A blink of lightning, then
a rumor, a grumble of white rain
growing in volume, rustling over the ground,
drenching the gravel in a wash of sound.
Drops tap like timpani or shine
like quavers on a line.

It rings on exposed tin,
a suite for water, wind and bin,
plinky Poulenc or strongly groaning Brahms’
rain-strings, a whole string section that describes
the very shapes of thought in warm
self-referential vibes

and spreading ripples. Soon
the whispering roar is a recital.
Jostling rain-crowds, clamorous and vital,
struggle in runnels through the afternoon.

More from Derek Mahon's "The Thunder Shower" here.

If you saw me smiling on the train Wednesday morning, I was reading the start of Karen Russell's "The Dredgeman's Relevation." If you saw me linger on the platform that evening, I was reading the story's end.

Her fiction in a July New Yorker is the story I'd most anticipated of the magazine's "20 under 40" series. Russell is a random acquaintance of this blog, and I've been a fan of her writing since first reading it. In her stories — usually somewhere between the magical and the grotesque, often equally joyful and gothic — she makes investment. You get the feeling she has to reach a personal, sustained suspension of disbelief for each sentence. At least I get that feeling. The voices beat reality.

Her relative absence from publishing as she's worked on her first book has been no easy time for a Karen Russell fan. Which, granted, is likely much easier than being Russell, as she actually has to write the book.

So, if you do one good thing for yourself today (and you should), read "The Dredgeman's Relevation." Print the pages, take them on the train with you and smile until you're engrossed. Here are five lines from the story — the first sentence and four non-spoiler others. Now go places.

"The dredgeman had a name, Louis Thanksgiving Auschenbliss, but lately he preferred to think of himself as a profession."

"Lightning sent down its white spider legs outside the boxcar doors and crawled up the pine trunks, trailing fires."

"Outside, rising from the ground like the earth's own exhalation, came the odor of peat, a great seawall of it, nothing so subtle or evanescent as a fragrance — no, this was stuff with a true stink."

"The insects had been a chronic irritation on the C.C.C. barge, but out here on the marshy open prairie they were pestilential, their sawing sound filling the air like a cruel ventriloquy of the men's own thirst."

"He did not have any headaches that day, or dark presentiments."

Did you ever consider not becoming a writer?

Do you mean did I ever consider becoming something else? Yes. As a boy, I wanted to be the Peruvian Diego Maradona. Sadly, Peru hasn't made the World Cup since 1982, so I guess I did well to choose something different. But, more to the point, not becoming a writer is something I consider every single day, if only for a moment. What if today I didn't write? What would I do?

It's cool, Daniel. You can still blog. And hear the words in your head. Beautifully beyond you but near you, around you. Ready for purpose.

Part of my latest New Yorker catch-up attempt, in the June 28 issue — neurologist Oliver Sacks examines the case of a writer who suffered a stroke and lost his ability to recognize all written words. As the writer struggles to practice his craft again, Sacks covers how reading works.

We are all faced with a world of sights and sounds and other stimuli, and our survival depends on making a rapid and accurate appraisal of these. Making sense of the world around us must be based on some sort of system, some swift and sure way of parsing the environment. Although seeing objects, defining them visually, seems to be instantaneous and innate, it represents a great perceptual achievement, one that requires a whole hierarchy of functions. We do not see objects as such; we see shapes, surfaces, contours, and boundaries, presenting themselves in different illumination or contexts, changing perspective from their movement or ours. From this complex, shifting visual chaos, we have to extract invariants that allow us to infer our hypothesize objecthood. It would be uneconomical to suppose that there are individual representations, on engrams, for each of the billions of objects around us. The power of combination must be called on; one needs a finite set or vocabulary of shapes that can be combined in an infinite number of ways, much as the twenty-six letters of the alphabet can be assembled (within certain rules and constraints) into as many words or sentences as a language ever needs.

