A Woman and a Man. The Man carries a short stool and a laptop.
The Woman kneels down on her hands and knees. She bends her head down and stares at the ground.
The Man approaches the Woman, sits down on the stool and places the laptop on the her back, then opens it. He starts writing on it, using the woman as a desk.
I’ll be presenting on March 8th at INTED 2010 in Valencia, Spain and then doing a reading in Rome later that week. Mark the calendar…
Manolo the Shoeblogger, writer of one of the fashion industry’s most read blogs, mentions he’s reading The Kingdom of Absurdities. Thanks for the mention, Manolo! And thanks to Susanna for the nice comment: “As a second-time grad student, I am currently experiencing the four horsemen of diversity fatigue, the vapidity of political correctness, pedanticism and verbosity minus proper attendant vocabulary. Gatenby understands and Norman Mailer was wrong, wrong, wrong. A fascinating and hilarious book about grad school can be written.” Appreciate it.
Update: And thanks for the great email in return, Manolo. I blush…
The Goodreads.com contest is now over. 1,018 people entered to win free copies of The Kingdom of Absurdities. Congrats to the 5 winners; your copies are on the way. If you’re in Spain or Italy next month, I’d be happy to sign them. As for the other 1,013 people, another contest coming soon…
The train pulled into Rome’s Termini station late afternoon on that hot, sticky August day. It was just after Ferragosto, the Virgin’s ascension day and the third most important Italian holiday. The arrival into Rome past the crumbling old city walls is not an inspiring one. The train tracks, overgrown with grass and littered with garbage, are lined with rundown apartment buildings, laundry hanging outside windows open against the heat, and scattered, desolate, overgrown ruins from the Roman Empire. Rome may be the eternal city, but time has not been kind in its decline and fall. German train stations are clean, orderly, and impressive while Italian ones are dirty, chaotic, and unimpressive. Compare Berlin’s Hauptbahnhof and Rome’s Stazioni Termini and you’ll see what I mean.
While stopped at the Brenner pass at 3 am for the changing of the guard, I’d started chatting with a young Italian woman seated across from me. Valentina, 28, a journalist with black hair and a bright wide smile, spoke a mixture of Italian and English and wrote about calcio, soccer, for a small Roman paper trying to compete with the pink pages of the national Gazetto dello Sport. It was half the price but had only one third the readership. She joked about working for the second largest sporting news in the capital and about her boyfriend, Ciccio, who was getting too fat to even consider sleeping with. When girls complain about their boyfriends, which they usually do, they’re either looking for confirmation that they’re still attractive to someone else, or they’re on the hunt for a new boyfriend. After a few more hours of chatting turned mild flirtation, since I didn’t have an Italian cell number yet, we exchanged email addresses when we arrived at Termini and said we’d get together for caffé and chiacchierata, more chitchat. But before even thinking about replacing Ciccio, I had to concentrate on finding a place to live…
CLICK STORIES TO CONTINUE READING
Thanks for the honorable mention. From a brief review of The Kingdom of Absurdities on Red Adept’s Kindle Book Review: “I read the very long ‘prologue’ and a portion of the first chapter. I found the writing to be very good, almost too good as it made me work a little hard. 
I just had trouble getting into the subject matter. The editing was of professional quality. Also, I think many readers will enjoy the tongue-in-cheek humor present.”
An excellent article by Ted Genoways, editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, on the death of literary fiction. My favorite reader comment on the article: “I’m somewhat fed-up with a wanna-be writer friend of mine. His mantra is: “I live an interesting life… the journey is the important thing.” Yet he’s over 30 and still lives at home with his parents. His “journey” is a journey to nowhere, yet that’s what he wants to write about. I read it only because he’s my friend. I can’t imagine why anyone else would…” And people wonder why I left America…
“There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.” —Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
Cloud Seven
Looking back, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Looking back, he could always blame it on her, the pierced, tattooed, i-Poded brunette, Prada sunglasses black areolas around her eyes, cell phone/camera lanyarded around her neck, swinging like a pendulum out of Poe, digital organizer cradled in one hand, a double-tall, no-doubt nonfat, caramel-laced coffee monstrosity in the other, as well as a leash looped around her right wrist trailing back to the trendy, midget dog du jour, she of the thrift store chic and Neiman Marcus makeover who walked right into him on Pine Street without looking up, and then blamed the ensuing materialistic, caramel-laced mess on him, supplying the Damascus moment so necessary to those waiting to see the light. Looking back, he could comfort himself with the ridiculous notion that no matter what decision he made it was always the wrong decision, but in the history of wrong decisions this one ranked right up there with invading Stalingrad in the winter. Looking back, somewhere, in the fog and mist of memory, lay the answer, the WHY. He needed to know the WHY. Why had he walked away from his comfortable life, why had he embarked on this particular course, why had he convinced himself he could easily adapt to a new and different environment, far away from family, friends, and personal history? Looking back–he couldn’t stop looking back, especially into the swirling Seattle fog and mist and rain of that last particularly nasty Pacific Northwest winter. Could a simple crushed heart among the Cascades really be the root cause of all of this?
Click here for pdf file of Chapter One
