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Jay

The Risk Taken

I ride my bike to the bus stop almost every work day — even in the winter. That sounds crazy, but it’s hardly that; biking in the winter is actually much more pleasant and not any more dangerous than in warmer seasons. With a few key pieces of clothing you will not get cold. In The Risk Taken

Book Review: The Man Who Was Thursday

Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday is a mystery novel about a poet and secret agent, Gabriel Syme, and his mission to infiltrate an inner circle of anarchists in early 20th century London. He first meets Lucian Gregory, a fellow poet and one of the anarchists, and through some verbal sparring he goads Gregory into Book Review: The Man Who Was Thursday

Waste Your Life Away With Words

A photographer friend of mine, Jonathan, was telling me about a discussion he had with someone at a video shoot we had just covered for Noisecreep. This person asked Jonathan how to become a photographer. He said his response was this, roughly paraphrased: “I didn’t really know what to tell the guy. The way you Waste Your Life Away With Words

Spin the Dradle, Nauseate Your Inbox

Hanukah starts at sundown today and it snowed a little bit in Pittsburgh, so to celebrate these two unrelated events I set up email subscriptions to jd.com — in case you’re one of the five people that read this site and are scared of URL locators and RSS readers. You will make your inbox vomit. Spin the Dradle, Nauseate Your Inbox

Read It, Won’t Buy the T-Shirt

I recently subscribed to the wonderfully-designed blog of someone high-profile in the publishing industry — a writer and editor. There was a good amount of useful information for people like me: unpublished twerps waiting in line to get their hopes eradicated. But there was also plenty of drek: two levels of main navigation, advertisement graphics Read It, Won’t Buy the T-Shirt

Book Review: The Road

The Road is Cormac McCarthy’s tenth book, and it’s about a father and his son traveling through a post-apocalyptic America. It was panned by critics and by the crowning jewel of praise, Oprah, and has been already been shuffled out of Hollywood as a film. McCarthy’s other recent success which made it to film was Book Review: The Road

Book Review: The Moviegoer

Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer is probably his best known work, and it was highly-praised from its first pressing in 1962. Though mostly plot-less, it follows a few month in the life of Binx Bolling, a stock broker and veteran of the Korean War who now lives a quiet life in suburban New Orleans. The book Book Review: The Moviegoer

Vitruvian Rendezvous

The other day I ran into one of my pastors downtown. He had on his headphones so I laid my hand on his shoulder in the most non-threatening way one could do. We talked for a few minutes on the sidewalk in front of a coat store, and it was the sort of interaction seemed Vitruvian Rendezvous

One Set Future

There’s colored yarn strings of stuttered graffiti phrases on the once-bare concrete walls that parallel the east busway on the ride into downtown. One of the legible phrases is “NO SET FUTURE”, set in half-serifed seafoam. Given the number of people that ride on those buses every day I’m estimating that more people will read One Set Future

National Throw Words Onto A Screen Month

There’s an annual, month-long phenomenon called National Novel Writing Month (usually referenced by the offensively cutesy portmanteau, NaNoWriMo), and any writer with a blog worth its Google-salt is mentioning it — often through several posts. The idea is that participants spend the entire month of November writing, and completing, an entire 50k word novel, with National Throw Words Onto A Screen Month

Comments Closed, For Eternity

Through some recent discussions with a friend I’ve decided to take comments off the blog. Not that the comments were really a huge “problem” to begin with, but it’s more representative of something internal. I want this site to be a documentation of a cadre of various things, a few of which are broad topics Comments Closed, For Eternity

This Is Not What You Wanted

On an episode of 60 Minutes a while back I heard of a writer who preferred to create on a typewriter instead of a computer because it forced him to reconsider things more effectively. Ray Bradbury drafted Fahrenheit 451 on a rented typewriter in the basement of a college building. He inserted dimes at the This Is Not What You Wanted

The House of Usher (of Books)

“The grim phantasm,” of paper. The blurry, delicately left-aligned photograph you see here are all of the books in my possession that are in queue for reading. Please note the absence of the highest priority item, Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, which has been posted from an operative in Ebayland. You see, book club has The House of Usher (of Books)

