In case you can’t get enough of me, I now have a cocktail blog as well. Check it out here: http://whiskeythief.wordpress.com/

In the last five days, I probably threw more alcohol in the garbage than some people consume in a year. This was a survival technique because at Tales of the Cocktail, the annual cocktail convention in New Orleans, you are literally given something new to try every few minutes. The only way to not be flat on your face after an hour is to take the smallest possible sip, ponder its flavors and potential, and then walk away from it. There were seminars on things like how to use apple brandy and the history of the pineapple, each of which included up to three cocktail samples and up to five additional samples of base spirits straight. And then there were the tasting rooms, where up to twenty one vendors had samples of their wares available. On top of that, there were parties and spirited dinners. There were way more events than we could possibly attend, and the alcohol was constantly flowing. It was important to drink a lot of water, eat whenever possible, and get a good night’s sleep every night.

One of the highlights was on Thursday night when we attended a spirited dinner sponsored by Bushmills. It was a five-course meal . Each course included a shot of a different Bushmills product as well as a cocktail that included that product. It was just not physically possible to drink everything that was put in front of us. Oh, and the food was pretty good too. Many of the tasting rooms also had food available.

We attended seminars about everything from whiskey to ice to tree bark. It was crazy. It was all so overwhelming that I still can’t quite wrap my head around it. Overall, it was a great experience, and I would definitely go again.

During the winter break, I’ll actually have time to read some things for pleasure, and you can bet I will be packing in as much as I can. First, I’m going to be re-reading Absalom, Absalom! (though I am genuinely excited about it, the exclamation point is officially part of the title, which is why I italicized it) by our old friend Mr. Faulkner. When that’s done, I have some perusing of an English 102 textbook to do in preparation for the class I’m teaching next semester and some other decidedly nerdy stuff: Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By, Donald Davidson’s Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, and How Novels Think by Nancy Armstrong.

If there’s time after that, I might just read Knockemstiff, the collection of short stories by Donald Ray Pollack. I’d also like to read the new Zadie Smith novel, NW, and Inventing Wine by Paul Lukacs (those last two are on my wish list if you are thinking of buying me something… ahem, Mom).

And guess what? If you still don’t have your copies of Zen, Mississippi and the Salvation of Billy Wayne Carter, you might could still obtain them before Christmas if you act quickly.

It’s been bothering me for some time that my old group PopCanon, which I unabashedly claim as one of the best bands to ever exist, does not have anything available on iTunes, Spotify, and other digital music sites. Alas, when we did our recordings, that technology was not yet available.

I considered re-releasing all the old albums one at a time in digital versions, but due to the fees involved, I just made one giant 50-song album called “Too Clever By Half: The Very Best of PopCanon.”

The reason I only included 50 songs, instead of all 75 or so that we recorded from 1995-2001 was because there was a limit on how much I was able to upload on our host site CD Baby. I also didn’t want to deal with the legal issues w/r/t some of the covers we did, so I left those out.

If this is successful enough and people want it, I will consider creating a Part II album for the leftovers.

The individual songs are the usual 99 cents each, but you can buy the whole album for a mere $6.66 (natch).

When I was an undergraduate at UAB I took Philosophy of Language and Epistomology from a professor named Tim Day, and these classes made a huge impression on me. I’ve often wondered what happened to this professor. I assumed he wouldn’t be in Birmingham anymore. He always seemed a bit of a fish out of water (and I recall that he had a particular interest in seafaring stories).

I happened to run into him at a bar last night and hope he’ll read this.

Cheers, Professor.

I wrote the short story below while taking Day’s classes, and I wrote the song “Make Reference” a couple of years later while thinking about things he had said in class. The refrain “Is there something between me and the tree or is the tree in my head? Is the tree too big for my head?” is practically lifted from one of Day’s lectures on how reference works.

Click here to listen to “Make Reference” as recorded by PopCanon in 1999

This short story has been published several times–in a Birmingham zine called Isms, in a national journal called Nanofiction, and in my collection The Salvation of Billy Wayne Carter and Other Stories.

