Thoughts on literature, well, anything people write
Or: Why Kook Cooks Is Written In recent years, more Bricks have been about food. Why? Brick started in 2003 as a continuation of themes of columns I’d written for newspapers — contemporary life, personal reflections, and local and national issues — oh, let’s call the last two politics. These self-published online columns have been […]
Poem A home town is where you’re from. After a while, a home town is now where you’re from. Later on, the home town is where you’re from now. Finally, there is no finally, the home town is where you are. The trouble is, who agrees? People in the current hometown see you as a […]
It’s unfair to say one feels let down by a free program. It’s more unreasonable to feel let down by a non-performer’s performance. Alas, several of us did; I asked around afterward. Writer Joyce Carol Oates, 75, still teaching at Princeton and other campuses, was fascinating for her 45 minutes onstage at the Fayetteville Town […]
I lost in “NaNoWriMo” this past month. The goal of National Novel Writing Month, held every November, is to craft at least 50,000 words of a new novel (not revising a draft nor picking up an abandoned manuscript) in those 30 days. This was my fourth try, beginning in 2007. I “won” in 2009. Alas, […]
I knew a Jay Gatsby. We were in grade school in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and stayed close through high school. It probably wasn’t until junior high when I saw this trait of his — simply put it’s a person sure he can buy friends with money. But that is so simple it sounds sociopathic, when […]
When I’m driving somewhere with My Beloved, when (not if) she corrects my navigation, I recall the junior high geometry class phrase “describing the sides of a rectangle.” The distance and time are roughly the same: My over then down, or her under then up, and there you are, thptpth. This is the feeling I […]