An Assembly of Resented Fools

I ate an apple today that was named after a typical American male forename: Joey, Dennis, Christopher. Something. In my hand it was bigger and more dense than I expected and I wanted to yell out “APPLE GRENADE” before biting into it, but I generally like staying employed. Now the fruitbomb has been turned into An Assembly of Resented Fools

Book Review: Humble Apologetics

Humble Apologetics offers to steer Christians toward a better way of defending (or explaining) their belief system in the general market of religious ideas. As you can guess, like most of other books addressed to the church at large, author and theology professor John Stackhouse says church has been doing it wrong for the last Book Review: Humble Apologetics

Notebook Bought

Older than many things. It’s not very big (that’s a mini-pencil beside it), but I didn’t want anything bulky. The edges of some pages are yellowing, and there’s arcane charts and tables of measurements relating to growing and caring for commercial crops, some minimalist advertising for fertilizer, and two calendars of the entire year of Notebook Bought

Write It Down

Not my notebooks. I’ve toyed with the idea of a pocket notebook for a while, after reading somewhere about how Chesterton would stop while crossing the street to write down a thought. This is partly because I like to cause car accidents, but mostly because I can’t remember any thought that strikes me from the Write It Down

Making the Call

I may get some business cards printed up. Why? Because there have been a few instances where I wanted to give people my contact info for something writey-related and I had to resort to ye olde fashionede quill and parchment. It feels far less professional than handing over a decently designed business card. So here Making the Call

Book Review: Hipster Christianity

Brett McCracken’s Hipster Christianity attempts to document the fusion of modern western Christianity with the hipster subculture. It’s mostly a descriptive book with a bit of prescriptive advice at the end that might ruffle some feathers, but for the most part McCracken -– a writer for spiritual hipster publication Relevant magazine –- offers germane insight Book Review: Hipster Christianity

Collectivist Kids’ Books

Being the father of an almost-five year old and a book dweeb, I naturally enjoy reading her books with her — at least, as much as an adult can enjoy that sort of thing. The ones that are didactic are fairly innocuous in their delivery; they promote good manners, cooperation, learning, imagination, inventiveness (some of Collectivist Kids’ Books

I Heard Jesus Smoked Cloves

I received my copy of Hipster Christianity that I won from Mike Duran. When I unzipped the FedEx box, that one part from Handel’s Messiah echoed somewhere from the side of my house. You may recall that I won one of his handmade crosses a few months ago. Didn’t hear any Handel when the package I Heard Jesus Smoked Cloves

Wizard Needs Food…Badly

On a non-literary note, I did some tidying up on the site, most noticeably in the graphics department. It’s 8-bit time! After listening to some Anamanaguchi I redid the “jd” logo in the corner, jiggered the icons (and the content) on the About page — and made all the images one sprite file. I also Wizard Needs Food…Badly

The Confession of Chalcedon

I’ve informally made sure to keep this writey blog Christian-theology-free — and sometimes I skirt too close to the edge — but I’m not afraid to post in that area of interest if it has something to do with the engrossing use of language (I have a Venn diagram benignly hovering in my head). Enter The Confession of Chalcedon

Kill Your Friends

A longtime friend of mine, Seth W, wrote an e-book on killing your blog, a minimalist diatribe to encourage us to spend more time doing things rather than writing about them. This is coming from someone who has been blogging for nearly a decade and runs the Internet’s biggest metal sites (and who is singlehandedly Kill Your Friends

Book Review: Why I Am Not A Christian

Not so much a book as it is a compilation of essays and lectures, Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not A Christian encompasses, presumably, his reasoning for Christianity as a religious truth. I say “presumably” because I know Russell to have been a noted and influential philosopher, and that Why would follow in the tradition Book Review: Why I Am Not A Christian

English Be Hard: Skeletal Punctuation

The other day in the car the family was listening to a song from Anberlin, called “Reclusion”. One of the lines in the chorus goes like this: Sins like skeletons are so very hard to hide. Nice line, but it had me thinking that this could be taken two different ways, which aren’t radically different English Be Hard: Skeletal Punctuation

