Questions

Dear Dickens,

Is writing about the weather just as bad as writing about writing?

Do you have to be dirt poor to be kind?

Do you have to be sad and beaten in order to master the hook of the comma?

Is there a difference between story telling and Neo-Futurism?

Do you have to be a teacher before you're taken seriously?

Do you like John Irving as much as I do, as much as he likes you? He really likes you.

Is a memoir a book?

Is a politician a writer?

Is a writer a performer?

Why would you put Post at the beginning of a new movement? Eventually isn't the idea to be old, to last? As a writer, wouldn't one avoid the danger of becoming Post Post? It doesn't sound right.

They all wanted people to read their journals some day, right? Everyone wants an audience.

Could I hire someone to produce my memoir? Could I write my own memoir via a series of interviews?

Where, without feeling sorry, do you see me in ten years?

If you were alive, would you subscribe to the Believer? Contribute?

Are you alive? Like, in the form of a poor Mexican immigrant in the Bronx, struggling to make it as a cutting edge beat box operator?

My mentor gave me "Great Expectations" on my eighteenth birthday, and that's why I chose it as my favorite book of all time, then I realized I liked the book, a lot. I like the commas, I like that you can always say more, I like that one sentence can go on for pages; lifetimes, weekdays, tech rehearsals, Christmas parties, therapy sessions; the sentence is an air tight leather couch that I could lye down on, except I never do that, that only happens in post modern movies depicting life on the North Shore, I sit right up in those sixty five minute debates, I have to be ready, poised, curled only ever so slightly at the tip of the ankles; for more, if there's twenty two point five different ways of describing something--then by all means, go at it. Pip, Pip!

That last one was not a question. And I wish you were the president of some university that would have me for graduate studies, I know you wouldn't charge me anything, and we would just sit around and talk all day, while drinking hot totties, and wearing argyle sweater vests. And you would produce my memoir, and get me hooked up with McSweeney's, and This American Life.

Well, I was out of questions a while back, and it's mid-terms, so I better skey-daddle!

Bye for now Chuck.

Your chandelier flaming,

Skin and Toast