Ink Nell News Today

I was still shaking. “I never felt so angry,” I said. “Never ever. I want to club him to death like a baby seal. Just take a lead pipe or a baseball bat and smash him all over.”

“Does she sound 16 to you?” Nell asked the group. “She’s stoned,” Ned countered immediately. “Wasted,” Ted agreed.

Soon after meeting P in 2011, I read his first book. The overall mood was utopian, yet pragmatic. Fable-like methods were used to depict bleak truths while avoiding finger-pointing: Once upon a time, farmers cleared a forest; the water table fell, so they dug a well, and it fell some more, et cetera. Red herrings abounded. One memorable paragraph lamented the extinction of Steller’s sea cow, a sluggish 30-foot behemoth that could have provided truly socialist quantities of meat and milk.