The Fourteenth Factor (July 2015)
Let you be a person.
You are a person, you have a body.
If you are a person and you have a body, you have a name.
You have a secret.
literary
Dear Singularity (September 2014)
And I thought, well, you might get lonely, with all that data, all of it oblivious and naive to your coming.
Self Portrait Three (August 2012)
The role one plays depends on the story one reads. For me, the author of the story is quite umambiguously the Philippines. I am not a central character. But I am inside her, inside her body, drawn through a passageway two years ago, reading about my role day by day.
Interview with the Prostitute (October 2011)
It takes someone who has been in a whorehouse, participated in the conversation of the transaction of a body -- someone familiar with the bravado of the whore, the self-possession in her shoulders, her eyes -- as a painter sees the spectrum of green. Only a Lazarus can really know his Jesus. Am I the prodigal son?
Lovejoy: a Peace Corps Profile (July 2011)
She did yoga every morning. She had a stamina that consistently wore out volunteers half her age. I'd tromped across beaches and boulevards with her, myself dehydrated and dog-tired and ready to crawl into the nearest tricycle or pedicab while Holly strolled along blissfully energetic.
Anticipating Desire (June 2010)
This is three o'clock on a Friday afternoon in Suite 1024 of the Hotel Chelsea which is an old building on 23rd with iron staircases and high school hallways and hostel firedoors and long-stay resident artists and layers and layers of paint that remind you, as does everyone you talk to, that the hotel has seen layers and layers of artso
Burning Heart (June 2010)
The photos were raw: a teenage boy wearing a Marlboro shirt and holding an Uzi, two scrawny old men with old Chinese wiseman wrinkled faces officiating a cockfight, a crowd with fists raised singing the national anthem.
French Quarter Fest: A New Orleans Story (April 2010)
French Quarter seafood pasta, fried seafood bites, chargrilled oysters, beef tacos, chicken tacos, fish tacos, hand grenade, happy gator, tropical itch, Abita beer, HUGE ASS BEERS TO GO, Jockama IPA, Purple Haze, Amber Light, Jungle Juice, Pina Colada, Southern Comfort strawberry freeze, Michael Jackson Warhol-style portraits on tattered canvas, $100, Tim Burton trees, Lucien Freud flesh, skulls, endless fleurs de lis
In Mi Casita: A Roswell Story (March 2010)
There was a dozen tables front to back. Old fashioned stools at the counter where two old ladies sat the whole time I was there and a somberro pinata at the end of the counter like it was sleeping or something. The salt and peppers looked like old ashtrays. That amber tinted glass you always see in old ashtrays, is what I mean.
Social Aid & Pleasure Club Second Line: A New Orleans Story (March 2010)
You start at Big Man Lounge where everyone's gathered in the street listening to the ReBirth Brass Band, which is a guy rigged with a marching drumset, two trombones, a bari sax, a sousaphone chugging along on a debaucherous walking bass, three trumpets already squealing the high stuff even though the walk hasn't started, and being a trumpeter yourself you wonder how the hell they're going to keep that up for the three and a half miles to Diva's Lounge, not even factoring the syrup air and sun.
In the Public Library: A Taos Story (February 2010)
The thing that really got me was, here was this cowboy type, boots and beard and ect--everyone had beards here--and his Rolling Stone cover is some shirtless hearthrob rocker. That really got me.
At Songs Fine Asian: A Taos Story (February 2010)
The reason I bring it up at all is when I was leaving. They had this dusty old and cracking "Opening Soon" sign stuck behind the back porch. That and a Power Hoop basketball hoop. The whole family probably lived above the place. But it made me think, that sign.
In the Thai Cafe: A Taos Story (February 2010)
Sort of when I was finishing up the noodle stuff, I noticed the waitress had been, you know, rotating this paper between her fingers. It had to be the check. I'm sure she wasn't trying to let me see her doing it, but that wasn't the point. It was clear to me.