It's nearly time for the Salzburg Academy again — congrats to those going! — and there's no better reminder of why the Academy exists than in this week's New Yorker. Ken Auletta profiles Afghanistan media mogul Saad Mohseni and the complicated nature of his broadcasting.

Among the angles, Auletta writes about the Afghan Star show, the local take on American Idol. "Every Thursday night, an estimated one-third of Afghanistan's thirty million citizens gather in front of television sets to watch," Auletta writes. "In rural places without electricity, people fill generators with gasoline or hook up their TVs to car batteries."

The culmination of the passage is a sublime reminder about speech.

As on "American Idol," winners on "Afghan Star" are determined by the judges, the audience, and text messages sent from mobile phones throughout the country. Before the show aired, Mohseni made a deal with Roshan, the country's leading mobile-phone company, and ran promotional ads on Tolo and Arman instructing citizens how to place a vote. (The text messages cost voters about seven cents, the equivalent of a loaf of bread; three hundred thousand votes were cast in the final week.) With suspicious egalitarianism, the finalists have often been from each of the three main Afghan ethnic groups: Tajiks, Pashtuns, and Hazaras. At first, losers reacted badly on the air, smashing stage equipment and claiming ethnic prejudice, but, because their tantrums were so public, they were humiliated and seen as dividers.

In the third season, one of the finalists was Lema Sahar, a Pashtun woman from Kandahar, the spiritual home of the Taliban. Religious leaders were outraged that a woman was allowed to perform in public, and Sahar received death threats. In the "Afghan Star" documentary, she said, "We hide the songbooks and other things at night. If the Taliban come at night, we have a special place to hide the computer. If they find something, they kill you." She was undaunted. "If I do not sing, what else can I do?" she said. Sahar's performances on the show demonstrate a somewhat tenuous relationship with pitch and rhythm, but she was a crowd favorite. Mohseni told a reporter at the time, "They all realized how it was for her to come from Kandahar, and we all want to root for the underdog." The text-message voting did something else, Mohseni says: It "has changed Afghanistan in ways you could not imagine ten years ago. It has given people power to vote someone off."

As my coffee table and I aren't having the greatest year in keeping up with The New Yorker (every week, Remnick? haven't you heard of the Internet destroying publishing revenues?), I'm clearing my mind today before reading the self-debated "20 Under 40" summer fiction issue.

First, I've just finished reading the short-story collection Things I've Learned from Women Who've Dumped Me, the birthday gift from my brother that pretty much makes up for the time when we were kids and he gave me a crossword puzzle book when he was the one who loved crossword puzzles. Rob, consider all the crosswords forgiven.

Here is my favorite passage from that book that isn't totally obscene or the last essay in the book, as I try to stay away from quoting endings. It's from Will Forte's "Beware of Math Tutors who Ride Motorcycles."

… As we got off the phone, I wondered about Steve. Was he some tattooed clubber guy? Was he on a collegiate sports team? Would a representative for a modeling agency approach him on the street and give him their card?

I walked back to the van and, in a jealous mini-rage, slammed the door hard enough to provoke a "Trouble in paradise?" comment from one of the ski teamers. Could be, ski teamer, I thought to myself. Could be.

That night, I slyly asked Michelle all about Steve. I didn't like what I heard. Apparently, Steve was a blond-haired, blue-eyed surfer. He was nice, smart and funny. But nothing scared me more than the information I found out next: Steve played bass for a popular campus band called the Brewmasters. Oh, great, a fucking musician. When pressed, Michelle admitted that she found Steve attractive, but claimed she didn't think of him in "that way." As I went on with my questions, Michelle became annoyed. Didn't I believe her? They were just friends. Steve was helping her with her studies. If anything, he should be thanked — I mean, the more solid grasp she had on her math theorems, the quicker she could do future math theorem homework, and the quick she could meet me for romantic date nights at local taco establishments.

Next, I watched Black Joe Lewis and the Honeybears play Get Yo Shit.

