The New York Times Magazine asked some writers and critics, including me, which 2011 novel they’d have given the Pulitzer to. I say Mat Johnson’s Pym. Nominate your choice here.

I leave for Berlin and Amsterdam a week from today and meanwhile am slammed at work-work and with other work, so I keep not being able to post any of the things I intend to write here.

But for the first time since my college days, I’ve been keeping a journal. Actually, I’ve been keeping journals, on my iPad, using the Paper app, which I wrote about last month at The Chimerist and have been turning to more and more often since then. I still scrawl longhand drafts and quick notes in my hardbound composition notebook, and my penmanship on the iPad screen leaves something to be desired, but I like the way Paper allows me to categorize my thoughts and musings, and to delete them when they’re no longer useful by pressing a button.

In mid-June I go back into hibernation on my novel, which I haven’t focused on in months. Here are some events I’m involved in before then. On May 30, at the invitation of the ever-inspiring Austin Kleon, I’ll be speaking with two of my Internet crushes, Maris Kreizman and Maria Popova, about creativity and curation in the digital age, at McNally Jackson.

On June 9-10 I’ll be participating with a lot of great writers in Urban Librarian Unite’s 24-Hour Read-In to protest proposed NYC library budget cuts. And on June 12 I’ll be talking with the amazing Kate Christensen about her latest novel, The Astral, which you know I love. Details about all of these events are here.

“My Son Went to Heaven, and All I Got Was a No. 1 Best Seller,” my essay about Heaven is For Real, my own fundamentalist background, and my lifelong doubt, appeared in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine, underneath this illustration by Tom Gauld.

“People ask me, was writing Fun Home therapeutic? And I feel like, yes it was, but that’s kind of like asking somebody if swimming the English Channel was a good workout for them. That’s not why they did it — of course it was a good workout.” The great Alison Bechdel and I spoke on the phone a couple weeks ago about her new book, Are You My Mother? An edited transcript of our interview is up at Barnes & Noble Review.

“Almost all of the great books are regional books,” Ron Rash (Serena) has said. “Landscape is destiny.” I talk with him about his latest novel, The Cove, tomorrow night at McNally Jackson.

Tuesday night I’m reading with Alexander Chee at the KGB Bar for the True Story Nonfiction Series. Both of our essays are about family mysteries, conversations across generations, and I promise you, Alex’s is gorgeous and you want to hear him read it.

In his fiction and in his life, Harry Crews empathized most with the people who needed it most: the freaks, the fuck-ups, people who’d been broken by loss of one kind or another. Crews died yesterday, at age 76. As his son Byron told The Daily’s Claire Howorth, “[he] put more miles on the Chevy than most of us.”

More to come, when I pull myself together. Until then, there are the archives.

Image courtesy of the UGA Library, where you can find a podcast of Crews teaching a creative writing seminar.

I’m finishing up some longer projects and running around for the next little while. Wednesday night I speak at Butler University in Indianapolis. On April 10, I read with the amazing Alexander Chee for KGB Bar’s nonfiction series.

And I might as well be living at my favorite bookstore in April; on the 4th, I interview Madeline Miller (of the wonderful The Song of Achilles), on the 17th, I’ve got a daily double for FSG’s Nerd Jeopardy, and on the 25th I talk with the venerable Ron Rash (Serena, The Cove). Details for these events and others reside here.

I’d love to see you and talk for a second in the midst of the whirl.

My friend Philip Connors’ excellent Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout is out in paperback. Our Paris Review interview, which spilled over onto this site, is included.

The last time I visited Oxford, Mississippi, at the end of a trip through ancestral haunts in the Delta, I stopped by Faulkner’s grave, Rowan Oak, and Square Books, and consumed my weight in sweet tea and fried catfish with my favorite aunt. I’m sure I’ll do some of the same things this weekend, when I’m in town for the Oxford Conference for the Book to talk online publishing with Jack Pendarvis, Anya Groner, and Michael Bible. Other speakers include Barbara Epler, Josh Weil, Steve Yarbrough, and Ken Auletta, to name just a few.

I found a new polka dotted dress for the occasion, and managed to rope one Carrie Frye into meeting me there. I wish I had an extra day or two to get over to Eudora Welty’s house and my Great Aunt Maude’s official state archives in Jackson, but I fly back Sunday for a couple days before heading to speak at Butler University next week. Meanwhile, I’m looking forward to Gulf Coast oysters, mint juleps in their native habitat, and good company.

Last month I sent Darin Strauss a copy of Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori after he vastly overpaid for his part of a cab ride home from a party. In return, he introduced me to the Essential Stories of V.S. Pritchett. And then he discovered an edition of Memento Mori with an introduction written by Pritchett (pictured), and we were as excited as any two book nerds could be.

So far I’ve only found a few tiny excerpts. “Only one other novelist and playwright of consequence — Samuel Beckett — had looked at Mrs. Spark’s subject: the corruption of the flesh, the tedium of waiting to die,” Pritchett said, praising her for taking on “the great suppressed and censored subject of contemporary society, the one we do not care to face, which we regard as indecent: old age.” I hope someone will get permission to republish the full text online.

Fannie Farmer’s Food and Cookery for the Sick and Convalescent and Robin Bellinger’s “Feed a Fever, Starve a Cold” inspired my latest New York Times Magazine mini-column.

Sometimes (rarely, but sometimes) when you’re sick you need something other than a hot toddy.

At Bookslut, Elizabeth Bachner wonders “whether, on average, people are lonelier in real life than in novels.”

“Lost things have their own special category. So long as they’re lost, and felt to be lost, they belong to the imagination and live more vividly than before. They make a mystery.” — Sven Birkerts, The Other Walk.

