Malcolm McCollum – US Represented

Do They Throw Things Away They Might Need Someday?

Malcolm McCollum — Sun, 10 Nov 2019 17:25:32 +0000

In 1982, I went to work with my friend Dave hauling trash, using a 1950s International truck, a classic old 1-ton, open-bed pickup. Somehow Dave became our estimator, despite being A. legally blind and B. pathologically reluctant to wear his glasses. This made for some interesting if unremunerative estimates, and we often wound up working entire days or more for forty dollars. One revolting job we took on involved cleaning

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Wigged Out

Malcolm McCollum — Fri, 27 Sep 2019 13:37:34 +0000

I’d started something I was pretending was a novel up in Denver, and I continued with it for a while. I’d been reading, or at least pretending to read, the “new novels” of Alain Robbe-Grillet, and catching the films of Antonioni and Bergman, so I was up to date on pretentious, intentionally obscure anti-narratives, and was manfully writing another of the same. I think I got through about thirty pages

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Gwynne

Malcolm McCollum — Sun, 01 Sep 2019 20:18:29 +0000

for Gwynne Stolle in loving memory In her garden, as in mine, the earth is let be earth, and flowers grow where flowers will, not where she wills them to. In her garden, as in mine, light falls through the green it’s made, softened, dappling everything below it, even me and the dogs. In her garden, exiles of the world meet and talk together as if there were no nations,

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Nelson Algren and the Murder of Meaning

Malcolm McCollum — Wed, 17 Jul 2019 07:23:27 +0000

The murder of meaning is a crime Nelson Algren spent his life trying to get people interested in, and it scarcely ended with his death in 1982. Shortly after that year, in fact, one of the greatest admissions of that crime began appearing on t-shirts nationwide. They said, “The one who dies with the most toys wins.” To which Algren’s great love, Simone de Beauvoir, had long ago replied, “’It

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Cleveland

Malcolm McCollum — Tue, 02 Jul 2019 07:39:52 +0000

White antlers of the night exacerbate my soul. There were gerbils at angles unheard of, perpendicular to themselves. These gerbils: my little sister in her prom dress more expensive than mine. This was in Cleveland. And so on. And so on. This is the kind of thing they mostly print these days, desperate attempts to say something new in a new way, display awareness of everything known, torture metaphors to

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Vacant Lots: A Butterfly Hunter Considers the Sacred

Malcolm McCollum — Wed, 29 May 2019 16:59:58 +0000

The simplest definition of “sacred” in the Oxford English Dictionary has always seemed to me to be “set apart,” and that’s probably why I’ve never felt very happy with the word. I’ve never much liked the idea of things being “set apart.” Somehow, in my staunchly Republican family, I acquired a stubborn egalitarianism. But I grew up in places that I’ve recently come to think of as sacred. I grew

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