1337: A Game Novel (January 2010)
Level after level Ana had complained the game was an "endless reinforcement of the patriarchal hegemony," and each time Elle sang back "We all wanna change the world," but nobody had nullhypothesis to say when we got to the Postmodern Era. There, cyberterrorists, political action committees, rising seas and receding treelines, drug-resistant bacteria, monopolistic global corporations, cultural imperialism, sweat shops and school shootings, and all the poverty and wealth, malnutrition and obesity, sad ignorance and sadder hyperintelligence of this post-racial, post-gendered, post-industrial, post-national, post-meaning, post-nonsense, post-white-picket-fence, post-office, post-material, post-consumer-content, post-real, post-POST era vied for our attention.
Pandu, Who Was A Boy (March 2004)
In his thoughts the boy made up a game that was just his own: he would pretend that perhaps he was special, the most special person in the world, because perhaps he, unlike anyone else, had no father. Perhaps he had only a mother, and this somehow gave him a special power. It was part of this mysterious power that he could run fast and could memorize the Mahabharata so easily.
Is Everyman an Iceberg (August 2003)
Each isles craggy cliff or shingled shore
Is a soule inimitable postcard: it tales its tale
Of that windswept waterswept journey.
An each mans an islan, for poor or for worse...
The Shore Road Mystery (March 1986)
Frank and Joe said to aunty we must go now. We have a mystery in mind.
home
Be happy...and be a good wife (October 2025)
Whatever story I'm on, whether film or lit or lyric or ritual, my brain tunnel-vision defaults to seeing the scene in service of a plot which is in turn serving some kind of point. My personal little Big Idea watching Late Spring is that, for Ozu, the point serves the plot that serves the scene.
DIY billiard table for under $300 dollars (November 2023)
A cue ball, stationary on a green bed of felt, on the other hand, is seen and readily described as being such and such distance from an eight-ball that is such and such angle from the corner pocket, requiring such and such force to reach its terminus.
Spheria and Kalavria: Two Islands Become One (May 2017)
You who are here,
Hear,
And plant your blessings
Upon this ground,
A solemn promise resting
The Rachmaninoff Vocalise (August 2016)
I can't think how to describe what it sounded like. I try to recall an image of J.B., standing there, singing a song without words, slow and sad, in C-sharp minor.
Adagio for Trumpet (August 2015)
Said Barber, 'They always play that piece. I wish they'd play some of my other pieces.'
The Fourteenth Factor (July 2015)
Let you be a person.
You are a person, you have a body.
If you are a person and you have a body, you have a name.
You have a secret.
Self Portrait Three (August 2012)
The role one plays depends on the story one reads. For me, the author of the story is quite umambiguously the Philippines. I am not a central character. But I am inside her, inside her body, drawn through a passageway two years ago, reading about my role day by day.
Rebecca True and Charlie Kind (February 2010)
I was driving home from this sushi place, I don't know, probably the only one in town. And I had my radio on the local NPR. Really local, know what I mean. It was Mexico music hour apparently and I fell in love instantly. Playing, one of those slow ballads with the guitarron plucking away, lullaby walking bass.
1337: A Game Novel (January 2010)
Level after level Ana had complained the game was an "endless reinforcement of the patriarchal hegemony," and each time Elle sang back "We all wanna change the world," but nobody had nullhypothesis to say when we got to the Postmodern Era. There, cyberterrorists, political action committees, rising seas and receding treelines, drug-resistant bacteria, monopolistic global corporations, cultural imperialism, sweat shops and school shootings, and all the poverty and wealth, malnutrition and obesity, sad ignorance and sadder hyperintelligence of this post-racial, post-gendered, post-industrial, post-national, post-meaning, post-nonsense, post-white-picket-fence, post-office, post-material, post-consumer-content, post-real, post-POST era vied for our attention.
