly high number of individual scenes from Lord of thew Barnyard have really happened, and not so rare me.

Given the lush, original vocabulary full of puns and new creations, as you will find it in hardly a first novel, but you will not be surprised that there is looking for literary role models.

No, of course not, and I do not say that I did not read much. But the observations that really set something in motion come from somewhere else; I also like to read the local press with their completely absurd messages – »Bus full of wheelchair users on the way to the casino crashed by cliff« or something. It gives you a completely different view of storytelling. The world of these events, however, remains limited to the region; For New Yorkers this is as foreign and far away as it is for Europeans.

As a child or adolescent, have you often invented or even written down stories?

Yes, that was always fun for me. When I wrote down my first story, about twenty years ago, the concept of punctuation was still unfamiliar to me, and my mother, who was trying to read the four pages, did not understand half of it, because it went through no point and comma. I was very frustrated. But I already realized how great it is to create a world in storytelling.

Earlier you mentioned that you have experienced some of the romance scenes more or less yourself, and you can hardly imagine that there is no connection between your life and the experiences of the hero John. How far is this possible? I do not suppose that you ran chicken at the age of seven, but when I think of certain feelings, a worldview, a sense of justice in John …

Well, I think everything started with Isabelle. The sheep Isabelle really existed, I had to take care of her as a child, and I can tell you that she was just as devilish as I have described her, nothing is exaggerated. She was the most malicious, tough, aggressive and unbelievable livestock imaginable, and I had to take care of her every day. Even when I brought her food, I had to keep her at bay with a stick. And that was just the beginning.

But to answer on a less anecdotal level: Basically, there is nothing more harmful and suffocating for the development of a personality – let alone a sensitive or artistic personality – than the American public school. In the first five or six years of my school days, there was not a single day when I did not want to throw a bomb on the store, so all I did was outrage. If you survive that, that sense of total cut-off, because you can not communicate with anyone, then you’ve learned something for life.

John is isolated in a way I was not, my family was more involved in many ways, while he is a true outsider who soon becomes indifferent. For me, that did not matter, I did not care, and in that regard John is my revenge on this close community. I put myself back into many situations when writing, which, looking back, I could of course have handled much better, but I was younger and could not. Partly, I let John do what I did not, sometimes because I was not stubborn enough, and sometimes too hard – according to the motto: first strike, then ask.

Although I grew up not in southern Indiana but in Pennsylvania, in a larger city than Baker, there are quite a few parallels to my birthplace; Generally speaking, this was a life situation where you could say perfectly normal sentences and the others looked at you as if you had gone crazy.

In that sense, life really only started when I came to the big city, where that changed; John, however, does not learn anything else until his time as a riverboat. To have stupidity, hypocrisy and conformism and not be able to do anything about it, we all have in common, and it makes you really wild. For years you think, I want to get away, or: One day I have to finally meet a person who somehow understands me …

In addition to this socio-critical aspect, there is also something socially critical in your novel, albeit more in the background. The people of Baker who describe you in the most detail are workers, factory workers or garbage men, and you paint a vivid picture of the treadmill, the bone mill in their everyday lives. Would you go so far as to call this a class-struggle critique?

Oh, I think, without some kind of industrial treadmill this world probably does not work, and there will probably always be a class to take those efforts. But how this class originates or continues is not an issue that I wanted to or could address. My approach is more a mixture of flair for the absurd sides of many rather hard working professions and compassion for those who perform them; I have always had something for the “damned” and describe it with a certain tenderness. This inevitably implies a critical view of the situation. But as a mouthpiece of the working class or as its chronicler, for example in a John Steinbeck tradition, I do not see myself.

So no mission consciousness.

Maybe, but then at the level of the individual. No matter how much wind blows in your face, no matter if no one understands you and the whole world is against you, you have to fight back, stand up, carry on. That’s what I was all about in Monument for John Kaltenbrunner; the parodic, grotesque came almost automatically along the way.

The encouragement falls, since the story does not end so positively, but rather relatively, right?

Oh, I think this conclusion has something triumphant, after all. Sure, John goes down, but he has not given up; and, after all, it has done a lot, not just chaos and destruction, but also a significant improvement in the situation for the garbage men, the twenty-two “dumpsters.” The grotesque way they honor him after his death-the pig-hunt in the cemetery-shows that he was not alone after all, that there were people who understood him. Even if there are only a few.

Do you see America so pessimistically?