Bertrand Russell Sees a Man

I. A Man Viewing a Sunset

Let (x is human and x is male) be true where (x=x) is always true and (x has the name “John”) is sometimes true. Let (s=the visible atmosphere of the earth) be true if and only if the sun appears from position(x) on the surface of the earth to rest on the edge of the western horizon such that s:x is fragile and delicious as a warm cookie.

II. A Man in Love

Let x have the property L(x) where (L=the certain combination of active neurons which results in giddiness) is always true. Let (g is human and g is female) be true where (g=g) is always true and (g has the name “Mary”) is sometimes true. Let L(x) occur if and only if x:g results in the property B(x) where (B=an intensional relation [belief] that L(g):x reciprocally) is always true. If L(x) is true and B(x) is true then LB(x) results in the property F(x) where (F=the certain combination of neurons which result in the intensional relation [feeling] that L(x):g is fragile and delicious as a warm cookie) is sometimes true.

III. A Dead Man

Let L(g):x be false if and only if x:g results in the property D(g) where (D=the intensional relation [disgust] that L(x):g) is sometimes true. If L(g):x is false then not x.

Steel Toe Review, the online literary magazine that I edit, is publishing a print anthology featuring the best pieces from our first year online. The anthology will be available in mid-February.

Earlier this week, we launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise money for this venture, and we are already almost half way to our goal. Please visit our Kickstarter page and pledge a donation. The sooner we reach the goal, the sooner we can complete production.

STR Kickstarter page.

You’re going to hear a lot from me about Steel Toe Review over the next couple of months.

On Monday, we’ll be launching a Kickstarter campaign to raise money for our first year anthology. More on that in a couple of days.

Also on Monday, we’ll start posting issue #10.

And finally, I’m trying out a mailing list service for STR subscribers. Up until now, I’ve just been managing the list manually, which is a huge pain. If you aren’t already on the list, sign up.

Subscribe to Steel Toe Review

Exciting times.

My short story, “The Jigsaw Puzzle” is featured in the latest issue of the refereed e-journal the Criterion.

Thanks so much to Melissa Studdard for suggesting I submit it there. The title of the story reflects one aspect of the plot but also the process of writing it. I had written several sections of this piece separately as scattered random notes and story ideas. I suppose this process is not unusual for writers, and I’ve certainly used it to some extent often. But in this case, that was all I had, and I was surprised at how smoothly it all came together.

Hope you enjoy it.

The direct link to my story is http://www.the-criterion.com/V2/n3/David.pdf.

For October’s issue of Steel Toe Review, we haven’t gone out of our way to be Halloween-scary, though things sometimes just turn out that way.

In New York hordes of protesters continue to occupy Wall Street, and my own mind, recently re-immersed in Academia, is occupied with a search for some overarching narrative I can apply to everything that’s floating around in the zeitgeist. From here in Birmingham it feels like maybe something important is happening but we aren’t quite sure what it is yet, if we’re for it, against it, or indifferent to it. Though there is apparently a local group supporting the occupy movement, I still personally feel mostly disconnected from what’s happening. It’s easy to write it off as a group of people making the statement, “We are making a statement.”

I know there’s real substance to the feeling of oppression feeding the political movement, and at the same time, I suspect there are members of the movement that aren’t as oppressed as maybe they’d like to think they are. The feeling of disconnectedness that informs this dissonance is why I started Steel Toe Review in the first place. Birmingham is extremely disconnected from the literary and artistic community at large, and I hoped to enact some change there. The literary and the political are often intertwined, though (ideally) that connection is seldom overt. The piles of academic reading related to my graduate studies remind me that power structures are inherent in every aspect of life, and that the actions of everyday life, including reading and writing literature, are no less than tactics for navigating our way through the power structures that, by their nature, prevent us from ever being truly free.

Is that scary enough for you?

-M. David Hornbuckle, editor