I’ve had Joel Kotkin’s The New Class Conflict on my Kindle Wish List for some time. It’s dovetails with what I have long thought about the actual class structure of America for some time. I was rather pretentiously calling myself a “rebel against my class” back in college. But I hadn’t yet found that need to… Read More Mencken and the New Class Conflict
Really, a collegiate playwright, but that doesn’t make the same stale pop-cultural reference. In any case, one of the ways I spent my days in university instead of exercising or learning how to talk to girls was writing one-act plays. Some of them were bedroom-type farces, some had theological and/or philosophical pretenses. All were silly.… Read More I Was a Teenage Playwright
He covers all the basics in a short period of time. This struck me: Brian Aldiss believes that if you look at the life of any novelist, you’ll find an early traumatic break, and mine seems no exception. Because I think everyone can examine their childhood and find moments of sublime clarity, when reality takes… Read More William Gibson’s Source Code: An Interesting Mini-Memoir
I have a lingering love of the genre, and one of these days may yet pour out the Western novel that’s been a-brewin’ in me since I was a tad. For the nonce, I’ve created a Medium Collection devoted to Western-ness, and a fine fellow has contributed a story to it: High Moon – Westwood.… Read More The Western Ain’t Dead.
Way before I’d ever read 1984, I’d heard of it. I don’t know if I had heard of it during the year 1984, as I turned eight that autumn, but somewhere along the way I heard that particular year spoken of in that way that conveyed symbolic significance. When I did read it,that significance finally took… Read More 1985 is a Thing
And by “not entirely” I mean that there was such a person known as that, who lived in that part of Arkansas and came before the not-fictional Judge Parker’s court on a few occasions. At least, according to Brett Cogburn, who posits his great-grandfather as that man.
At the end of a re-posted Sarah Hoyt Human Wave “manifesto” You shall not spend your life explaining why your not-boring is better than your fellow writers not-boring. Instead you will shut up and write. There is nothing lamer, sadder, and more pathetic that author-on-author hate. Does anyone imagine that J.K. Rowling gives one… Read More A Message I Think Many of Us Self-Published Could Use.
Winter’s Blossom, posted on Medium. Thanks to Jason Yi for accepting it to his Dark Matter collection.
Like a Bandit, I made out. Like a bandit. The list: William Shakespeare’s Star Wars – Still reading it, and while i detect clunky moments, when it’s on, it sizzles. Two Gentlemen of Lebowski – A friend of mine summed it up as “so much more spot-on than necessary.” I concur. World War One: A Short History – “In four… Read More The Yuletime Haul of Books: Trenches, Emperors, and the Knave Doth Abide
I was done with you, you old dead grump. Yes, I liked the Hitchhiker series in my early adolescence. Early adolescence is the right time for silly stories finding the funny side of planetary extinction and philosophical fail. A send-up of the whole sci-fi genre was long overdue, and Douglass supplied them in witty style. The… Read More Geek Heresy Episode 2: Damn You, Douglas Adams.
Content Blues 