Later in the day the boy turned to him. Can you tell me about apostrophes?

What do you want to know about them?

I dont know. Where did they all go?

I dont know, the man said, and it was truth. He didnt know where all the apostrophes had gone.

Ben knew I would appreciate the humor as, last May, I published my own parody of The Road, called, “The Read,” in Booklist. Doing a quick search to see if Road parodies were any kind of trend, I stumbled across these incredibly kind words on Read Red. (And to think a colleague queried my use of “unadhorn”!)

I’m a big fan of The Road — heck, I was one of the first to go on record calling it a “masterpiece” — but you know what they say: parody is the sincerest form of flattery.

Well, if they don’t say that, they should.

“What’s Going On” is a day in the life of a besieged man who holds the oft-maligned position of community organizer. It’s a good thing for you that the whole thing has already been published, so you won’t have to wait a day for each new installment. You won’t want to wait.

“BusinessWeek names Tinley Park best place in U.S. to raise a family,” by Kristen Schorsch:

Turns out there is life south of 95th Street, despite what some North Siders might think. And it’s a slice of “real Midwest Americana,” according to Tinley Park Mayor Ed Zabrocki.

“Tinley Park woman charged with hate crime for tugging on woman’s head scarf,” by Kim Janssen and Joel Hood:

A suburban Chicago woman has been charged with a hate crime for allegedly yanking the head scarf of a Muslim woman in Tinley Park two days after the shootings at Fort Hood, Texas.

Good thing I’m not a cynic.

After the election of Barack Obama, as half the nation celebrated the dawning of a new era, there were times when I thought about abandoning my novel out of fear that it would soon seem out-of-date. But even though a new administration can quickly change the tone, actual change is harder to accomplish. Old contracts must still be honored, old appointees must be replaced, old business drags on and on. A promise to close Guantanamo isn’t as easy to deliver as it seemed. Political resistance aside, a proper location must be found (”Illinois the Next Gitmo?” by Christi Parsons, Chicago Tribune).

A near-empty prison in rural Illinois has emerged as “a leading option” to house suspected terrorists currently held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, an Obama administration official said Friday.

Suddenly, my novel about a prison for terrorists in the American heartland doesn’t seem so eighteen-months-ago anymore.

But travel with me now, if you would, back to May 15, 2009, when the world was a little younger, a little less cynical, a little more ready to laugh, and a scrappy prepublication book-review journal called Booklist had just offered an amuse-bouche with its Spotlight on SF/Fantasy–a short story by yours truly, called, “The Read.” A loving parody of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, with a book reviewer as its antihero? Yes, it’s all that, but it’s also so much more.

Well, a little more, anyway. Read on!

On Jura he would be liberated from these distractions but the promise of creative freedom on an island in the Hebrides came with its own price. Years before, in the essay “Why I Write”, he had described the struggle to complete a book: “Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist or [sic] understand. For all one knows that demon is the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s personality.” Then that famous Orwellian coda. “Good prose is like a window pane.”

After paying some bills last night, I clicked “headlines” on my browser bar and saw that J. G. Ballard had died. There’s no shortage of news about this now, but as many of the obits seem to focus on his role as an influencer (see “Author J. G. Ballard dies after lengthy illness,” by Ben Hoyle, Times), I’ll add a few words about Ballard’s influence on me.

Tuesday morning, Jillian from Disasters calls. Apparently an airman named Loolerton has poisoned a shitload of beavers. I say we don’t kill beavers, we harvest them, because otherwise they nibble through our Pollution Control Devices (P.C.D.s) and polluted water flows out of our Retention Area and into the Eisenhower Memorial Wetland, killing beavers.