Yes. But not only America; John’s story is ultimately universal. My picture of all humanity is not much optimistic, but the novel is set in America because I know the land of limitless possibilities – the unlimited choice of totally incredible, crazy situations – better. Maybe there are other countries where the questionable influence of television is not that extreme, but stupidity has no own passport, it’s everywhere.

Right now, you’re on a scholarship grant in Oxford, Mississippi, a small town unlike Baker, thanks to their university. After that, the big city calls again, New York?

I guess so. Of course, the town does not scare me anymore, neither do I have to go to school or keep afloat with cheap jobs, I can also choose somewhere outside of a big city how to shape my life. What appeals to me is Alaska – a real contrast to the narrowness of the human settlements, big or small. And who knows, maybe there’s a hot new story – an Eskimo bank robbery or something.

Have we now learned about your new novel – or the next but one?

On my second novel, I’m sitting too long again. And it’s not about Eskimos, not yet. A main theme is again the strangeness; To feel alien, that drives me on. For example, the differences with Monument are stylistic; I-narration, dialogues, shorter sentences. And it’s a love story. But you will not overlook the similarities; the parody is there, the dark, there are rat catchers …

Rat catcher??

… well, they work in the sewers. Garbage and rats! You have to remain recognizable. Although it’s actually a black GI and a Cambodian prostitute smuggling in a suitcase to the US; Surely you can already imagine how it goes on? It ends hopefully anyway. Until now.

 

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Book

Tristan Egolf Lord of the Barnyard
Grove Press

‘A literary sensation published to outstanding accolades in America and around the world, Lord of the Barnyard was one of the most auspicious fiction debuts of recent years. Now available in paperback, Tristan Egolf’s manic, inventive, and painfully funny debut novel is the story of a town’s dirty laundry — and a garbagemen’s strike that lets it all hang out. Lord of the Barnyard begins with the death of a woolly mammoth in the last Ice Age and concludes with a greased-pig chase at a funeral in the modern-day Midwest. In the interim there are two hydroelectric dam disasters, fourteen tavern brawls, one shoot-out in the hills, three cases of probable arson, a riot in the town hall, and a lone tornado, as well as appearances by a coven of Methodist crones, an encampment of Appalachian crop thieves, six renegade coal-truck operators, an outraged mob of factory rats, a dysfunctional poultry plant, and one autodidact goat-roping farm boy by the name of John Kaltenbrunner. Lord of the Barnyard is a brilliantly comic tapestry of a Middle America still populated by river rats and assembly-line poultry killers, measuring into shot glasses the fruits of years of quiet desperation on the factory floor. Unforgettable and linguistically dizzying, it goes much farther than postal.’ — Grove Press

 

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Excerpt

Chapter One Baker is situated in Pullman Valley, a twelve-mile pothole which was gutted into the modern-day corn belt by the glaciers of a preceding ice age. The western lip of the valley rises to 425 m above sea level, with the crowning limestone peaks on the northern end towering an additional 20 m over all the rest. Between this 600 yard escarpment and the treeless barrens to the northeast lies a maze of knobs and hollows, all thick with saw-briars, sassafras, dogwood and fool’s gold. Most of the soil is fairly worn, though it was once among the most fertile in the state. The summers are hot and long, the winters brief, yet occasionally brutal. Positioned at the northeast corner of the town line, almost perfectly centered in the valley — just south of where the Patokah river veers off from its course along the eastern wall and cuts in toward the community — lies Gwendolyn Hill, home to the Ebony Steed coal company and probably the greatest key in existence to Baker’s muddled past.

Sometime during the postwar industrial mobilization that swept across the corn belt and brought towns like Baker alive with manufacturing plants, a Bostonian entrepreneur by the name of Glendan Castor moved into an old Antebellum home on the north end of town. Castor had purchased three square miles of land in Pullman Valley with the intention of founding a mining operation. It was a fundamentally sound investment, as the land was cheap and the availability of an expendable labor force seemingly inexhaustible — New England money goes a long way in the corn belt. However, what he did not foresee was the endless chain of complications that would come about as the result of his chosen site for operations. Had he known what lay beneath the surface of Gwendolyn Hill, he very well may have packed up and headed back to Boston straightaway.

