Over the course of that rainy muddy monsoon that was the summer of 2018, I wrote some poems, cheap, messy, quick, and therefore true. I consider it an expression of this idea I call Suburban Zen, which I have not fully defined. It’s closer to Zen that way. It’s a Kindle-exclusive, and it’s 99 cents. You… Read More New Summer Poetry
As part of a retrospective on Welles for its weekly movie post. His opinion matches my own. It’s an odd little movie, ambitious and self-referential, with an element of satire, both of Hollywood culture in the 70’s and of the art-house trends of that decade. The film within the film, which has the same title,… Read More Ace Of Spades Does “The Other Side of The Wind”
My reasons are common, but they are no less true for that: Twitter is Unfair. Twitter squelches the speech of the Right, but not the Left. The examples are too many to count, and they’ve been going on for a while. It’s going to continue that way. That’s what the people who run Twitter think is… Read More Good-Bye, Fail Whale: Why I Left Twitter
Apparently it’s 1971 or something, because Vice UK has a whole subsection of Astrological blather. It’s tongue-in-cheek, but also not: A Bunch of Vague Blather With the Latest in Cool-Kid Lingo for “Virgo Season” Same, But For Libras Oh, Hi Scorpios Yeah, We’re Just Gonna Keep On With This, Sagittarius But that’s not what brought… Read More Why Vice is Writing About Astrology
A good discussion of the most modern of complaints: the University-as-therapy and the concomitant eradication of Free Speech. Apart from its intellectual content and institutional structure descriptions, The Coddling of the American Mind makes being a contemporary college student in some schools sound like a terrible experience: Life in a call-out culture requires constant vigilance,… Read More The Coddling of the American Mind — Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff — The Story’s Story
A rare political post that I’m throwing up because it touches upon an area I just finished writing about. Larry Correia takes the world’s dumbest tweet by a Congressman, and drops a hydrogen bomb of truth on it, and makes the rubble bounce. Last week a congressman embarrassed himself on Twitter. He got into a… Read More We Don’t Actually Want Another Civil War
That’s the upshot of this article at Quillette. While midlist authors are seeing their income shrink, the upper-crust is doing even better: the number of seven-figure advances has increased even as the number of five-figure ones have decreased. What this means is that the publishing industry doesn’t want to invest in small potatoes anymore –… Read More The Novel Ain’t Dead. The Industry Has Just Changed.
Let. It. Go. For over two decades there was talk of a third Ghostbusters movie, but that particular phantasm never materialized. Instead we got 2016’s Ghostbusters, a reboot of the property with an all-new cast that suffered all kinds of controversy and ultimately failed to be a hit at the box office. That seemingly killed another Ghostbusters in that continuity, but perhaps it opened the door… Read More Someone Hold Dan Akroyd Down and Make Him Stop Babbling About Ghostbusters 3
What the wags have called Braveheart 2 came out this week on Netflix, and being a medievalist nerd, I was all about it. It is a more accurate film that Braveheart in several respects. For one, it gives us the real struggle Robert the Bruce had in claiming the throne of Scotland. None of this… Read More Quick Review: The Outlaw King
Originally posted on Mad Genius Club:
We are writers. That means our tools of the trade are words. Most of us — but not all — are more fascinated with words than we should be. So, why is it most writing books say nothing about words, except perhaps for telling you things like “eschew all…