Birkerts’ best personal essays are steeped in an anxious nostalgia that is, in intensity if not in focus, all too familiar to me.

“The Pump You Pump the Water From,” on his wistfulness for the writing processes of his younger days, is online at the Los Angeles Review of Books. If you like it, pick up The Other Walk, and read that, too.

I spoke with the Nervous Breakdown’s Brad Listi for an hour last month about writing, blogging, day jobs, personal stuff, and why I’m not reviewing nowadays. You can listen at Other People Podcast.

On the heels of news that Junot Díaz will have a new collection of stories out this fall, the Times reports that he wrote the introduction to the Library of America’s forthcoming reissue of the pulp novel Princess of Mars.

“Once the Virgin Mary was released into the world, the world took her and ran in different directions.” Jessa Crispin ponders religious icons.

My latest New York Times Magazine mini-column is on London’s taxi drivers, who memorize 25,000 streets and 20,000 landmarks to obtain a license; they emerge from the training with a larger hippocampus. In the smaller city of his day, Charles Dickens also mastered the roads — to avoid being overcharged. But eventually, as he explains in an essay published in 1860 in All the Year Round, an interview with one man left him with “a more charitable view of the business and trials of cab-driving.”

My wife, accompanied by a servant, and our first-born, an infant, aged three months, had started, one November afternoon, to visit a relative at the other side of London. The day was misty, but when the evening came, the whole town was filled with a dense fog, as thick as soup. I gave them up at an early hour, never supposing that they would attempt to break through the black smoky barrier, and accomplish a journey of nearly nine miles. In this I was mistaken, for towards eleven o’clock the door-bell rang, and they presented themselves muffled up like stage-coachmen. The account I received was, that a four-wheeled cab had been found, that they had been three hours and a half upon the road, that the cabman had walked nearly the whole way with a lamp at the head of his horse, and that he was now outside awaiting payment.

I felt a powerful struggle going on within me. The legislature had fixed the price of cab-work at two shillings an hour, or sixpence a mile, but it had said nothing about snowstorms, fluctuations in the price of provender, or November fogs. There was no contract between my wife and the cabman, and she had not engaged him by the hour, so that, protected by the Act of Parliament, I might have sent out four-and-sixpence for the nine miles’ ride by the servant, and have closed the door securely against the driver. Actuated, perhaps, as much by curiosity, as a sense of justice, I did not do this, but ordered the man in, and gave him the dangerous permission to name his own price. He was a middle-aged driver, with a sharp nose, and when he entered the room, he placed his hat upon the floor, and seemed a little bewildered by novelty of his situation.

“If I am to, I am,” he said,” but I’d my rather leave it to you, sir.”

“This is a journey,” I replied, “hardly within the meaning of the act, and whatever you charge, I will cheerfully pay.”

“Well,” he said, with much deliberation, “I don’t think five shillin’s ought to hurt you?”

As you probably know if you encountered any news source of any kind last week, February 7 was the 200th anniversary of Dickens’ birth. In honor of the occasion, the Guardian filmed Simon Callow on Dickens’ London, the British Council sponsored a readathon, A.N. Devers

Edward St. Aubyn, whose social comedy is “more reminiscent of Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell or Nancy Mitford than of anyone writing today,” appears Upstairs at the Square this Wednesday.

“The most successful nonfiction books are those that can be boiled down into an argument so that everybody can wade in with an opinion without having to undergo the inconvenience of having to read the book itself.” — Geoff Dyer

I’m interested in James Wood’s writings on religion, including his novel, The Book Against God, which I read recently. Here he is on Santorum’s attitudes toward the environment. (See also.)

Parul Sehgal’s admiring and ultimately profound review of Ellen Ullman’s wonderful By Blood appears in the weekend’s New York Times Book Review. I talk with Ullman March 1 at Book Court. Join us if you’re free.

My latest New York Times Magazine columnlet draws on a passage from H.L. Mencken’s The American Language (1921) about the word “bug.”

“An Englishman,” he says, restricts its use “very rigidly to the Cimex lectularius, or common bed-bug, and hence the word has highly impolite connotations. All other crawling things he calls insects. An American of my acquaintance once greatly offended an English friend by using bug for insect. The two were playing billiards one summer evening in the Englishman’s house, and various flying things came through the window and alighted on the cloth. The American, essaying a shot, remarked that he had killed a bug with his cue. To the Englishman this seemed a slanderous reflection upon the cleanliness of his house.”

In a footnote, Mencken elaborates: “Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Gold Bug’ is called ‘The Golden Beetle’ in England. Twenty-five years ago an Englishman named Buggey, laboring under the odium attached to the name, had it changed to Norfolk-Howard, a compound made up of the title and family name of the Duke of Norfolk. The wits of London at once doubled his misery by adopting Norfolk-Howard as a euphemism for bed-bug.”

Even today, slang guru Jonathon Green confirmed when I asked him on Twitter, the UK “does use ‘bedbug’ but otherwise, I would say UK still mainly [uses] ‘insect.’” A British friend of mine agrees, but says of the Mencken passage, “nowadays bug has no connotations of uncleanliness, it’s just not used. The only time an English person says bug to mean insect is ‘don’t let the bedbugs bite’ and no modern British person’s ever had bedbugs, so it’s just a saying, not an insult! We know that it’s a general American term for insect, but we tend to call insects by their species, generally — fly, beetle, ladybird, etc — or, if we need a catch-all euphemism, we’ll say ‘creepy-crawly’ or in Scotland ‘beastie’ (or ‘wee beastie’).”

As the plague spreads, visitors to the UK may wish to make linguistic adjustments.