{"id":1106,"date":"2015-01-10T08:18:46","date_gmt":"2015-01-10T16:18:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/?p=1106"},"modified":"2015-05-07T08:22:40","modified_gmt":"2015-05-07T16:22:40","slug":"im-sorry-joel-porter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/2015\/01\/10\/im-sorry-joel-porter\/","title":{"rendered":"I\u2019m Sorry, Joel Porter"},"content":{"rendered":"

Postaday for January 10th: Call Me Ishmael<\/a>.\u00a0<\/strong>Take the first sentence from your favorite book and make it the first sentence of your post.<\/em><\/p>\n

Call me Russel Wren. I like to steal. I stole my name, stole the heft and weight of it, and stole its meaning. I don\u2019t know what it means. I don\u2019t know what scholars say when they say my name to each other. I don\u2019t read books. You can\u2019t cross the same river twice, they say, and you can\u2019t read the same book anyone else has ever read.<\/p>\n

Have you read Thomas Berger? I have. He died last year. No one told me. I\u2019d been checking the web for years, seeing if he\u2019d written anything, or died. Neither, for years, and then I stopped. And then I wrote the above, and decided to check one last time. His last novel, ever, was ten years ago. My favorite is Who Is Teddy Villanova?<\/em> That\u2019s where I stole that line from.<\/p>\n

Listen to me. I\u2019m Jason Edwards, but call me Russell Wren. I\u2019m a fictional character. I\u2019m a bumbler stumbling from one made-up mystery to the next. I don\u2019t read books because I am in<\/em> books. Joel Porter died too. I didn\u2019t know that, either. I met Joel in grad school, and his writing was exquisite.<\/p>\n

Thomas Berger, Joel Porter, Percival Everett. A handful of writers who makes sentences I want to steal. Joel went crazy, or was already crazy, literally crazy, committed suicide, and I didn\u2019t even know until two years later. And I want to steal his words? I do. I can\u2019t, but I want to.<\/p>\n

Percival Everett is still alive. I\u2019d steal from him too if I could. \u201cI will begin with infinity.\u201d That\u2019s the first sentence of Glyph<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Joel Porter was like David Foster Wallace, but readable. \u201cI am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies.\u201d Infinite Jest<\/em>, my ass. I never saved any of Joel\u2019s stories. Maybe if I\u2019m lucky I can find one in an old email. And steal it. Steal the weight and heft. DFW killed himself too, that coward. That overrated coward.<\/p>\n

Thomas Berger died of old age. I\u2019m going to die of old age. But call me Russel Wren. I\u2019ll die of being forgotten about. Jason Edwards will not die of being forgotten about. He\u2019ll never die because no one will even remember they\u2019ve forgotten him.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Postaday for January 10th: Call Me Ishmael.\u00a0Take the first sentence from your favorite book and make it the first sentence of your post. Call me Russel Wren. I like to steal. I stole my name, stole the heft and weight of it, and stole its meaning. I don\u2019t know what it means. I don\u2019t know … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “I\u2019m Sorry, Joel Porter”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7,61],"tags":[95,94],"class_list":["post-1106","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","category-postaday","tag-death","tag-writers"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p24y52-hQ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1106","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1106"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1106\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1107,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1106\/revisions\/1107"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}