A wave

of yet more tender joy escaped from his heart and went coursing in warm flood along his arteries. Like the tender fire of stars moments of their life together, that no one knew of or would ever know of, broke upon and illumined his memory. He longed to recall to her those moments, to make her forget the years of their dull existence together and remember only their moments of ecstasy. For the years, he felt, had not quenched his soul or hers. Their children, his writing, her household cares had not quenched all their souls' tender fire. In one letter that he had written to her then he had said: "Why is it that words like these seem to me so dull and cold? Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?"

-James Joyce, The Dead

The Damnation of Memory is now available for the Kindle

And for all of you hip cats that enjoy reading books digitally, especially on those nifty new Kindles, The Damnation of Memory is now available for approximately the cost of a good protein bar. Advantage: no brown rice syrup aftertaste.

The Damnation of Memory is Here!

I just got my first copies of The Damnation of Memory today.

Many of you know that this book has been an unusually long time in the making. In fact, I actually finished this one before I even started working on Life After Sleep, which came out earlier this year. I finished the first draft of Damnation and sent it to Paul in late 2008, before I was made an editor at Silverthought, which to give you a sense of scope was a few weeks before Barack Obama was elected. And it's been in post-production since then, delayed at various points due to life in general and creative rethinking; the book just needing that much time to fully mature under what seemed like a never-ending series of revisions and rewrites.

But all that's over, and it's finally here, and I couldn't be happier about it. This book has been my co-pilot of sorts for the last three years, with the manuscript accompanying me during events both good and bad. I remember taking it with me on a weekend trip with the O'Malleys when John was very young, and working on it late into the night, falling asleep on the couch in the big rented weekend home so I wouldn't keep anyone else awake. I remember taking it with me on several long train trips from Chicago to New York, typing scenes that took place in the very same northeast corridor that I was watching the sun come up over. I had this book with me, either in my thoughts or on a glowing laptop screen, as I traveled to visit my grandmother Laura Thompson when she became progressively more and more ill with cancer, and again when I rode the train home that final time after she passed. Some of that loss is there, on those pages. A lot of it, actually, and other sorts of loss, and grief, and anger, and resolve, and wonder at how easy it is to lose perspective in this upside-down world we live in. It's not an emotionally easy book for me, in other words, but it's here now, for happier or sadder, and every bleary-eyed re-read of it at 3AM on my chilly, unheated front porch has finally added up to this stack of books on my desk, wrapped in a gorgeous painting by Deborah Lader titled "Flying".

I've once again really had a resoundingly positive experience with the editing process. I know writers who say they just flat out hate editing their work; that it's a part of the birth of a book that they don't look forward to at all, and I couldn't disagree more. As long as I've been fiddling with it, changing phrases here and inflections there, I'm certain today that it didn't take the full shape I wanted it to until right at the end of all of this work. Maybe that's too egotistical of a way to phrase that... I should say that by the end of the editing process, I started to surprise myself that I had written this, which is always the point where I know that a project like this is finally close to done, and where I can only give humble thanks to the people who helped me along the way, in this case in particular my editor Paul and the cover artist Deborah Lader, but more generally to my wife and family as well because I absolutely couldn't have done it without them.

So even though we haven't had the official release party for it yet, it's available to buy now through Amazon.com, Silverthought.com, and will soon be available at several bookstores in Chicago. If you're a Kindle reader, there will likely be an eBook version coming soon as well.

Four Stories, by John

Do I have a story for you

My son came home today from his pre-school with an unusual assignment: for homework he was to sit down with us and write a story that he would then use in class to make a book. John is somewhat aware of what I do and the fact that in addition to "fixing people's backs" (massage therapy) that I also write books. So he was thrilled when I asked him if I could share his stories on my webpage with my friends. Here we go:

Story #1: The Lion's Life

First there was a lion king, then the baby grew in the mommy's belly. Now, then a pigeon walked by and then the pigeon took the baby and the mom was so mad. Then the shuttles came down and then the aliens killed the baby but the pigeon killed the aliens. He broke the aliens with his beak and the baby lion was saved. And then the tools came by and told the baby lion they can share their friends. And Handy Manny told the baby lion he can stay if he wants. And that's the story of the Lion's Life. The End.

One of father's vintage
Go-Bots.

Story #2: The Heart Loved the Stick

First there was two friends, a Heart and a Stick. Before long, they married each other and turned big. But the bad guys surrounded them but the Autobots came and told the bad guys, so now you know what they do. Someone tells someone and they tell. And maybe they will all discover that you can't make up a story if it's real or fake. And that's how they got married. But you can't do anything without your friend. The End. By John.

