ClimbingSky

Why Baseball, Books, and the Grateful Dead matter

DAILY BLOG

  • THROWBACK THURSDAY “I am the People, the Mob” by Carl Sandburg

    Throwback Thursdays” at ClimbingSky feature posts I wrote over a 15 year period for various blogs. This was first posted on October 19, 2011. The Occupy Wall Street movement has been much in the news, and much on my mind. A life-time mistrust of a system where some can drive Mercedes while others struggle to pay the Read more

  • Why We Read Horror

    I have been thinking a lot about why we love and read Ghost Stories, Horror Novels, etc. Here are a few ideas I have come up with: The Thrill of the Safe Scare or “Why fear feels good” Meeting the Monster Within or “How Horror is a mirror to the human psyche” Fear as Connection Read more

  • BOOK REVIEW: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson

    Like Stoker’s novel Dracula, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Gothic-Horror novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a familiar and foundational work of Horror that is much different from the story that has become part of our collective imaginations. And for that same reason. like Dracula it is a book that is good Read more

  • LITERARY COFFEE: Le Fanu

    “I believe that every one who sets about writing in earnest does his work, as a friend of mine phrased it, on something — tea, or coffee, or tobacco. I suppose there is a material waste that must be hourly supplied in such occupations, or that we should grow too abstracted, and the mind, as Read more

  • SHORT STORY REVIEW: “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” by Washington Irving

    Yesterday I reviewed a “Paranormal Romance” based on Washington Irving’s classic short story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” It is only natural, I suppose, that when I finished the unsatisfying reading of yesterday’s “Paranormal Romance” that I would immediately pick up and read Irving’s familiar tale again. “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” was as good Read more

  • BOOK REVIEW: The Murder of Sleepy Hollow by Michele Pariza Wacek

    I have said it here often, I am an indiscriminate reader. That is how I ended listening to part of an audiobook then speed reading (and now reviewing) The Murder of Sleepy Hollow” by Michele Pariza Wacek. According to my research into Wacek and The Murder of Sleepy Hollow, belongs to a sub-genre of fiction Read more

  • FOOD FOR THOUGHT: Gustavo Gutierrez

    “Charity is today a ‘political charity.’. . . it means the transformation of a society structured to benefit a few who appropriate to themselves the value of the work of others. This transformation ought to be directed toward a radical change in the foundation of society, that is, the private ownership of the means of Read more

  • THROWBACK THURSDAY: POETRY REVIEW: Written in Very Early Youth, by William Wordsworth

    “Throwback Thursdays” at ClimbingSky feature posts I wrote over a 15 year period for various blogs. This was first posted on MARCH 15, 2012. This is one of Wordsworth’s earliest poems. Even though it is early in his career, it contains much that we would consider to be lyrical and “Wordsworthian”: nature, emotion, and the individual. Enjoy! Read more

  • SHORT STORY REVIEW: “Dracula’s Chair” by Peter Tremayne

    I came across Peter Temayne’s perfect Dracula short story “Dracula’s Chair” in a collection called Coffins: The Vampire Archives, edited by Otto Penzler. For a lover of Stoker’s Dracula, it is the perfect anthology. It contains stories by writers like Harlan Ellison, Robert Bloch, and F. Paul Wilson. Tremayne’s short-story is about a writer who Read more

  • BOOK REVIEW: The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

    Sherlock Holmes stories are something I return to quite regularly. In the month of September this year, I reread the Sherlock Holmes novel, The Hound of the Baskervilles. For those who have not read it, the story begins with Dr. James Mortimer visiting Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson in London. He presents them with a Read more