TWEET, TWEET: a mysticotelegraphic fistbump panegyric to the american open road odyssey (October 2009)
Ars poetica 4 the roadtrip
A roadtrip is an ablution, a high grayed uncut line, a tome
A roadtrip is a lollipop, best sucked lovingly @ the teat
Teaching Writing as a Performing Art: A Paradigm for the College Writing Class (April 2006)
This has led me to wonder how teachers of developing writers might best negotiate their knowledge that writing is a performance when our students feel writing to be an essentialist expression of self.
John J. McAleer: The Making of Rex Stout's Biography (July 2005)
I scanned a six-year long correspondence between the writer and his biographer. I watched the relationship—and the biographical project—develop from an initial, self-conscious fan letter, to mutual respect and attempts at scholarship, to, finally, a consuming labor of love: an authorized literary biography.
Pandu, Who Was A Boy (March 2004)
In his thoughts the boy made up a game that was just his own: he would pretend that perhaps he was special, the most special person in the world, because perhaps he, unlike anyone else, had no father. Perhaps he had only a mother, and this somehow gave him a special power. It was part of this mysterious power that he could run fast and could memorize the Mahabharata so easily.
Is Everyman an Iceberg (August 2003)
Each isles craggy cliff or shingled shore
Is a soule inimitable postcard: it tales its tale
Of that windswept waterswept journey.
An each mans an islan, for poor or for worse...
The Personal Website of J Mark Fullmer (April 2003)
'J Mark Fullmer grew up in Southern California in the 1990s. He read extensively as a child, acted in a local children's theatre group, played Little League baseball, NJB basketball, and was a boy scout. '
The Shore Road Mystery (March 1986)
Frank and Joe said to aunty we must go now. We have a mystery in mind.
internet
The Personal Website of J Mark Fullmer (April 2003)
'J Mark Fullmer grew up in Southern California in the 1990s. He read extensively as a child, acted in a local children's theatre group, played Little League baseball, NJB basketball, and was a boy scout. '
academic
Teaching Writing as a Performing Art: A Paradigm for the College Writing Class (April 2006)
This has led me to wonder how teachers of developing writers might best negotiate their knowledge that writing is a performance when our students feel writing to be an essentialist expression of self.
John J. McAleer: The Making of Rex Stout's Biography (July 2005)
I scanned a six-year long correspondence between the writer and his biographer. I watched the relationship—and the biographical project—develop from an initial, self-conscious fan letter, to mutual respect and attempts at scholarship, to, finally, a consuming labor of love: an authorized literary biography.
film
TWEET, TWEET: a mysticotelegraphic fistbump panegyric to the american open road odyssey (October 2009)
Ars poetica 4 the roadtrip
A roadtrip is an ablution, a high grayed uncut line, a tome
A roadtrip is a lollipop, best sucked lovingly @ the teat
music
Tribute to Caesar (Arvo Pärt) (August 2017)
Then he saith unto them
Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's
and unto God the things that are God's
When they had heard these words
they marvelled and left him
and went on their way
Spheria and Kalavria: Two Islands Become One (May 2017)
You who are here,
Hear,
And plant your blessings
Upon this ground,
A solemn promise resting
The Rachmaninoff Vocalise (August 2016)
I can't think how to describe what it sounded like. I try to recall an image of J.B., standing there, singing a song without words, slow and sad, in C-sharp minor.
Adagio for Trumpet (August 2015)
Said Barber, 'They always play that piece. I wish they'd play some of my other pieces.'
Rebecca True and Charlie Kind (February 2010)
I was driving home from this sushi place, I don't know, probably the only one in town. And I had my radio on the local NPR. Really local, know what I mean. It was Mexico music hour apparently and I fell in love instantly. Playing, one of those slow ballads with the guitarron plucking away, lullaby walking bass.
peace-corps
Self Portrait Three (August 2012)
The role one plays depends on the story one reads. For me, the author of the story is quite umambiguously the Philippines. I am not a central character. But I am inside her, inside her body, drawn through a passageway two years ago, reading about my role day by day.
