Every Saturday I’ll post a book passage, fiction or nonfiction. Let’s get started:

I was beginning to find that a lot of my positions clashed. The habits of liberals, their automatic language, their knee-jerk responses to certain issues, deserved the epithets the right wing stuck them with. I’d see how true they often were. Here they were, banding together in packs, so that I could predict what they were going to say about some event or conflict and it wasn’t even out of their mouths yet. I was very uncomfortable with that. Liberal orthodoxy was as repugnant to me as conservative orthodoxy.

– George Carlin, Last Words

Found this while going through old emails. I’d intended to double-major in German and French, but ended up not continuing with German, even though I thought it was easier to speak than French.

I’ve listened to this three times now and don’t know what the hell I’m saying. Let’s hope you real German speakers out there don’t have the same problem…

Author Ray Hecht has interviewed me over on his blog, where I reveal the inspiration behind my new book: odd messages posted all over a small Chinese town:

But once I noticed one message, I noticed all of them; they were all over the place, mysterious, perhaps sinister. And not all these messages were new. Some were barely readable while others looked like they’d been posted yesterday. Someone had been doing this for years. Why?

and in addition to that, we also discuss my life in China and my new book, The Pale Ancient & the House of Mirrors. Read the rest here!

He has written several books, available here. I also did a review of his book, Ghost of the Lotus Mountain Brothel.