Remnick, I'm ready. Right after breakfast. And more procrastinating.

I'm excited to see Karen Russell, long a fav of this blog, on The New Yorker list of "20 under 40" fiction writers. "The list will be published in the double fiction issue of The New Yorker that arrives on newsstands Monday," the NYT tells us. Can we have writing with this list, please?

Between Russell, the fantastically debuting Joshua Ferris, all the folks who have blown me away in their New Yorker work (like Yiyun Li), let's feature their short stuff and forget about Talk of the Town for a week.

In related news, it appears that Russell's Swamplandia! is now due for either a February 2011 or spring 2011 release. Looking forward to it.

Update, days later: Should've mentioned that I first heard about the issue via Gawker's quality "How to Complain About The New Yorker's 20 Favorite Writers Under 40." And the post answers my concern — "eight of whom will be published in an upcoming 'fiction' special; the other 12 in subsequent issues of the magazine." Awesome.

Even the people who love it the most (and fight our wars). When his less-than-glowing quote appeared in the Times this week, the NYer line jumped to mind. It had struck me at the time as progressive, an example of how to use an app well. But you attend enough briefings…

New Yorker, September 2008:

Petraeus is a professional briefer, and with a PowerPoint slide before him he will slip into a salesman's rapid-fire patter. He illustrates his remarks with a laser pointer; he will swirl a bright dot of emerald light around a particular sentence fragment until a listener risks succumbing to hypnosis. Petraeus and his staff will discuss at length the shading of colors on a slide, or the direction of arrows depicting causality. When I asked, in a skeptical tone, about this passionate use of PowerPoint, the General responded in the staccato of the medium: "It's how you communicate big ideas–to communicate them effectively."

New York Times, April 2010:

Gen. David H. Petraeus, who oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and says that sitting through some PowerPoint briefings is "just agony," nonetheless likes the program for the display of maps and statistics showing trends. He has also conducted more than a few PowerPoint presentations himself.

But is there pride involved? Outside the watch of the Times, he's still presenting enthusiastically, the 92nd Street Y shows this week.

I had to present a Powerpoint deck this week. I printed it out.

(Sorry, trees.)

Good for the Post Story Lab. Steve Hendrix noticed this line in a New Yorker blog item and posted about it: "The biggest play of the game may have been Alex Ovechkin's open-ice demolition of Jagr, which led to a quick Russian goal and an arena-wide gasp (it was the hockey equivalent of the collapse of the North Tower)."

Like Hendrix, I'm a big fan of NYer writer Nick Paumgarten, but what a bizarre comparison. One other blogger thought the same: "I mean, I love me some Ovechkin talk on newyorker.com, but this may be a tad inappropriate." (The one funny thing was Hendrix's initial post title, still reflected in the URL: "But what can he do with curling?") No one else on the Internet seemed to notice. I posted the line and Story Lab link on Facebook yesterday, and friends were similarly mystified.

But as the day rolled on, friend Andy noticed the New Yorker quietly removed the North Tower reference. No explanation, no note. The line lost its parenthetical and joined with the next sentence, "The biggest play of the game may have been Alex Ovechkin's open-ice demolition of Jagr, which led to a quick Russian goal and an arena-wide gasp, but Datsyuk's defensive work, as resolute an expression of skill as any spinorama or one-timer, was the secret to Russia's success."

Not a cool way to edit online, New Yorker. See the post here.

Claire Keegan's "Foster" is what you read leaning against the handle of the refrigerator as the water boils and your wine glass gets lonely on the counter. You continue to read the story through the meal and, returning the plate to the sink, as your clothes washer spins off in the hall, then the dryer. Most of the sentences in the story gaze outward but every fourth or so looks in. A line looking in? "I am in a spot where I can neither be what I always am nor turn into what I could be."

Right now… I'm in search of awesome. That's what I've decided.

Colliding with the above story about a little Irish girl, I've posted this similarly (seriously) themed Wilco song before but never this version.