i'm sick of school and i love james atlas.

i'm currently reading the great pretender, and i have a weird connection to this novel that i have not experienced with a piece of literature before. everything seems to click with me somehow. not in that it's parallel to my life story, or i've found some meaning in the book that uncovered an ocean of truths within myself. no, it's really more simple and less...epic than that. it's just that little words and phrases in the book just feel right to me and make me feel at peace and make me smile and make me want to keep going, even if they aren't inspirational tidbits. i find strange comfort in the novel.



i also love that atlas dedicated the novel to his parents, and it is a book with very sexually explicit parts. i don't think i would be able to do that. i admire james atlas for that. kudos, you're the man!



at the kenyon workshop for young writers two summers ago, we had a writers fight club which centered around each student choosing an author and facing another student and competeing in terms of which passage was better. if this resulted in a tie, the readers would have a "sentence off," where they would have to chose a single sentence to "fight with." so as i was reading the great pretender, i found a sentence that i thought was pretty great:



"It was hard to get stoned when you were worrying about whether your poetry was any good and why you hadn't gone to California and gotten laid and whether your parents would wake up and find you weren't home in bed." (p. 54)



i'm not sure why i find this so appealing, i just do.



so, in this spirit, i am posting a photo i took at coney island this past summer. i call it "rebel bliss" and i'm not sure if that's an obnoxious title or not.