Busy week. Was in Oregon over the weekend, way out in Oregon, visiting a dear, dear friend who has recently had a baby.

Tomorrow I conduct a short interview for PW with Yannick Murphy about her forthcoming book HERE THEY COME, due this spring from McSweeney’s. It’s a stunning and strange book (as I have said below) and I suggest that everyone read it.

Feeling exhausted by the whole poetry game, by my own obsessive relationship to poetry. That feeling seems to go around every now and again. I’m trying my hand at a little fiction in the meantime, because I’m not good enough at it to worry about publishing.

Lookout for the new Octopus, which Zach says should be up as soon as tonight. I edited a bunch of the reviews in this issue.

Still on my Pavement jag. Netflixed the official documentary THE SLOW CENTURY, which was, frankly, disappointing. The film stayed fixed on the goings on within the band and didn’t touch at all on the amazing things that were happening around them. That was the rock n’ roll moment that I feel I was present to. I was 14 when CROOKED RAIN came out, and I saw them many times during the few years that followed. I was in a band at that time too, and you couldn’t listen to or play indie music then without being influenced by Pavement. And lots of wonderful bands were pulled into the indie spotlight by what was going on with Pavement, like Guided by Voices, who had toiled in obscurity until they broke at the same time as Pavement, and toured with them. I was hoping for a movie that, in the same way that THE YEAR PUNK BROKE was for the scene in ’91, would be a kind of historical document of that musical moment. Alas, it was not. I’m listening to Malkmus’ most recent album, which is the best thing he’s done in his solo career so far.