Story #3: The Red Crayon and the Blue Crayon

There was two friends, a blue crayon and a red crayon. Then an orange crayon came by and he put one spell on both crayons. Then they were iced. The good guys came by and broke the evil spell. The rocket ship zoomed and killed the bad guy for good. Then the Bakugans came and saved every one of them. And that's the story of the red crayon and the blue crayon.

Evil Autobot?

Story #4: 3,2,1... Go! The Pencil Killed the Evil Autobot by John. Illustrator: Daddy. The one who reads it: John Kangly Stanger (no idea: ed)

Deep deep deep down in the sea lived an octopus and her baby octopus. Then a crayon and a pencil came down and married in the water. But the octopus and her babies did not let those guys marry in the water. So they let out a crew of sharks to throw them away. But the sharks ate them up accidentally. Then they turned into octopus babies and they dived right back into the water. Then the evil Autobot came down and took over the whole water city. And that's the story of the pencil and the crayon. By John. True story.

You talk a good game, Mark, but just exactly what's been taking up all of your time?

So yeah, here I am a good, I don't know, several months after having posted anything substantive on here and I'm still inexplicably getting hundreds of hits per day on this site. Which, I've gotta say, does make me feel a little guilty. And of course I never wanted this site to devolve into a series of long-winded excuses of why I don't have time to post here, but this time I actually do have some good ones.

The last year has meant enormous upheaval in my work life. I was working part-time at two different practices six days a week for almost an entire year before I left the one in Mount Prospect and went to work full-time in August for the practice in Lincoln Park. This was a good move for me, but it's always stressful to switch jobs and my boss from the Mount Prospect practice always treated me like family instead of just a mere employee, so I was sad to see her move to California.

Nevertheless, my new practice in the city is very fun, very busy, and I work with some terrific new folks who, similarly to my old boss, really "get" good patient care and go the extra mile to make sure that our patients get the most out of their treatment with us. So that's reassuring and I feel confident that I'm in the right place for this phase of my career. If my schedule is anything to go by (usually booked solid after only three months of being there full-time), I fit right in.

DePaul's quad

Also, importantly, this new practice of mine happens to be located only about three blocks from DePaul University, where I've been accepted into the Masters program in Writing & Publishing, which I started last month and am already nearly through the Autumn quarter of. DePaul goes by quarters instead of semesters, and though I dare not question their math, there are apparently only three quarters per calendar year. No judgment here, just saying.

Your SEO meta-tags are
poorly conceived, father.

I'm learning all sorts of fun, rad stuff in the Writing & Publishing curriculum, including a lot I didn't know about web design, effective writing for the web, SEO, and other technical things for my class on digital publishing. You'd think by looking to the right-hand bar here and noticing that I've had this blog now for a whopping thirteen years that there wouldn't be all that much you could teach me about writing for the web. And you'd be wrong. There are a ton of fascinating web-use studies and style guides emerging that really make a lot of sense when sitting down to put thoughts on something as simple as a blog, and I'm slowly becoming a convert to their logic.

So if you're in grad school full-time and working full-time, why haven't you had time to blog? you ask. It can't be all that hard to carve a few minutes out of every week to post clever or creatively-phrased thoughts about your life on this little online diary, right?  Right?

Yeah, well I've also been doing a shitload of writing, including four new short stories (one of which was already published in CClaP's anthology American Wasteland: bleak tales of the future on the tenth anniversary of 9/11) and two new guest blog posts at Patrick Wensink's We Who Are About To Die and Robert Duffer's Experiments in Manhood, I'm working on a collaborative project that's still in the early phases so I won't go into it further yet, AND finally at long last my latest novel The Damnation of Memory will be released within the next few weeks.

This is a robot dressed as a
caveman. No caption needed.

I've been trying to get out to reading events on a semi-regular basis as my punishing schedule allows, and since I last posted I was able to attend the annual Chicago Tribune Printer's Row Lit Fest, Poetry Magazine's Printer's Ball, a Quickies! (run by my fellow Chicago writer Lindsay Hunter), as many Orange Alerts as I could get to, the CCLaP Multi-Release Party (Life After Sleep was one of the books), and the release party at Quimby's for American Wasteland where I read with Delphine Pontvieux and Larry Santoro. Quimby's, if you don't know, is probably the coolest bookstore I've ever been in in my life, and aside from shelves and shelves of some of the most legit indie fiction out there, it's just packed to the rafters with random junk/treasure like a life-sized pair of mannequin she-devils and a robot dressed like a caveman. I mentioned to my friend and author Katherine Scott Nelson that I if I ever manage to obtain a full-on Man Cave, I want it to look like Quimby's.

