• Memoir

    Midsummer – Year of the Fire Rooster

    After seven years of teaching in China, I’m glad to return to America–for the time being–and enjoy some good old fashioned reverse culture shock. There’s music on the car radio I haven’t heard in years. Weekly trips to matinees showing current/uncensored films that do not require government issue IMAX 3D glasses. There’s fresh air and blue sky and green lawns. Even all the mass delusion here in the wilds of Make America Great Again seems quaint to me. And right now there is much to do. Books to read. Trails to hike. Old friends to visit. An action-comedy script in the works. And finally, it goes without saying that I must…

  • Creative Metanonfiction,  Memoir,  MFA,  Satire

    A Report on the Ontological Status of Somebody’s Acting Head

    Subject: Update Concerning Somebody’s Acting Head Classification: Ultra Secret – For University MFA Eyes Only As none of you may know, I am a self-appointed detective investigating the current ongoing fiasco occurring in Hong Kong. But now I am depressed because I have discovered the truth about the Acting Head, my nemesis. My greatest fear was manifesting. Could I have been unwittingly wormholed into a Thomas Pynchon novel? When praying to the deities, Jesus, Peter Hessler, and Kim Kardashian didn’t work, I decided to take matters into my own hands and improvise a voodoo doll out of unwashed socks, a moldering potato, and my emergency sewing kit. Still nothing. Then…

  • Creative Works,  Satire,  Traveling

    How to Act Now Before Your Total Abnilisation (All major credit cards accepted!)

    A Note to the Reader: “How to Act Now Before Your Total Abnilisation” is a work of cosmic pseudepigraphy by American fabulist Matt Muller, significant for its experimental style and its reputation as one of the most difficult works of metafictional advertisement in the American language. Its first draft written in Chengdu, China over a period of 3 hours, and first published online minutes later, just 24 hours before it would be made to disappear from Chinese cyberspace. The entire work is written in a falsely eloquent language, consisting of a mélange of standard American and neologistic jargon, which many critics believe attempts to recreate a simulacrum of expertise and…