Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Lost in the city

My name is Jack. I am a librarian; I currently work at the UNT-Dallas campus south of town, and I hope to have another librarian job soon. I am also a writer; if you asked me which profession I would prefer to be considered better at, I would emphatically tell you the latter.

I live in the city of Dallas, just off Oak Lawn, almost in Highland Park. At the hottest part of the day I don a wife-beater and army swim trunks and run down Armstrong Parkway. I run past the homes so large I find it hard to believe that anyone lives in them. Tejano music, blasted out of the pickup trucks and dusty stereos of the Mexican workers who maintain these homes, provides the soundtrack of this daily jog.

I lost nearly ninety pounds once, only to discover the same person beneath all that fat. It was mildly disappointing.

I call myself a writer but I've yet to publish anything. That should change this fall, when I begin sending out stories from my master's thesis. Right now, I can't see writing a novel, even though I keep trying to resuscitate an aborted attempt from my workshop days. I keep telling myself that, one day, a novel's just going to spill out of me. Until then, I'm reading things that other, better people have spilled out, like Stephen Wright's "Meditations in Green" and Harry Crews' "A Feast of Snakes." But I prefer short stories; I enjoy being able to check out a collection from the Oak Lawn branch down the road and not having to read the whole thing to get an appreciation of it. In that category, I am reading Mark Richard's "The Ice at the Bottom of the World," Larry Brown's "Facing the Music," Mark Jude Poirier's "Naked Pueblo," and Scott Snyder's "Voodoo Heart." I think that there's a book about Dallas waiting to be written. If Michael Cunningham can write a great book about Cleveland, then why not Dallas?

The best albums I have bought this year are "Fishscale" by Ghostface and "Everything All the Time" by Band of Horses. I still haven't given "A Hundred Miles Off" by the Walkmen much of a chance. I would buy the new discs from Sufjan Stevens and Okkervil River, but I don't want the sloppy seconds of superior albums from last year. The two releases I am most excited about in the fall are the sophomore efforts from The Rapture and TV on the Radio. Invariably, the latter's "Desperate Youth, Bloodthirsty Babes" has been playing non-stop on my car stereo ever since I moved here. TVOTR reminds me of this city: steely, warm, detached, throbbing, and full of pissed-off black people.

I haven't done much since I've been here. Weekends are spent sleeping off the past week. I have an urge to be part of some cultural scene but must remind myself that I really don't care all that much. If there's been one constant in my life, it's not really fitting in with whatever group I'm surrounded by at any given moment.

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