Stating the Obvious

It's been 2 weeks since I wrote anything here. Not that long, I suppose, but a lifetime for someone like me who is used to writing every day.

It's been a nice break. It will continue... and it won't...

I won't post here for the foreseeable future.

But if you want to talk baseball, come read what I'm writing at Pinstripe Alley.

And if you want to talk books, let's connect at Goodreads or LibraryThing, where I'll continue to post book reviews.

Updating My Bio

I'm a Staff Writer once again for Pinstripe Alley.

It's a nice thing to be able to go home again. I feel really honored that the staff agreed to let me come back as an analyst and to write on my own schedule.

I'm looking forward to really dedicating my baseball work to Pinstripe Alley and focusing ...andalittlewine... on books and my little life adventures.

Rewriting Shakespeare's Histories

I dislike Shakespeare.

Glad I got that off my chest.

I understand the reverence in which he is held to an extent. He is, for an early modern playwright, remarkably accessible. And his writings cover a range with more talent than anyone else in the era. If you want one many for histories and tragedies and comedies and sonnets, well, you can do no better than Shakespeare.

But, and I know this is not a new or original critique, if you want one thing executed perfectly, never look to Shakespeare. None of Shakespeare's tragedies can touch Marlowe's Edward II (which I suppose is more properly a history) or Faustus. I prefer Beaumont's Knight of the Burning Pestle and Johnson's Alchemist for comedies, and I favor Donne and Milton as poets.

So maybe the proper thing to say is not, "I dislike Shakespeare" but "I disagree with the notion that he is the greatest playwright of his era, let alone the argument that he is the greatest ever."

All the same, I'm always a little appalled when someone tries to re-write Shakespeare, and especially appalled when that person is a homophobic whacko. It has been demonstrated time and again that the internet was specifically designed to mock people like that.

But the Scott Lynch piece I linked above reminded me that just a couple weeks ago, a friend and I were working on a five act adaption of Henry IV 1, IV 2 and Henry V.

Open Mic Day

Feedback day! (click the link already!)

"Eventually" at Red Fez

One of my 30 Before 30 goals was to submit poems to 6 publications this year. I'm half way to my goal, and one of my poems (Eventually) has been accepted for issue 60 of Red Fez.

Check it out (and all the other poems and fiction in issue 60, too).

30 Before 30 Update: Submit or be Conquered

Goal #15 on my 30 Before 30 is to submit poems to 6 publications. This week, I heard back from locations 2 and 3, both of whom want one of the poems I offered to them.

When I set this goal, I thought that going 0 for 6 was a real possibility, which is why I made my goal submissions and not publications.

It was, frankly, a real possibility. But if I'm 0 for 3 with my remaining submissions, I'll still be ecstatic to have this two poems in print.

*** Helpful advice: the image results for a Google search on "submit or be conquered" are Not Safe For Work. Do not look for an image to accompany your blog post on this topic during your lunch hour.

Open Mic at Hazel & Wren

My favorite ladies from the Twin Cities have another Open Mic today, so if you need me, I'll be there.

My poem.

Open Mic at Hazel & Wren

Today's the day!

Poetry, Fiction and Payoff

So I'm a sap when it comes to well written music. Any genre, any singer; if the lyrics are good, I'm hooked.

This often leads me down a rabbit-hole of folk music, and lately I've been hooked by Joni Mitchell's Both Sides Now. And on a recent road trip, while I was thinking about the two graphic novels I've just reviewed (Archeologists of Shadows and Akira), it occurred to me that what I want is for the two books to be like Both Sides Now.

Let me explain.

National Poetry Month Kickoff

Last year, I had a lot of fun completing the April poem-a-day challenge and posting the results here. This year, I'll be doing things a little differently.

Goal #15 on my 30 Before 30 is to submit poems to 6 different publications (one down, five to go), and since last year I've learned that many publications consider posting a draft of a poem to a blog to be "previously published" and therefore unacceptable for future publication.

So, as I write, I'll try to share each day the prompt or theme I had in mind (either the theme I started with, or the theme I ended with, since they're often different).

Day One: On the way to work

Here's wishing you a happy April!

Going Back to Goodreads

One of my 30 Before 30 goals is to improve the blog layout. While it isn't exactly an adjustment to my site, last night I finished importing all my reviews on this blog and LibraryThing to Goodreads.

I got onto Goodreads years ago (seriously, the first book I added was East of Eden on July 11, 2007). Back then, I didn't like it. It was clunky and slow, and it didn't do a good job of sorting through multiple editions. Just because I read one version of Pride and Prejudice doesn't mean I need 1000 versions in my library.

When I started blogging about books, I discovered LibraryThing. It had a much smoother interface than I remember from Goodreads, and the site is small enough that I've actually won a few books from their give-away program. But smallness is a disadvantage, too. I'm not leaving LibraryThing, but with 21 million members, Goodreads is where the people are.

If I'm going to properly serve myself in promoting my reviews, and serve the publishers and authors who have sent me books, I've got to reach the biggest audience possible.