My Crane technique will defeat
your Dragon technique.

And of course that's just the formal stuff. I haven't even mentioned yet that my son John is getting HUGE, and, unbelievably enough, will be starting Kindergarten in ten short months. Even though he was a December baby, and therefore gets almost an entire extra year before starting formal school, that still seems lightning fast to me somehow. It was like he was two and a half for about a decade and then suddenly he's going to be asking me for the keys to my car. I'm only partly joking about this, he did actually ask me a month or two back how old he would have to be before he could drive a car.

Him: Dad, when can I drive a car?
Me: When you're sixteen.
Him: I'm four.
Me: I know.
Him: Will you teach me?
Me: Sure.
Him: Can I drive your car?
Me: Uhhh...

So not fucking around...

John has also discovered just in the last month or so a budding love for video games. That's right, that earth-shaking rumble you felt a few weeks ago wasn't another sub-oceanic mega-quake, it was the confluence of interests between two equally devoted fans of pirates, spacemen, ninjas, knights, and pretty much anything that carries a sword or laser pistol. Add this to his (and my) affection for LEGOs, and you get LEGO Universe, a kid-friendly MMORPG with characters made out of... you guessed it. I was sure it would take John at least a while before he could master the controls and dexterity necessary to move and shoot and jump in a totally 3D environment. I mean, we had Frogger in the arcade when I was four and a half and THAT was hard. He sat next to me for about a week before trying it himself and now he patiently assures me: "I've got this, Dad." Here's Ruckus Sam, our main character.

Too pimp?

My beloved Volvo S60 turbo finally gave up the ghost. Or, more precisely, was threatening to cost me several thousand dollars to repair during a time when several thousand dollars is several thousand dollars more than I have to spend on a ten year old car, so I traded it in for a sensible, responsible daddy car, which weirdly was only available in the package I wanted in white with black tinted windows. I wasn't sure I was a Hyundai guy at first, and I really wasn't sure I could pull off something quite so pimp-looking as a white car with dark tint, but I've come to love my new ride and it has all sorts of nifty little things that weren't available when I bought the Volvo, like full Bluetooth compatibility with my phone, which means in addition to podcasts and streaming radio, I can now take calls from you on my cell while driving to and from work and school at all hours of the day and not simultaneously crash my car trying to get the combination of wires and adapters just right. So call me. I'll probably answer. I've got to tell you, as well, after having bought premium gas for a turbo engine for almost six years, the pump is a hell of a lot less painful now when I'm filling up.

Lego Boba Fett
stares at you icily.

Let's see, what else? I've updated the look of all of my pages so they sort of match each other now. www.markrbrand.com, www.vinniethevole.com, and www.breakfastwiththeauthor.com all now have vaguely similar aesthetics, and they're all cross-linked for maximum surf-age. Hope you get a chance to check them all out because with this digital publishing class I'm taking I've rededicated myself somewhat to keeping all of them current and updated.

That's about it, I guess. More posts coming soon.

It's October, I haven't updated in months, and my apology is a pile of awesome music

So feast your ears on these:

This song is just terrific. First heard it during the end credits of the first episode of season 3 of HBO's Hung. Such a great anthem for recovering from this shitty economy. I work, and so do you.




It's like if tween-aged Kate Nash and Grace Potter had a sleepover and their crazy college-student older cousin stopped in with a handle of whiskey and full orchestra.




I heard this one on Pandora a few weeks ago and hunted for days to find it on here. I didn't even know what it was until I heard the last line "everything looks perfect from far away". There are many, many versions of this on YouTube, but this cover by Iron & Wine was the raw-est and captures the alternate meaning of the song so well.




This song will rip your heart out and feed it to baby ducks. Johnny Cash did a cover of it that just leaps down your throat, but the original, if you can stomach how slow and emotionally brutal it is, is the better version.




When I purchased my new car following the untimely death of my Volvo, I unknowingly also got an active subscription to XM Satellite radio. I happened to be surfing on the "Jam_ON" station and heard this little gem. I had never heard of this band, but this is a fun song at high volume.




This is one of those songs that I hated initially and it somehow grew on me during a breakneck race to get to school on time one Monday evening, weaving in and out of Chicago traffic. Put this song on loud, roll down the windows, and floor it.

In case you were wondering where to be on August 10th...

I'm not going to say that my reading is going to stand up all that well alongside these other literary behemoths, but I'm not NOT going to say it either.  That's right, Ben Tanzer, I just called you a behemoth.

Full details here.