Author: Dan White

I’m just looking at the calendar and noticing that Thanksgiving is creeping up on me again. For me, this means one thing: friends and loved ones will soon be gagging on my overwrought, undercooked chocolate-pecan pie. Every year I screw it up in a different way. One year I burned it so badly that the outside was black as pitch, and yet it was raw and glutinous in the middle. No one wants to hurt my feelings, so everybody ends up choking down one piece — and in some cases, more than one piece — of my mucilaginous, viscid baked product. Another time it was so hard that you could barely pry the pieces apart, even when you used a sharp knife and hit the handle as hard as you could with your fist. Last year it came out OK, but for some reason I accidentally added mint flavor so…

Thanks again to my brother Phil for finding this and sending it along. I knew it was about to be posted online but didn’t know it was already up! Anyhow, here is that free podcast from True Fiction Radio, including brand-new readings by Wallace Baine and Richard Stockton, and also a brief reading by me (from the Cactus Eaters.), recorded recently in town. If you’ve got access to iTunes, download away. I’m part of the radio show #12, podcast on 10/30/11. http://cactuseaters.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

See. I wasn’t kidding. Ignore the silly tagline — I seriously doubt that a krill-eating mammal would ever gobble up a surfer — but it’s still a shocker when the whales appear. http://cactuseaters.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

I hope you enjoy this stereotype-shattering link. Now that I’ve read this, I might have to redesign my cookies. http://cactuseaters.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

She’s going to be in conversation with Vendela Vida at the Herbst Theater. Go if you can. (I can’t.) I went to a fantastic Didion event in NYC some years back. She was in conversation with New Yorker editor David Remnick, and it was all going well until someone in the audience asked Didion a truly dumb and appalling question at the very end. http://cactuseaters.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

In case you aren’t following the local news, certain Santa Cruzans have lost their minds in regard to this surge of humpback whale sightings. Kayakers are going right up to them and practically rubbing the creatures’ noses. I think this is a good time to remember that humpback whales can swim 16 miles an hour and have the combined weight of 350 humans. In other words, annoying them is a very bad idea … http://cactuseaters.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

I chuckled after watching this scary trailer advertising a new horror movie that takes place at the Yankee Pedlar Inn in Torrington, Connecticut. This struck me as funny because the Yankee Pedlar is a real place. In fact, I frittered away a certain amount of my early 20s at the bar on the bottom floor of that very inn. I have a real life, silly “ghost story” that takes place in part at the Yankee Pedlar. When I get a moment, I will upload that for you. (it’s long and rather complicated.) http://cactuseaters.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

I was walking on West Cliff Drive just the other day with a friend when we saw the same two ‘spyhopping’ whales that you’ll see in this link to a story in the Santa Cruz Sentinel. The Sentinel story implied that the whales were here primarily for the food. http://cactuseaters.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

(this is my scratchboard illustration of Mephitis Mephitis, whose noxious spray can render dogs temporarily sightless.) First of all, stumbling upon this link to an interview with Tom Waits was an unexpected boon. Plus, it’s nice to hear that someone’s car is messier than mine, and that he apparently like Valencia hot sauce, although my brand is Tapatio. A couple of other things. It’s unnerving when I read a very good book that came out a while ago without me knowing about it. One prime example is Bernard Cooper’s The Bill From My Father, as good a memoir as I’ve read in a long while. It has poetic compression, heft, authenticity, the whole shebang, and it doesn’t try to gussy up the grouchy inscrutable dad at the center of the book. Books I also enjoyed recently: Gerry Hadden’s new nonfiction work, Never the Hope Itself (I even blurbed this one!…

I’m going on True Fiction Radio in less than an hour. I’d better start driving to the studio now in case I get a flat tire or run into traffic. (or both.) My reading and my talk with Richard Stockton will soon be available as a podcast on iTunes. http://cactuseaters.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default