How the Gods Shook, Excerpt Two

The excerpt below is from a book I never published, titled How the Gods Shook or A Season Underneath. “What’s the story?” I asked. “Morning glory!” he said. “My battery is getting worse and worse. We should move to a quieter place. What’s with the cap?” “I’m not allowed to wear one?” Pedaling slowly, he How the Gods Shook, Excerpt Two

Planting(a) Seeds

A few years ago I started the official site for Alvin Plantinga, a distinguished professor of philosophy at Notre Dame. I had contacted him about doing a site after reading Warranted Christian Belief (read it all for free here). There were papers and other things floating around the web that weren’t really consolidated into one Planting(a) Seeds

How the Gods Shook, Excerpt One

The excerpt below is from a book I never published, titled How the Gods Shook or A Season Underneath. “Afternoon, Bite Size,” she breathed in her smooth contralto. “What’s up with you and Cecil?” I asked, pointing my chin towards 5th. “We were talking.” “I could see that.” “Then why’d you ask?” Her blue eyes How the Gods Shook, Excerpt One

Other People Write: Matt Clifford

Matt’s been my friends for more than a decade now, and we were in a band together so I got to witness the words firsthand. At the time I wasn’t too much attune to good writing that much, but in the last few years I’ve been recollecting and piecing together lyrics and things I’ve read Other People Write: Matt Clifford

How the Gods Book

I’ve been searching for ways to get the second draft of my book knocked out. Usually it’s “when I find time”, and this still holds true, but I will be finding more time in the next few months to actually pound this thing into submission. With that, I think I will be posting excerpts of How the Gods Book

Gods In One Sentence

Earlier this month Rachelle Gardner gathered a lot of responses from authors about the one-sentence book pitch contest. I mean, she’s a literary agent that encourages comments her blog, so of course authors are going to flock in droves to get themselves noticed. She could post about the off-color of her pee in the morning Gods In One Sentence

Your Writing Is Terrible: Summer Poetry

With the summer months upon the northern hemisphere, some fiction writers and bloggers will attend to the most favored of all seasons (except if you’re already somewhere hot…then it’s just annoying). Unfortunately, because of the common vocabulary bank tied to the summer experience, after a few dozen stories the flow and bounce of words will Your Writing Is Terrible: Summer Poetry

Memorial Day 2010 Bike Ride

I got a new bike over Memorial Day weekend: a steel frame Trek 520. It’s actually very old, but it’s new to me — and it’s my first road bike. I was using a mountain bike heft to my bus stop, which was certainly workable but not ideal in suburban/urban terrain. It was also a Memorial Day 2010 Bike Ride

Book Review: Economics In One Lesson

I was pretty excited to read this as it comes recommended by a lot of proponents of the Austrian school of economics. Despite knowing about Henry Hazlitt’s Economics In One Lesson, I didn’t know much of the content. I believe the title is misleading, because the lesson is actually just one sentence long. Hazlitt humorously Book Review: Economics In One Lesson

Paradox in Character Development

One of my favorite philosophical paradoxes is the Ship of Theseus. If I have a ship and I gradually replace the parts of the ship as they break or suffer from wear and tear, it’s possible that eventually I will have a ship with none of the original parts. The real ship of Theseus — Paradox in Character Development

Book Review: Wise Blood

I hadn’t heard of O’Connors Wise Blood until it mysteriously materialized in my to-read list. This might not be remarkable except for the fact that the mid-century book is highly rated both critically and general readership-wise. Maybe my cultural connection to the literary world and its history is still in question. The story follows Hazel Book Review: Wise Blood

Book Review: Pale Fire

Most people know of Nabokov from Lolita, a book bearing a title now synonymous with guileless jailbaiting teenage girls. Pale Fire was published after Lolita and hasn’t enjoyed its household word status, probably because it’s significantly more difficult to read and far less prurient. If you can successfully wade through his complicated narrative and strange Book Review: Pale Fire

