Thanks to having our offer on a house accepted, June came and went without finding time to emit a newsletter; if you’ve ever gone through…
Leave a CommentPublishing dark matter since 2018
Category: Writing
Before I forget, Saturday 4/30 is Indie Bookstore day. You may yawn, but it’s a big deal in their struggle for survival. Find a local bookstore and go see what’s happening. Click the poster below to visit a store locator at bookshop.org. Click here to see the full size image. If you have a website or want to send out email about it, copy this section and paste it there.
And while you’re there, why not browse at the Perfidy Press Bookstore. Thinking of adding a shelf called Friends Recommend... with books that you and others I know believe readers would enjoy. It’ll be limited to 10 titles, so don’t delay, send in your faves.
Scooping Book Reviews
Sometimes the magic works.
It isn’t normally possible for an author to get a new book reviewed in print before it goes to galley, which means you’ve got a publisher or you’re publishing it yourself and it’s all typeset. I’m in a pre-publication limbo, and rather than just twiddling my thumbs til my publisher does their thing, I decided to review my novel myself—but not by itself.
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Though I’ve never met Jeff Schnader, we are both fellow alumni of Columbia University and fellow authors whose work has been excerpted at The Write Launch, where I learned he had set a novel on campus during the riotous years of Vietnam War protests. I remember those days well, though not as well as him. Of course, I had to seek him out. That wasn’t hard, as he has a website that runs down his career as a physician, journal editor, published science writer, and now fiction writer, and found him welcoming. Aside from being a thoracic surgeon, I have a lot in common with Jeff (besides first names), and now we have both published subversive novels. So, let’s hear it for:
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Celebrating Black History Month reminds one that, like Dr. Martin Luther King, too many African Americans enter history before their time, felled by those sworn to serve and protect them. Their murders have fueled civil rights uprisings such as swept the country in June 2020, after police blithely took the lives of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and other Black martyrs. The Black Lives Matter movement these events crystallized may be changing things, but how much it has impacted communities across America is tough to assess, at least for me. I guess you have to be there to know.
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As the year inexorably winds down to the orgies of consumption I sometimes call the holydaze, I find myself unaccountably nostalgic for the “old daze,” when my parents, grandparents, and perhaps an aunt, cousin or guest gathered around the table at my childhood home in Connecticut. Along with my parents and theirs, five of my twelve first cousins have since departed to their final destinations. Of the survivors, one of us lives close at hand and she’ll be with us on Thanksgiving, hopefully with stories. Her mom was a fabulous cook who threw large dinner parties I well remember that I’ll never upstage, even with Peking Duck as our main course. (Don’t ask why. It just happened that way.)
Leave a Comment“The freedom and exhilaration of moral insensibility” (Newsletter)
William Hogarth (1697–1764)
The reward of cruelty, 1751, from series Four stages of cruelty (engraving) See note at end of post. Baillieu Library Print Collection, University of Melbourne
This is a difficult subject, but recently it’s been bothering me a lot and it’s all Steve Bannon’s fault.
Let’s say you hate something—anything from water pollution to child trafficking—with a passion. Maybe a kid you know got poisoned by PCBs or disappeared. You loathe it so much, you feel, that if you ever captured a trafficker or a polluter you would gladly torture him. Better yet, get someone else to do it and enjoy their suffering vicariously.
Maybe you wouldn’t get off on that, but mightn’t you titter at someone slipping on a banana peel? That’s a mild form of schadenfreude, and we’ve all felt it at some point in our lives. We’re talking about human
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“The walls here are like a daily newspaper, trying to make us get off the couch and roam the streets demanding all that is written on the walls.” — Níkos Tρavvós
Breathlessly stumble down the western flank of the Athenian tourist destination Mount Lycabettus and soon you’ll find yourself slack-jawed, taking in a part of the city that looks and feels a whole lot different from the tourist haunts just blocks away. You’ve entered the twilight zone, a compact triangular enclave called Exarcheia, home to artists, poets, intellectuals, immigrants, communists and anarchists, a creative churn of radical visions, defying authority, making its own rules, perpetually decolonizing itself. Wikipedia tells us that in Exarcheia:
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Uncooked meaty bacon, courtesy of Science Meets Food blog
Dear Friends,
Before I get going, let me update you on last month’s used car quest. Craigslist came to the rescue with an ad for a Forest Green 2010 Toyota Corolla EX sedan without frills but in great condition with new exhaust system and tires. Turns out it was traded in by a local couple at 115,000 miles and our seller took it off the dealer’s hands. He’s a Ugandan dude who drives around in a flatbed tow truck, which is how he delivered the Corolla. The next week he returned to make off with our old Honda, which he bought for himself as an extra car. Interesting fellow; at about 130 pounds, he’s thin as a rail and dark as night with handsome chiseled features and likes to share his carefully construed life philosophy. And I when wanted the car checked out, he trucked to my auto mechanic who, it turned out, had known him for years.
When she came down from Vermont to exchange cars, our daughter was delighted with it. I love it when things groove like that. In case you’re wondering, after the exchange of cars we were out around $5K, though sale tax, title fee, and registration bumped that up ten percent. We’re all happy with the deal and I’m particularly happy to be done responding to car ads by shady guys named Bob or Tony.
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