As it was, the establishment of the company was fraught with disastrous setbacks right from the beginning. Unbeknownst to all concerned at the time, Gwendolyn Hill had been the original site of an early European settlement/trading post, of which most existing records had vanished. In addition, Pullman Valley had been previously inhabited by a tribe of Shawnee Indians. In effect, this meant that encased in the hillside lay a scrap heap of Kentucky rifles, dead Indians, corroded whisky stills, sod houses, busted cooking utensils and grindstones, all of which were deemed `archaeologically significant’ in contemporary legal terms. As standard governmental policy dictated, the discovery of any such find mandated that the respective bureau in the capital be notified at once, and that all operations be temporarily seized. A crew of archaeologists would then be sent in to pick apart the 1.5 mile reservoir with a fine-toothed comb. Which was all good and well for everyone concerned, except the coal-truck operators on unemployment. Castor’s original crew had unknowingly inherited a buried pig sty left behind by its forebears.

If a white burial ground was unearthed, the church was called in to exhume the graves. That took two weeks. If an Indian burial ground was unearthed, the bureau of archaeology was deployed. That took up to two months. During that time the company’s enormous million dollar coal trucks, each being the size of the average American home, were left unattended, lined up in a row like sick dinosaurs at a watering hole. Their operators filled the taverns, commiserating openly and drinking themselves blind. Before long, they’d become an active public menace. Their behavior was frowned on all through the community. They themselves were miserable and bored. Knockdown brawls resulted. The whole crew was thrown in the county jail overnight on more than one occasion. And no sooner would operations finally get underway again than someone would churn up a section of an old stone wall during a munitions blast, landing everyone back in the bread line for another few weeks. Back to the taverns, back to the public charge. It became a serious problem. Castor’s operations started to falter. The company’s future was in jeopardy. Some of the operators walked off the job, and, contrary to the way it had been mapped out, they were no longer so easily replaceable.

But the precarious nature of the situation was never more apparent than on the afternoon a routine blast turned up a fully intact, perfectly preserved, calcified skeleton of a grown wooly mammoth. The moment `exhibit #1A,’ as it would later be called, appeared on the southern end of the main quarry, the coal-truck operators leapt out of their rigs and ran screaming along the ledge with their heads in their hands. They swore that was it — it was all over; they would be shut down for the entire season this time. They stood in a flap-jawed row along the drop off, staring down at the half-submerged ribcage protruding from the gravel. Visions of terminal unemployment and public disgrace swept over them. It probably would’ve been curtains for the entire company right then and there had one man not quietly stepped forward and told them all to keep their hats on. At the time, the head of the human resources department at Ebony Steed was a barrel-chested, charismatic graduate of the university of St. Louis by the name of Ford Kaltenbrunner. Kaltenbrunner, in his trademark levelheaded manner, climbed down into the quarry, threw a black tarp over the latest find, and instructed everyone to take a break. All eyes followed him as he made his way back up the embankment to Castor’s office-house.

The outcome of the resulting conference was this: the company’s administrators unanimously concluded, under advisement from Kaltenbrunner, that it was high time Ebony Steed took a few basic matters into its own hands. In the interest of self-preservation and at the risk of crippling legal repercussions, it was thereby decreed that, from that day forward, all significant archaeological finds would be handled in a clandestine manner. Kaltenbrunner himself was appointed overseer of the coverup. Beginning with the latest discovery, all artifacts were to be recorded, dusted off, and turned over to him personally. He would then package the material with any pertinent information intact, and store it in a secret, well-concealed location where no one, including Castor, could get to it. The less anyone knew of its whereabouts, the more secure the coverup, it was reasoned. The new policy was effective immediately. Consequently, the company wasn’t shut down once for the next eleven years. Kaltenbrunner, for his efforts, was promoted and compensated accordingly. He rose through the ranks of Ebony Steed and was soon second only to Castor himself, though in the eyes of the machinery operators he was clearly the most capable man in the company, bar none. He was widely respected and well-liked, seen as a fair man, a brilliant conversationalist, and one of the finest drinking partners this side of the cross. His sway over those around him was widely coveted. He was consulted for professional and personal advice on a regular basis. He was never known to turn down anyone in genuine need of his help.

At the age of thirty-four he was married to an area seamstress of Welsh descent. He and his wife put a down-payment on an estate situated one mile due north of Gwendolyn Hill, just across the river. Ford set up a study in the attic of the farmhouse and soon lined the shelves with long rows of research material pertaining to his archaeological inquiries. His library grew, as did his personal interest in the subject matter. The highly classified evidence from the mine was stored in a hidden location, the whereabouts of which not even Madame Kaltenbrunner was aware. Everything else remained in the attic. A growing collection of textbooks lined the lower shelves of the wall-mounted book rack positioned over the main desk. Information pertaining not only to the heritage and ancestry of the original inhabitants of Gwendolyn Hill, but also further analysis on the settlement and foundation of all of Baker: a chronological study of European migrations to the Midwest, the development of industry in the corn belt, the genesis of waterway navigation on the Patokah, the establishment of the railroads, pre and postwar farm production, the staggering effects of prohibition on a community of drunkards, barnstormings, cornhuskings, quilting bees, revivalism, wood-sawing contests, and even family charts on a good many of the town’s oldest residents. Exactly what he was working toward will remain a matter of conjecture, but the fact of the matter stands: Ford Kaltenbrunner probably had a tighter lock on the local populace than anyone in history.

