"I work till this here little flat line closes the curtains"

(quote: Aesop Rock, video: finale speech from Generation Kill)

I climbed Thompson Peak yesterday. A sweaty foray out of the lab, all anxiety about the hours away from the word processor ameliorated in the things I relearned. 14 miles across scree and up hills and picking my way across icefields with pointy rocks in my hands so I don't slip to my death. Jumping from boulder to boulder at altitudes that remind me how weak my lungs are. Fending off the hot sun with willpower. Drinking blue water from enormous puddles where the snowmelt collects. Aches in my knees so pure, movement so stiff by the summit that I can feel by swollen tendons creak. And clambering up and over that last rock to look down on everything. Like the roof of the tallest building in the city, looking down on creation with all its perfections and its coincidences. At the summit there's a little metal box that has been bolted there to the rock since the 1960s. Notebooks full of jottings, a pack of rolling papers, a tiny empty bottle of Crown Royal. On the first page of one these someone has written an ode to a loved one that died on that mountain. The author returns every year on the anniversary to pay respects and write some tear-jerking update as to how her memory has survived. A more fitting tombstone than one you'll find in any cemetery.

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Ancillary to this workshop I've been involved in I've been reading much of the fiction that's been published in The New Yorker for the last six weeks or so. This is the premier American publication to feature short works of fiction. Supposed luminaries such as Lorrie Moore and Tim Gatreux and Johnathan Franzen. The works all have in common a vast lack in imagination. Nothing worth noting happens, ordinary people going through somewhat ordinary things. My own impatient and stultified life strikes me as more moving and interesting than any passage from any of these. But despite my disdain, the whole thing is encouraging. There is so much room in literature: for fiction more interesting, more memorable, more urgent. Line-by-line more engaging and carefully wrought and mindful. Thematically more relevant to this weird world we find ourselves in. No disrespect to anyone that shares my craft, but I'm afraid modern American fiction is completely insubstantial (DFW RIP). We'll only be allowed to bitch and moan about depleted readership when we've written the next "On the Road", the next "Grapes of Wrath", the next "Blood Meridian". Writers, it's time to step your game up. The world is passing you by and you're pondering the rusty undercarriage as it scrapes off your dead skin.