2023: A Final Farewell to Some Irreplaceable Icons
Wow, it's sad to look back and see the sheer number of all-times greats we watched depart our planet this year. Of course, these losses are invariably mitigated by the…
Wow, it's sad to look back and see the sheer number of all-times greats we watched depart our planet this year. Of course, these losses are invariably mitigated by the…
i. Kundera almost killed me, still in my creative cradle, a writer needing nourishment. He arrived in my life too early. As a reader, it wasn’t soon enough, as what…
So It Goes: Reflections on Kurt Vonnegut (written after his death in 2007 and included in my first collection of non-fiction, Murphy's Law Vol. One). Kurt Vonnegut would say in…
I’m happy to announce that my first poetry collection, The Blackened Blues, is available wherever you buy books (yes, *wherever*, so you don’t have to put more money in Rocket Man’s…
Herman Melville is not only, arguably, our most American author; he is America. Author of the most successful second act in literary history (posthumous, alas), Melville is sui generis as…
April, according to this poet, is the cruelest month. April, according to these lovers of poetry, is National Poetry Month, and the only cruelty is metaphorical (which isn’t to say T.S. Eliot was being…
Burn all the political books and essays: trivia masquerading as analysis that mostly measures horse races and trends, at best attempting to make sense of what's already history; if you…
Lee: …That’s stupid. That’s one a’ those?—whadya’ call it? Whadya’ call that? Austin: What? Lee: Whadya’ call it when somethin’s been said a thousand times before. Whadya’ call that? Austin:…
She nodded. “Make it extraordinarily squalid and moving,” she suggested. “Are you at all acquainted with squalor?” I said not exactly but that I was getting better acquainted with it,…
“Making fake biography, false history, concocting a half-imaginary existence out of the actual drama of my life is my life. There has to be some pleasure in this life, and…