Well, after my "American Beauty," moment a few days ago (the beauty of the plastic in the wind, I know, I know), I found myself thinking, friend, you need to show more restraint in how you publicly present yourself on the interweb. People may notice your poetic waxing about polymer-based mystery, and tire of yet another post concerning rain, Eugene's size, or the infinitely melancholy nature of longing. They do not want to hear any more same-seeming posts about playing pool at bars, or grading papers, or despairing about the difficult state of publishing. A girl I once was close to and who still is a friend wrote to me ask me how I was doing yesterday, and informed me that there is nothing on my blog worth reading these days. I am afraid I am guilty as charged, and Tuesday's post about the nature of retrospection in Willa Cather couldn't have done much to excite the blogosphere. And then yesterday, I was asked by an old acquaintance, a poet, about blogging and being a writer, and I had to tell her that I don't know a damn thing, that I have the idea that you ought to have a twitter though I rarely tweet, that I have Facebook but mostly use it alienate old friends with relentless self-promotion, that my blog is mostly full of semi-poetic musing somewhere in the key of Seasonal Affective Disorder, especially since I've grown careful about posting work-in-progress for fear of disqualifying it from publication. And when I realized just how foolish that sounded (and no doubt makes me sound), I took a deep breath and remembered that I really don't care. Don't care what the three people on the internet who take the time to read this actually think about my oversharing or a-lyric prose; don't care to craft a self-image that is any better polished. Here, you will find authenticity of only the most banal and redundant sort, and that is all. So be it.

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On to the self-promotion: you can buy Camera Obscura: A Journal of Literature and Art 4, which contains my story "True Conditions," at the nearest Barnes and Noble, or directly from the fine folk who run that beautifully produced magazine. Forget my fiction-- the photographs in this issue are themselves worth the price.

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If phones which can multi-task, connect to the internet and serve as gps units and find restaurants and bars and shops and hotels and act as credit cards and play music and manage Facebook are "Smartphones," then I have a phone which is decidedly dumb, of a different age. And sadly, it does not take good photographs. Nonetheless, a few weeks ago I was on campus at early sunset on a rare, clear afternoon, and as the sun went down the single bank of clouds which ran a line overhead, lit orange and gold, cleft the sky in half as if by the stroke of a lit brush, and the entwined branches of the oak were black and stark against the rent horizon, and I took a picture with my phone because I couldn't bear to forget.

It is a strange accident of memory, though, that though I wrote this having looked at my small screen, at the dull image of what was glorious, that I haven't looked back at the picture in writing, because the moment is truer in memory even as it no doubt is less absolutely accurate. There is a debate raging about 'fact' in nonfiction-- where does the responsibility to tell the truth run up on the ways we can never recreate or recover with absolute factual accuracy, but must inevitably seek to realize essence even if that means accepting that things may have in fact been different? Memory is re-written every time we access and fire synapses. I have fictionalized my experience in Mississippi to the point that at times I cannot recall whether I am remembering or imagining a fiction is how a story really happened. If the sky was not broken by a line of fire that was cloudcover, but a ragged and broken trail of jet exhaust, must I get that right to have you understand that I took the picture and stood with my head turned to the sky for minutes and minutes, only able to think, this is beautiful?