At the age of thirty-eight, when he and his wife conceived their first child, Ford was at the height of his powers. Glendan Castor had become a washed out, embittered old ghost at Ebony Steed, little more than a peripheral reminder that, technically, there was still someone higher up on the ladder than Kaltenbrunner himself. With that in mind, it’s no wonder that Ford’s untimely demise, which was officially attributed to an explosion caused by a buildup of methane gas in one of the underground caverns, immediately prompted allegations of foul play all through the community.

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** kier, Buddy! I trust you arrived safely and soundly and all of that. So happy you liked the post. I’m with you: I don’t like most of Sally Mann’s work, but the body farm photos are great. Really, your new drawings are incredible. I gazed at them and zoomed in and peered very lengthily. There’s a certain someone whose effigy not only needs to be burned but nuclear bombed. My Thursday? Mostly angling forward re: the film, or trying to. Trying to find a venue in LA to do the cast and crew screening. Seeing if a certain film festival we covet would let us submit our film. Not much else, truth be told. How was your first day of one on one with Copenhagen? When does the show you’re in open again? Love, me. ** jay, Hi, Jay! Happy you liked the Bryan Kent Ward pieces. Ah, a casual party, the best kind of party perhaps. I suppose full-on heavy costume parties have their charms. Excellent about the fun quotient. Anything of note intersect with your Friday? ** _Black_Acrylic, Great episode, sir, which I finality got to concentrate on to my hearts delight. An especially beautiful one, I thought, but my idea of beauty is … well, you know. Lots of new things I’d never heard of and found riveting. Off the top of my head, Koyil (is that a Coil reference?), Flume, Rude 66, and that Mono-Enzyme track, wow. Masterfully organised and segued as always. Thank you, Ben. Always such a boon. Yeah, I interviewed Tom for that Phaeton book. Such a smart, cool guy. ** Tyler Ookami, Hi, Tyler. Haha, well, I guess Anna von Hausswolff could have conceivably made that in some perfect/imperfect world. Thanks a bunch for those links. Super useful. Everyone, Should you be a fan or potential fan of Nekojiru, Tyler has located an archive of their works in English that you can access here. Ooh, with stickers attached! Thank you again. I hope you’re doing really great. ** Lucas, Hi! Awesome. Well, you know I recommend Paris as a settling down locale if/when it comes to that. Me either re: living in isolation. I need bustle and culture and hassle to stay alert. I’ve never even understood people getting ‘summer homes’ in the countryside much less when people move into rural places to retire. It just seems like giving up to me. But all’s good, all’s fair. Thinking more clearly is a success. Speaking from recent experience. I know of Car Seat Headrest, of course, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard them. I’m not even sure what I imagine they’ll sound like. I’ll try to catch up. My yesterday did not involve a huge drama, so that’s a plus relatively speaking. ** Justin D, Hey, J. That rhymes! That ‘Crossing’ trailer is appealing. Cool, I’ll look for space to watch it. Thanks, pal. For years after I turned vegetarian in my early teens, the only thing I missed about eating meat was In-N-Our burgers. Back then they were a local SoCal venture, and I think there were only two of them. Now there’s even a new one in Paris where people have to wait hours in line to get one. Anyway, score on your end, obviously. My Thursday was just trying to move forward with the film, and it was mildly successful. And eating decent pasta. Has the weekend started promisingly for you? ** nat, Howdy, nat, and thanks. What a curious internet project. Sounds like something one could discuss forever. Glad things are rolling along in your world. In mine too, just a little too slowly for my taste. ** Right. When the remarkable novel in the spotlight today was first published, it received immense acclaim in the US, France, and probably elsewhere. Egolf was deemed a new literary wunderkind. He killed himself not so long after the novel was published. In the years since, the novel seems to have been completely forgotten. I can’t remember the last time I saw anyone even reference it. And if you think that makes it perfect fodder for this blog, of course you’re right. See you tomorrow.