The best fiction out there can be found in standup cabarets around the U.S. Comedians know how to wield the stick of verbal art to talk about the meaning of life better than anyone who types or scrawls alone in a room for a living. They also know how to stretch the boundaries of language and what topics we need to discuss openly given whatever input has been flooding the transom of everyone’s nightmares and unconscious fantasies.

I will never understand why LA and NYC are considered the full frontal super-weight fulcrums of the standup comedy sphere, but it doesn’t matter. Go to any standup house anywhere in North America and you’ll find men and women making up the most bizarre and often hilariously distasteful shit you’ve ever heard. I suppose LA and NYC are the best places because so many comics congregate in those regions (you can probably add Chicago in as well), but I’ve seen some great comedy in St. Louis, New Jersey, Tampa, Continue reading “On Stories, Fictions, Literature, and Jokes in the Modern World” →

The failings of modern human beings begin by not understanding who they really are. The idea of art is to labor hard to find ways into the truth of human experience — the Truth — TRUTH — and to pass that insight into the world as a gift to be shared specifically because the basic failing of modern human beings is that they don’t understand who they really are. (Note, most writers don’t achieve that goal, but they damn well try to).

So much of human experience is not honestly dealt with. Part of the fault there is that Continue reading “While We Wait for What Comes Next, Let’s Think A Bit More About Fear of Death and Love and Sex” →