A description of Faulkner’s home, Rowan Oaks:

On the walls behind the writer’s desk, the day-by-day outline of ”A Fable” is famously hand-lettered by Faulkner on the wall….After her husband had finished writing ”A Fable,” Estelle Faulkner, according to legend, rashly ordered the wall repainted, over the outline. Using photographs as a guide, the outraged writer redid it and afterward, shellacked the wall, for the sake of permanence and posterity.

Doesn’t that story remind you of a mom who refuses to paint over the pencil markings on the wall tracking her childrens’ height over the years?

Recently I’ve had the urge to write on the walls.** But that’s the bitch about renting: you want to get your deposit back.

The Next Best Thing? Whiteboards. I started keeping a whiteboard above my desk to keep track of projects, submissions, and to-do lists. Then I got the idea to keep a dry-erase marker in the bathroom by the mirror, for those in-the-shower inspirations (I tend to have a lot of those.)

I was in there today, reading Chris Ware’s ACME NOVELTY collection, and it occured to me that writing on the wall might be the most primitive and accessible art-form, starting with the caveman in Ware’s “Our History of Art,” and ending, perhaps, with Rocket Sam, who, in an awesome gag strip, flies a spaceship all the way across the galaxy just to leave vulgar graffiti on a cave wall in another planet.

It’s not necessarily the desire to be heard, it’s the desire to be seen. And some institutions pick up on that and exploit it. At the Google headquarters, they have dozens of communal whiteboards, where employees can swap ideas and leave graffiti.

Whenever we do buy a house, I’m going to leave a nice section on the wall in my office to scribble. Maybe put up a couple of whiteboards in the foyer.

* * Before you start reading this, you might want to go listen to or watch some TV On The Radio. My sentences are beating to their drums.

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must learn them again.

—William Faulkner, “Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech”

I got my copy of George Saunder’s In Persuasion Nation in the mail a couple days ago, but I’ve found it really hard to get into, because I’ve already read most of the stories elsewhere. (”CommComm“, “Adams“, “Bohemians”, “The Red Bow,” “Christmas,” “93990,”…if you’ve got the Complete New Yorker you’re halfway there.) It’s like an album of previously released singles. The new website has a bunch of goodies on it, including a chapbook of non-fiction and an MP3 of Tony Danza (!) reading “The Barber’s Unhappiness.”

I’m also listening to Kevin Brockmeier’s THE BRIEF HISTORY OF THE DEAD. He got the idea for the novel from the epigraph of one of my favorite books in high school: Jame Loewen’s LIES MY TEACHER TOLD ME. Here’s a list of songs about death that Brockmeier likes, and the original story from the New Yorker.

I am still very excited for the new Walkmen album.