By Sean Ferrell

My most recent review, of The Prisoner by Thomas M. Disch is live at PopMatters.

A snippet:

Ultimately, Number Six and his attempts to prove that he is not a number are a thinly veiled metaphor for our own attempts to prove the same. I am not a number, I am (to use the phrase repeated throughout the show and in the novel) a free man.

Yet, I am a cell phone. I have to regularly list my social security number on applications. I drag around notes scribbled on the backs of old receipts to remind myself of my bank account number for deposits. God help me if I need to call the companies that provide my cable, gas, or electric service without my identifying number. I am, in fact, a large number of numbers, each one longer than the next, each one more oppressive for my lack of remembering, each one present, and here's the punchline, to make my life easier.

The brilliant Evan Mandery has a reading coming up:

March 10, 2010 (7:00pm)

Barnes & Noble
97 Warren Street
New York, NY

He will be reading from his brilliantly funny second novel, First Contact. I loved his first, Dreaming of Gwen Stefani, and think this new novel is ten times as marvelous. Like Evan it is funny and smart and filled with authorial asides. A synopsis:

A satirical joyride in the tradition of Kurt Vonnegut and Douglas Adams, First Contact introduces us to the hyper-intelligent Rigelians, who admire Woody Allen movies and Bundt cake, and urge the people of Earth to mend their ways to avoid destruction of their planet. But the president of the United States, a God-fearing, science-doubting fitness fanatic, is skeptical of the evidence presented to him and sets in motion a chain of events that will change the lives of his young attaché, an alien scam artist, several raccoons, and a scientist who has predicted the end of the universe. Parrot sketch excluded.

If anyone is in New York City and needs a place to crash, Evan's your man. Go to his reading before approaching him about sleeping on his kitchen floor. I will be there. At the reading, not the kitchen floor. It's a too cold and linoleum filled for me. The kitchen, not the reading.

I came down with some sort of horrible stomach virus last night. I'm still not certain I survived. If so, I'm considering hiring a MTA bus driver to run over me. Please don't pity me, pity those who have to live with me. I look and possibly smell so bad that even my dog left the room.

In my attempts to feel better I lugged my hot water bottle and what's left of my body over here to my computer to see if the internet could sooth my ills, or at least make me forget that parts of my body are trying to secede from the union that is me. I was lucky. It worked, because thanks to Wil Wheaton I found this brilliant essay:

I read a lot of threads about being lonely, sad or unhappy in general by alukima.

alukima, a 26 year old with three times that in life experience, breaks down life in a list of simple statements, ways that you can make yourself happy. She's on to something. Check out her essay, and then see if you don't find yourself both nodding in agreement and feeling awestruck at her honesty and self-motivation.

An excerpt:

People who set realistic goals and work towards them succeed.

Have you noticed just how disgustingly poor my understanding of grammar and punctuation is? I never advanced past 8th grade English. Here is something I wrote in g-chat just over a year ago: "I like sam beam better then te decemeris.... i wish thy would tour their going to be in st louis soon. go you wnna go?" That line was sent to a guy I wanted to date. I was trying. I was sober. I am still awful but at least people can understand me. Its very embarrassing but I have to work hard to sound this stupid.

Thank you, alukima.

I was honored to be part of a four author round table discussion for Writing.com. The other, far-more-interesting-than-me, participants were Tracy Garrett, Kiersten White, and Natalie Whipple. We were whipped into shape, I mean, moderated by S.M. Blooding.

You can check it out here.

Dedicated to Jeff Somers.

(Special thanks to Kari Dell for bringing it to my attention.)

The Daily Star, in Oneonta, New York, was interested in doing a profile of me. I'm excited to discover that it's now available here.