More Faulkner, my time at the USPS, and a birthday.

Still reading the Faulkner bio---it is WILLIAM FAULKNER, THE MAN AND THE ARTIST by Stephen B. Oates. Terrific biography, I'm breezing through it and have already put THE SOUND AND THE FURY on hold at the library.

One of the more interesting things is that Faulkner was quite the layabout in his youth, causing quite the stir in his Mississippi hometown. At one point, he had a position as postmaster of the Ole Miss post office, but "read and wrote poetry on the job, sold stamps and sorted mail only when he felt like it. . . and generally went about with a cheerful disregard for his duties and his customers." Sounds like the typical postal worker to me, I guess Faulkner was sort of a pioneer.

I worked for the Quasi-Governmental Corporation with a Reputation for Workplace Violence for nearly seven years, and sadly it is still the place where I had the most career success. At one point I put in for a supervisor training program, but did not get it due to lack of experience as well as difficulty with the government format of writing for job applications. Glad I didn't do it at this point, I don't think I would have done well, and I would not want to be like all the other poor supervisors I had while I was there.

There were some real characters there, and every so often I attempt to write something or other about the place, but I have never been able to stick with it for long. But each time I feel like it gets a little more workable, and I'm hoping eventually I may pull it off. I think sometimes the problem is that the reality seems too unbelievable, which is a common problem when you're writing about true events.

Happy 38th birthday today [March 29] to my cousin, a Major in the Air Force. We were pretty close as kids, more like brothers, really. I had not seen him for some time but we got together again last year [for a sad occasion, unfortunately, a death in the family] and talked for a long bit. One of the things he said seemed to me like a perfect line to use in either a poem or story, but I am perplexed about how to use it. I continue to work on it...and of course I won't say what it is until I do figure it out!

Hitting the wall. A sort-of Library Saturday. Writing about writing.

I think this may be the longest I've gone without an entry. I suppose this is the point where people often quit. Not me.

The rug remains below our feet--my wife's job is still on, and it is just HR being HR as far as why she hasn't gotten any official offer or anything. We are in good shape until the end of summer, where I will have to go through the whole unemployment extension merry go round again. Unless of course, I get a job.

Still haven't heard, don't expect to until next week sometime. The good news is I haven't yet gotten a rejection letter, I've had interviews where they obviously sent the rejection letter off the very next day, if not the day of the interview.

Anyway, I'm trying to put it out of my mind.

I always like it when I am the first to get a library book--I've had that experience a couple of times recently, for new books that have just been released and I've put on hold. Reading THE HEIGHTS by Peter Hedges [the guy who wrote WHAT'S EATING GILBERT GRAPE, and went on to do screenplays and some directing.] It's a little too New York and yuppiefied for me, but I will finish it. Reminds me somewhat of Tom Perotta's LITTLE CHILDREN. Wonder when Perotta will have a new one, I read THE ABSTINENCE TEACHER a while back and enjoyed it, although I found it lacking a little bit in substance.

Just picked up biographies of William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald, two writers that I have never had enough time to read much of. It's something I'm hoping to rectify soon. I've found it's good to read biographies of writers when I'm trying to get started reading them. Of course, in some cases it's not necessary [some would say it's never necessary, but I disagree] but sometimes it helps me get into the work a little more.

Visiting the video-game people again tomorrow. I guess it's good to get out every so often--I'll probably bring some really bad horror films to watch [the husband is into that, but is a neophyte in bad-movie territory so I am glad to teach him the siren song of crap.]

In a poetry writing mood. I won't subject you to it, but I find my mind going more toward poetry when I can't seem to focus long enough to write anything else [besides blog posts of course.] Raymond Carver once said that the reason he wound up never writing anything other than short stories, poems, and the like was because he had two children to look after. It sounds like he was joking, but he wasn't, he wrote an entire essay about it. The recent biography RAYMOND CARVER, A WRITER'S LIFE is an excellent read. When I was an undergrad English/Creative Writing major, he was considered like some kind of god, we had to read "Where I'm Calling From" in more than one class back then [although the all time record was "Heart of Darkness" which I had assigned to me five times over the course of my undergraduate career.]

Of course, he had only been dead a few years back then and quite a few of the people teaching had actually known him and been in the same writing programs [Iowa and the Stegner Fellowship at Stanford] with him. I wonder if he has the same influence today, although I would not be surprised if he still did--a friend of mine who went back to school a couple of years ago and took a writing class told me that most of the stuff they were telling them was pretty much out of the same playbook, everyone trying for the same hyper-realistic, unadorned, gritty style. But it's one of those things that looks easy, but isn't. And if someone has to try to do it, they probably shouldn't.