So, whichever site you prefer, let's connect.
Goodreads
LibraryThing

3 Ways to Read Science Fiction and Fantasy

I'm nearly through Margaret Atwood's Year of the Flood, and I'm so captivated that I can't help thinking about why we're drawn to science fiction and fantasy.

In college, I had a writing professor who basically forbade us from writing sci-fi/ fantasy. His logic (and as I've grown as a reader and writer, I've come to appreciate it more and more) was that unless we had a story worth telling, it was too easy to try to hide it by dressing it up with the trappings of fantasy. Descriptions of elves and space ships have their place, so long as they push forward a story that couldn't be told any other way.

Open Mic

It's Open Mic day.
Go. Comment.
Then return.

American Pastoral

Philip Roth had received a lot of attention since he announced his retirement. What was especially interesting to me was how he decided to retire: by reading nearly his entire oeuvre in reverse chronological order.

And when he was done, he decided that one of his favorite books is one of my favorites too: American Pastoral.

The plot is deceptively simple: there is a man who was the golden boy of his hometown; the man marries his high school sweetheart, the prom queen, and they have a daughter; in the midst of the 1960's, the daughter gets involved with the Weathermen and blows up a post office; things fall apart.

30 Before 30 Bucket List

1. Read In Search of Lost Time (A Remembrance of Things Past)

In Fun Home, Alison Bechdel writes "It's said, after all, that people reach middle age the day they realize they're never going to read Remembrance of Things Past." That quote struck a nerve with me, and once I decided that 2013 would be my year for Remembrance... the rest of this list started to take shape.

52 Books

Last year, my new year's resolution was to read a book a week. I've got a new plan for this coming year, but I'll unveil that later this week.

Today is about looking back:

Notes on Surviving a Hurricane

from here

Take the candles out of their hiding spots, all of them. Pull the tea lights from the back of the cabinet with the blue table cloth. Spread the table cloth across the dining room table and array the lights.
Take the thin tapers from behind the liquor bottles- take out the whiskey and the rum while you're there.  Pour. Fill as many candle holders as you own with tapers, and leave the rest on the mantle.
Set multi-wicked jar candles in the bathrooms and along the hallways leading from the dining room to the bathroom.

Light them all while the power is still on. Let them make up for the missing warmth.

Let each sputter lead to another and wait for the freight train wind lashed with rain, the approaching sirens. Breath, quick sharp shallow huddled. Breath, the sirens are not for us. As iron skinned engines doppler into the distance, thankfully count problems like blessings. Count problems like candles, like lit wicks burning down, that must burn down and die.

Place buckets beneath anything that leaks.

Wednesday Open Mic

It's Hazel & Wren's Open Mic today.

Go comment on all the poems, but especially on mine.

Buying Book Reviews, or Am I Doing It Wrong?

People make money reviewing books. I knew this.

People make money posting fake reviews on websites like Amazon and Goodreads. I suppose I understood this to be true.

But people make a living doing this?

It sounds like a scam; if I put it in email format, it would get sucked into your email junk box along with the Nigerian prince and the chain letter from Aunt Martha.

But when I read about people making $28k per month, I think to myself, am I doing it wrong?

Not that I'm interested in selling out, posting fake praise, boilerplate reviews, or demanding money for a review. To consider reviewing a book, all I ask for is a copy of the book. And I've got a queue of reviews to write, including some books that, damn it, I am going to finish reading just in case the last chapter moves me in ways the first two dozen chapters haven't.

I'd like to rush to a moral judgement. I mean, seriously, Todd Rutherford and people like him seem to be savvy enough to make this buck another way. So, muddling the process of reviewing books with money is a desecration (and yes, I'm willing to invoke desecration in all its contexts; it is blasphemous, it is profane, it is a violation of the divine).

But there's a small part of me that wishes, though I'm keeping it tucked away beneath the part that swears I would never- there's a part of me that wonders:

Why didn't I think of that?

How Cruel to Be in Reviewing a Book

I recently finished the audiobook of one of the worst books I've ever read.

I mean it. It was terrible. So this site has been silent while I dig around for what to say.

I love reading the NYTimes' movie reviews. Their reviews are always informative, written at a high level and show a mastery of the genre. But they become something magic when it's time to pan a lousy blockbuster.

Go ahead: read A.O. Scott's review of The Cat in the Hat.

I want to write like that: to eviscerate an author who probably spent less time thinking through the premise of his novel than I've now spent thinking about what to say.

At the same time, I never want to be cruel to someone who has endeavored to create art and failed.

Writing is hard. Impossibly hard. Doubt it? Go ahead: click the link to "Next Blog" that's at the top left hand corner of this page. I had to click 5 times to find a blog that had been updated this month. To write demands discipline, focus, and talent.

I never want to mistake a lack of talent for a lack of focus or discipline. So, although there are more and more calls out there for us to be brutal in our book reviewing, I try to let my gut reaction settle before I write. I will not say untrue kindnesses, but I will find (if I can) points to praise before I find points to demean.

Unless the book is World Made By Hand by James Howard Kunstler. The worst book I've read this decade.

Full review to follow.