January 2025
-
“Feel like breakfast?” he asked. “I could do things to a can of black coffee,” Steve admitted. “All right. But you’ll have to gulp it. Judge Denvir is waiting to get a crack at you, and the longer you keep him waiting, the tougher it’ll be for you.” (Hammett, Dashiell. Nightmare Town: Stories) Read more
-
The Best Western Stories of Lewis B. Patten is a collection of Patten’s short stories edited by Bill Prozini and Martin Greenberg. It is part of a set of “Best Western Stories” they did in the 1980s. I have also owned and read their The Best Western Stories of Frank Bonham. I know they did at Read more
-
Well, five basketball stars in the past sixty years have been famous for either failing miserably in the clutch or lacking the ability to rise to the occasion: Wilt, Hayes, Malone, Ewing and Garnett. All five were famous for their fall-away/turnaround jumpers and took heat because their fall-aways pulled them out of rebounding position. If Read more
-
Silence is where poetry is born. I have long wondered if my preference for books and poetry is based in part on the fact that I was born with hearing defect and something called Central Auditory Processing Disorder. A number of surgeries and hospital stays when I was young, fixed the hearing defect. The Central Read more
-
If you grow up in the West and and do not like westerns, it is the same as if you grew up in Belgium and do not like beer. At the very least, you have proven yourself to be someone who cannot be trusted. The status that westerns have in American culture is much diminished Read more
-
Sometimes there are books I just cannot connect with. It is something that happens to me with fiction books all the time. It happens much less often with poetry books. Doubtless this is because of the way I usually choose my poetry books. With poetry, it is easy to pick of a volume, skim pages, Read more
-
When she sat down on the stool next to me she nodded toward the counterman and said, “Shorty’s got a heart of steel, mister. Won’t even trust me for a cup of joe until I get a job. Care to finance me to a few vitamins?” I was too tired to argue the point. “Make Read more
-
“…those who erect walls, as Jorge Luis Borges reminds us, can easily have books burned.” Written in 2013, Nuccio Ordine’s “little masterpiece” The Usefulness of the Useless is filled with Post-Trump aha moments like the quote above. It also dovetails into a debate being waged in the universities and colleges of America even as I Read more
-
Once, about a decade ago, my daughter Dylan sent me an out-of-the-blue text asking me if I were a Deadhead. I told her at that time that I was not sure since I had only seen the Dead in concert once and The Jerry Garcia Band twice. In my mind, Deadheads were those people who Read more
ClimbingSky 