Matt Bell, Matthew Derby & the Best of the Web
Did everyone else already know that Matt Bell is going to be the series editor for Dzanc’s Best of the Web series, beginning with the 2010 book? I didn’t, but aren’t I glad to know it now? Yes. Anyway, I learned this information in a note Matt posted to facebook about also-Matt Matthew Derby, whose story “January in December” from Guernica will be anthologized in BotW2009, edited by Lee K. Abbott. (Disclosure/chest-beating: I am a proud alum of the BotW series; my story “The Jealousy of Angels” appeared in the 2008 edition, which was edited by Steve Almond.) After the jump, MB’s full facebook post: his explanation of what BotW is, his introduction of Derby, and then a long guest-post by Derby himself about the writing of “January in December.”
drunk post: does anyone want Logan’s Run on DVD?
So it’s been an uneventful Memorial Weekend Sunday of drinking and doing laundry here in Houston. I finally got around to watching Logan’s Run, a sci-fi film based on the novel of the same name by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson. I’ve owned this movie for a few years, but never got around to watching it.
Until now.
Paragraphs I’d Chew My Way Through a Mold Barn To Have Written (2): Matthew Derby
Super Flat Times, pg. 156, from ‘Instructions’
Before I lost my wife I had only ever hit one other person, and that was in junior high. His face is like a cotton swab in my memory now–he floats there in slow motion, holding a black book bag over his groin outside the locker room. It’s the Sesquicentennial and we’re getting out early to see the tall robots. I remember the scent of a person, the way it changes the air in a room. Louis Burney smelled like hair and lighter fluid–he came from the developments, where kids pissed out their territory and traveled in herds. I hit him in the gut–the reason isn’t so important anymore. The sound, though, is the thing. Like two sounds at once–and one of them is like the whole world just lifting up and folding over.