Art All Night All Done

Saturday and Sunday were pretty busy for me, as it was Art All Night in Pittsburgh. I checked my “art” in (I goofed the process up a few times. Apparently I can’t follow simple written directions…) with Marcia and her husband Travis, came back to my place for some food, then hit up the actual Art All Night All Done

Art All Night, Falling Out My Pants

I registered to be a part of Art All Night in the Lawrenceville neighborhood of Pittsburgh. I won’t go into details about what it is, but basically anyone can submit a piece of art for it. I don’t qualify as a real artist but I am passable at graphic design — I’ll be submitting a Art All Night, Falling Out My Pants

Book Review: Her Fearful Symmetry

Her Fearful Symmetry is the followup to unfortunately-surnamed Niffennegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife (which, I have been told, is slightly more enjoyable and popular). The story revolves around twin sisters, Julia and Valentina, who inherit a flat in London, from a recently-deceased aunt’s. It’s located directly adjacent to the large, historic Highgate Cemetery, where their Book Review: Her Fearful Symmetry

The Devil’s Assistant

The Devil Wears Prada recently released the video for ‘Assistant to the Regional Manager’. I covered the video shoot for Noisecreep, so it was nice to see the finished product emerge. I only witnessed a fraction of the gruntwork, organization, and creativity that went into it, but I know that the entire videographic process is The Devil’s Assistant

Iinterviewedabearonce

Tiffany Cooper, a good friend of mine and one half of the Hot Metal Studio duo, recently let loose with a blog post containing photos of the interview I did with Iwrestledabearonce and their set at Diesel in Pittsburgh’s South Side. I’m not super into photos of myself but she did a great job. One Iinterviewedabearonce

Louis Armstrong Goes Death Metal

I have a recent post over at Noisecreep on a video of a death metal version of Louis Armstrong’s “What A Wonderful World”. It’s probably one of the only pop standards I really like, especially the elegance of the lyrics (“elegance” in the sense but “brief but meaningful”). My favorite line is the “dark, sacred Louis Armstrong Goes Death Metal

He Is Not Here

Come and see the place where he lay. -Matthew 28:6 I thought about writing another scripture-based story, like how I did with A Native’s Story, but the idea came to me about ten minutes ago and it’s already Easter. Maybe next year, if someone cares enough to remind me. EDIT on 4/5: My conscience/muse has He Is Not Here

It’s All Going To Be Happening

I’m interviewing Iwrestledabearonce tonight. Their new album is called It’s All Happening, and their vocalist may become a focus of furries if they get big enough. Do they know the convention is in Pittsburgh? Time is in front of my face and burning up quick. The ashes are getting in my eyes.

Book Review: Beyond Future Shock

Dr. Alaniz’ Beyond Future Shock is a triple combo romance-sci-fi-war novel that takes place over the span of a few millennia, though most of it is in the 20th and 21st centuries. The amount of quality reading material is cut about 50-50 with some drek that required an editor’s literary filtering to make a less Book Review: Beyond Future Shock

Norma Jean Interview, Part 2

Head on over to Noisecreep to read the second post from my interview with Cory Brandan from Norma Jean, about his graphic design work. We met in a venue’s smoky side room with an unused bar. There was a flossing pick on the couch on which we sat. Not sure if it was also unused; Norma Jean Interview, Part 2

The Internet Just Had Another Baby

It’s a boy. It was born with a switchblade in one hand, and in the other hand a slip of paper with your name and address on it.

The Sharp Hills

Pastor Joe spoke about the many messiahs and he used the Powerpoint to his great advantage. There were many of them, splendidly arrayed in their dopey spiritual regalia. The slides flew by one after another like a disjointed flipbook of crazies. Later that day I dozed somewhere and dreamed of being at work, on 38. The Sharp Hills

Listen and Learn

Maria Solheim’s “Train Underwater” slinks through the ear buds, introducing itself with a series of muddled swishes and string scrapes that barely step over into tonal territory; just before the simple, clean vocals and compressed low-end jabs. “At tiny ray of light sneaks up…” The Franktuary (formerly Hot Dogma) is on Oliver and 3rd. Reflecting Listen and Learn