Another Christmas finds me in scenic New Jersey, along with family, beagles, and a pair of Krampuses hanging from the tree. My reading material: Stephen King’s 11/22/63 (shades of years ago, where I’m pretty sure Needful Things was my Christmastime reading.) Here’s hoping the holiday season finds you well.

The week Owen left New York was one of sweltering humidity reaching down to enrapture us, swaddle us, leave us all reaching for insufficient comfort. We assumed Owen was alone in the task of loading a truck, of carting boxes and disassembled furniture down flights of stairs and into a double-parked van. It was a week of sweat-stained shirts, of dodging brownouts, of foregone conclusions about the city and about what constituted comfort demolished. Owen was leaving us, and few among us were sad to see him go.

Keen-eyed readers may notice that it shares a character with another story of mine, “Dulcimers Played, Strings Played.” That is not coincidence; essentially, this story originally began its life as a sort of prelude to something much longer I’d like to write. As part of it, I needed to explain how one particular character ended up in a particular place; from there, this story arose. The longer work is as yet unwritten (as a couple of my favorite novels from this year may have rendered the concept moot); we’ll see, I suppose.

(Also: immense thanks to Brian at Joyland for running the story.)

By the third morning, the air’s density had grown: sweat sprouted from Dalton’s chest and shoulders as soon as he rose to street level and began his westward walk. Ten steps down the block, he saw the bags again, grey plastic taut in places, slack and crumpled in others. Their shapes, he saw, had come to rest on one another; had come to compress and support themselves.

You can read the whole thing here. I’ll be back later in the week with some thoughts on this story and something else that’s in the works, and What It All Means. (Or something.)

Chances are good that some dispatches, and the occasional photo, will show up on Twitter.

I’ve had some stories appear in both their print and online spaces, and they also appear here; there’s also work from smart folks like Joe Meno, Patrick Somerville, Al Burian, Anne Elizabeth Moore, Jonathan Messinger, Susannah Felts, Jamie Iredell, Kate Duva, and more.

(As always, giant thanks are due to editors Todd Dills and C.T. Ballentine, who are fine people to boot.)

If you’re so inclined, you can purchase the book here.

You learn fascinating things when you periodically google yourself.

This album is indeed a four-track project from the 90s, but it’s also a reminder of exactly why the home-recordings aesthetic works. These songs can feel messy at times, but that mirrors the messiness of the lives documented in them, something Ghetto’s lyrics and (especially) her vocal delivery makes clear.

I’ll be revisiting Sadstyle fairly soon, as I’ll be talking about the upcoming Carissa’s Wierd compilation for TMT before long. Until then, here’s one song from it:

Carissa’s Wierd – The Color That Your Eyes Changed With the Color of Your Hair by hardlyartrecords

When I was in Seattle last month, I caught a set from Javelin at the Vera Project. It wasn’t quite my thing — in the world of ramshackle DIY dance-friendly groups, I drift a bit more towards Tanlines* — but one song, a remix they’d done of a Future Islands song, caught my attention. Since then, I’ve been listening to Future Islands’ In the Fall somewhat obsessively — its songs prompt thoughts of breaking into a disturbingly visceral version of the running man while sitting at my desk. Their music is catchy, ornate, and a little ominous, and I’m quite fond of it.

This is their song “Tin Man”:

*-which is to say that I drift towards Professor Murder and affiliated bands & projects.

If you’ve read any recent think-piece about how the lines between rock bands and classical ensembles are blurring, you could pretty easily swap their name into the list of case studies provided without sacrificing accuracy. Besides recording their own compositions, they’ve also released their take on Arvo Pärt’s taut “Spiegel im Spiegel� and collaborated with the hip-hop group dälek.

You can read the whole thing here.