My new story “MANY WAYS TO FIND OUT” was featured at the BULL magazine website earlier this week. Bull specializes in quality fiction (and some essays) directed in varying ways at the complexity and dynamics of masculinity here in 2017.
There’s a theory out there that men don’t like to read “serious fiction.” I think a lot of men just don’t like to read crappy stories that have little to do with them. I might be wrong. Who knows?
Continue reading
I want to add something to the endless discussion about why it’s important to read literary fiction. The discussion is important.
You may have graduated from high school English class and feel like you never want to go back again, but you didn’t graduate from Life. Too many people have stopped reading quality fiction that makes them think about Life these days. That’s why this endless discussion about books and their import continues — taking the time to think about life is essential for all of us. Books assume that’s why you’re reading them — especially literary stories by anyone from James Joyce and Virginia Woolf to Joy Williams and James Salter.
You can find a lot of essays and blog posts out there on the value of novels, short stories, and plays because they teach empathy and help people understand another person’s point of view. Indeed, the written word in general is still the most effective way to express all the nuances of human emotion. These days, it feels in some ways that people are losing touch with emotional reality and concern for how other people feel in any number of social situations. Could it be that fewer people are reading quality fiction these days? Maybe people are spending less time with books and more time with porn and video games.
You can also find arguments on how readers of serious fiction are proven to be more intuitive, better problem solvers, superior communicators, and higher achievers at Continue reading
Note: The image to the right is not real. It is fake. It is not a dead parrot, but it is not a real parrot either.
Reading and listening to the mainstream media, it has been suggested that this new president is willing to distort reality openly and brazenly with essentially no subtlety or grace mostly for his own self-aggrandizement and to protect his brand. The Trump brand has been his bread and butter for over forty years. Should we be surprised? We’ve known this guy since at least 1973. But is brand protection really an excuse for a president?
When I started writing this essay we’d just witnessed the pissing match between Trump and the media over how many people had attended his inauguration. During a very weird scene at CIA headquarters in Langley, VA, Trump said in the middle of a harangue about crowd numbers: “I have a running war with the media. They are among the most dishonest human beings on Earth.”
He had also sent out his two main mouthpieces, Sean Spicer and Kellyanne Conway to stir things up. Spicer, in his first ever White House lectern performance with the media, berated them for concocting lies and misinformation. The next day Kellyanne Conway introduced the idea of “alternative facts” to an incredulous Chuck Todd on Meet the Press. Everything’s been going downhill since that first weekend in the communication department for this administration. Continue reading
In the summer of 1977 I was home from college ambling around our local library looking for a novel to read. I was also there because I wanted to ask Ann Jefferson out on a date and knew she worked in the library. I found her quickly enough and we chatted a bit while I roamed the stacks. I didn’t get up the nerve to ask her out, but I did sort of stumble on this big-ass tome of a book called The Fountainhead by a writer with a weird name.
I devoured Ayn Rand’s first successful novel about Howard Roark, a brilliant young architect who will not give up his principles about art and creativity to achieve what Continue reading
I have an open letter posted to Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, over at TW this month. I take Cook and Apple to task for not being creative with their digital book applications (the iBook Store and iBook reading system). I honestly don’t see any truly innovative digital reading applications out there offered by any company. It’s sad. But the truth is there’s not much innovation anywhere in the commercial part of the virtual world anymore. Think about it. What was the biggest application everyone wanted this summer? Yup. Pokemon Go.
Creativity in the ebook world did in fact occur on the hardware side of things beginning about a decade ago as the Kindle and iPad were being developed and ramped up. But the actual user interface has been a serious Continue reading
I finally finished Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666 last month (912 pages in English; 1,136 in Spanish). It represents a year of reading for me (with some other stuff thrown in, but nothing I stayed with or finished). The beauty of books, as opposed to TV and movies, is that you can take your time and just tackle two or three pages a night for fifteen to twenty minutes at a shot. TV and movies make us think we have to eat whole stories quickly. If you can disavow that habit, and feel comfortable with the slow pace of reading, you will probably extend your life by at least eight years, maybe ten. Besides, 2666 is considered one of the most important novels of the early 21st century. It probably can’t be read quickly no matter who you think you are.
Continue reading
I wrote a draft originally of an essay here at this blog on Colin Kaepernick’s refusal to stand for the “Star-Spangled Banner” before football games. The full piece has now been published over at Medium.com in The Coffeelicious, one of the premiere original Medium e-zines out there. You can read the whole piece here.
It starts out as follows: “San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick is following his conscience by not standing for the national anthem before football games. I get exactly what’s going on here and I am glad that our national “conversation” on race is being pushed harder than people want by someone with at least a bit of influence.”
I have been disturbed ever since the violence we saw in Ferguson, Missouri about how people who want to see more social and environmental justice Continue reading
I just finished revising the second draft of my next novel, which means I now have Draft #3 to print out. I’m doing that as I write this post. The whole process started back in October of 2013. Draft #1 clocked in at about 160,000 words (630 pages). Revisions for Draft #2 in December of last year shrank the book to 140,000 words. I was surprised at how many unnecessary sentences I’d written and how many extended metaphors showed up that a reader didn’t really need.
Draft #3 was an extraordinary process. My goal was essentially to lop 60,000 words off the beast. I’d gotten a fair amount of input from a few First Readers. In particular, several poet colleagues were concerned about the number of sub-plots I was offering up. They wanted focus and brevity. Poets!
I took a few weeks to think through their advice. I also got an interesting letter from a prospective agent saying, in essence, “I can’t take a look at a coming-of-age novel that is 140,000 words long.” Agents!
I kept getting goosebumps every time the promo pieces for the new Supergirl show came on TV in the first three weeks of October. The week before the show debuted I told my wife that I simply had to watch it. She gave me a funny look, but didn’t argue. When we finally sat down that first night, I was surprised at how excited I was. And when the moment came for Kara to say, “To hell with trying to hide who I really am,” and she went running through the dark streets of National City, leaping into the air (in fits and starts) until she was soaring through the sky on her way to save a sure-to-crash jet, I burst into tears. Seriously. No shit!
I am a 57-year-old father of three young men. My boys were all stud baseball players from the age of six all the way through high school. One of them is now a minor leaguer in the Phillies organization. I have been a lover of most male-oriented sports all my life. I revere macho writers like Hemingway, Kerouac, Henry Miller, and Charles Bukowski. And I’ve been in love with sexy Continue reading