by TJ Price An excerpt from “The Collectors,” by Matt Bell. No self without these ghosts. No ghosts, without— No. No ghosts, or rather: No ghosts except in things. They surround you, press closer, waiting for the rapidly approaching moment when you too will be just a thing, an object, a static entity slowly falling…

by TJ Price In last month’s column, as in the month’s before, I began telling a story that has its beginnings in a therapeutic modality called “narrative reprocessing.” Essentially, this is the act of re-authoring one’s trauma(s) in order to defragment painful memories, which in turn allows for a type of spiritually retroactive agency over events…

by TJ Price In last month’s column, I began telling a story that has its beginnings in a therapeutic modality called “narrative reprocessing.” Essentially, this is the act of re-authoring one’s trauma(s) in order to defragment painful memories, which in turn allows for a type of spiritually retroactive agency over events that caused distress in…

by TJ Price I’m going to have to change the names in this story, but not to protect the innocent. As the telling would have it, none involved in the following can claim that status, either objectively or by adhering to the legal definition. I can’t tell you why he did what he did, or…

by TJ Price I For years after an abrupt departure from college, I floated around, aimless and pathless. It was only a matter of time before I lost any buoyancy and began to drown, most likely in one or any of the bars I had begun to frequent. Seasons slid by without any notice, as…

by TJ Price   I.  Hook And I’m a true doomscroller I can’t seem to shut it down Until the worst is over And it’s never over Metric’s album Formentera, released about three years ago, begins with “Doomscroller,” a deranged, multilayered, pulsing epic that lasts for approximately nine minutes. As an opening statement, this is…

by TJ Price It’s been one year since I’ve been writing this monthly column here at 3 Quarks Daily. I think the temptation on such an occasion is to look backward—for evidence to support this, we have phenomena like the “clip show,” the “greatest hits,” the summation at the end of the textbook’s chapter. Further—the…

by TJ Price It’s a few days before Christmas, but it doesn’t feel like it. The weather app I use has subtitled the forecast for the holiday with a cheeky “feels more like Spring than Christmas,” and the temperature is hovering around seventy degrees Fahrenheit. I’m visiting family down in Cape Fear, and my nephew,…

by TJ Price I came to Andrés Barba as I come to many authors—via recommendation. A very good friend was the first to mention Barba’s work—specifically, Such Small Hands—during the course of a fun back-and-forth of “Have You Read?” My friend proposed Such Small Hands at first assuming I was familiar, but when I admitted…

by TJ Price Saying “I don’t know” is one of the great joys of my adult life. I revel in the phrase. I freely and openly admit honest ignorance, in the service of learning more, hungrily, with an avid—and, perhaps, slightly obsessive—need. It was not always this way. For most of my early life, in…

by TJ Price I did not expect to be watching so-called “reality TV” this weekend. It’s not a habit of mine; I’m not the kind of person who typically consumes that kind of media—at least, not willingly. There’ve been a few exceptions to this: back in the early aughts, I did watch almost all of…

by TJ Price F-1: blueprint The house, then, and its rooms. Viewed from the outside, it is nothing extraordinary: situated at the top of a hill, its single-level structure is unassuming. The front lawn is studded with the acorns of oaks and maples, themselves with none of their lowest branches reachable from the ground. There…

by TJ Price I first found the book in the used section of Longfellow Books, in Portland Maine, in the early years of the new millennium. The title included a sense of implicit dissonance, and there was no way I could resist it. It was a hardback, and the cover featured art of a book,…

by TJ Price In high school, algebra class was fraught with peril. I’ve never been good at math—in fact, I suffer from mild dyscalculia (not “number dyslexia,” as so many people quip), wherein integers squirm and shimmy on the page, mischievously transposing themselves with the others in a sequence. This was danger enough, yet also…

by TJ Price “What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying.” —Gilles Deleuze I struggle sometimes to write this column. See, it forces me to confront an essential question, which is:…

by TJ Price 1. It’s no secret that every society thinks its days are the last days. “But there’s something different about these days,” each cycle of humanity insists, and circumstances provide the breeding ground for our justifications in believing such. In these days, there’s unprecedented amounts of strife and calamity, as evidenced by the…

by TJ Price It was an unbearably hot and humid day. The clouds were starting to mass in the west, slowly but surely rolling their way into the city and darkening as they came. For sure, it would rain a deluge by mid-afternoon. The skyscrapers were already quivering with the anticipation of it, as though…

by TJ Price My first job, like so many others before me, was in customer service at a grocery store. I started as a bagger, positioned at the tailboard of a register, waiting for the cashier to slide down the items the customer chose from the store at large, though eventually I moved up to…

by TJ Price At a certain point, all memory is fiction. What we retain of the past is selective—our brain typically glosses over the finer details—even the substance of it is subject to change. Our past, much like our present and future, is fluid, constantly running, and not even Memory can step in that same…

by TJ Price In a 2001 article in The New York Times, Elmore Leonard begins a series of ten rules for writing with “Never open a book with weather.” Whether or not Mr. Leonard is right or wrong in this dictum, I have decided to start this column with exactly that: the weather. My thoughts…