Cause and Fall (December 2011)
That morning there was rain and a drunk grandson yelling above his lungs at a door for the key. Yelling at a door. Grandson: we all have our old lolitas, even after we grow up. But what about the key. In this conspiracy the door has an accomplice.
Interview with the Prostitute (October 2011)
It takes someone who has been in a whorehouse, participated in the conversation of the transaction of a body -- someone familiar with the bravado of the whore, the self-possession in her shoulders, her eyes -- as a painter sees the spectrum of green. Only a Lazarus can really know his Jesus. Am I the prodigal son?
Lovejoy: a Peace Corps Profile (July 2011)
She did yoga every morning. She had a stamina that consistently wore out volunteers half her age. I'd tromped across beaches and boulevards with her, myself dehydrated and dog-tired and ready to crawl into the nearest tricycle or pedicab while Holly strolled along blissfully energetic.
Burning Heart (June 2010)
The photos were raw: a teenage boy wearing a Marlboro shirt and holding an Uzi, two scrawny old men with old Chinese wiseman wrinkled faces officiating a cockfight, a crowd with fists raised singing the national anthem.
pc1
Burning Heart (June 2010)
The photos were raw: a teenage boy wearing a Marlboro shirt and holding an Uzi, two scrawny old men with old Chinese wiseman wrinkled faces officiating a cockfight, a crowd with fists raised singing the national anthem.
pc2
Interview with the Prostitute (October 2011)
It takes someone who has been in a whorehouse, participated in the conversation of the transaction of a body -- someone familiar with the bravado of the whore, the self-possession in her shoulders, her eyes -- as a painter sees the spectrum of green. Only a Lazarus can really know his Jesus. Am I the prodigal son?
Lovejoy: a Peace Corps Profile (July 2011)
She did yoga every morning. She had a stamina that consistently wore out volunteers half her age. I'd tromped across beaches and boulevards with her, myself dehydrated and dog-tired and ready to crawl into the nearest tricycle or pedicab while Holly strolled along blissfully energetic.
pc3
Self Portrait Three (August 2012)
The role one plays depends on the story one reads. For me, the author of the story is quite umambiguously the Philippines. I am not a central character. But I am inside her, inside her body, drawn through a passageway two years ago, reading about my role day by day.
Cause and Fall (December 2011)
That morning there was rain and a drunk grandson yelling above his lungs at a door for the key. Yelling at a door. Grandson: we all have our old lolitas, even after we grow up. But what about the key. In this conspiracy the door has an accomplice.
finance
How I approach finances to retire early (October 2021)
If things go according to forecast I'll retire in the next few years. This departure from the norm of retiring in your 60s, a financial planning concept referred to a 'Financially Independent, Retire Early (a.k.a FIRE), will have been made possible through more than a decade of planning, steady income, and just as steady saving. More than a decade, yes. But not decades.
yesterday
Space Wheel (July 2022)
Inside a long rectangular cardboard box decorated in the retro-futurism of swooping lines and NASA-inspired fonts (think Isaac Asimov and _Tron_) lays a single sheaf of paper cut to the same long rectangle as the cardboard box. This paper is not the Owner’s Explanation and Operating Manual. It carries this inscription: 'A Message to the Citizens of Earth'
diy
DIY billiard table for under $300 dollars (November 2023)
A cue ball, stationary on a green bed of felt, on the other hand, is seen and readily described as being such and such distance from an eight-ball that is such and such angle from the corner pocket, requiring such and such force to reach its terminus.
heuristics
The way of the illuminated manuscript (March 2025)
Something special about humanity -- perhaps the most special thing -- is going the way, not simply of horse-drawn carriages and card catalogs, but of the illuminated manuscript.
reviews
Be happy...and be a good wife (October 2025)
Whatever story I'm on, whether film or lit or lyric or ritual, my brain tunnel-vision defaults to seeing the scene in service of a plot which is in turn serving some kind of point. My personal little Big Idea watching Late Spring is that, for Ozu, the point serves the plot that serves the scene.