Too busy working and writing to post much lately. Jay Lake tells me he writes 1,500 words an hour. Boy, do I feel like a slacker. Anyway, it doesn’t leave me much time to pay attention to whatever’s going on out there.

In the mean time, if you’re looking for something to read:

I read Anthony Swofford’s Jarhead this weekend and it’s as good as everyone says it is. Much less messed up than I expected from the reviews. If you’ve read other infantry memoirs like Guy Sajer’s The Forgotten Soldier or Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried you may not learn a whole lot that you didn’t know already, but Swofford’s an excellent writer, and you should definitely check him out. (And then you’ll be able to get the jokes in the Chris Offutt story in McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, too.) I hope we get some guys like him coming out of this war.

From the department of unimbedded journalism, Phillip Robertson doesn’t quite have the technical chops of a Michael Herr or a Robert Kaplan, but the stories he’s filing from Iraq for Salon have a visceral immediacy that’s hard to match. I need to go back and check out his Afghanistan stuff.

And I’m glad to hear (via William Gibson) that Salam Pax seems to have made it through so far.

A conversation overheard by G. while in the Meridian Hotel — the Iraqi media center:

Female journalist 1: oh honey how are you? I haven’t seen you for ages.

Female journalist 2: I think the last time was in Kabul.

Bla bla bla

Bla bla bla

Female journalist 1: have to run now, see you in Pyongyang then, eh?

Female journalist 2: absolutely.

Iraq is taken out of the headlines. The search for the next conflict is on. Maybe if it turns out to be Syria the news networks won’t have to pay too much in travel costs.

You want something in between the Potemkin village statue-topplings and the radical Shi’ites’ anti-US rallies, something a little nuanced, Salam Pax is your man.