Read the rest of this entry »

So, I’m seriously considering heading down to the paint store and getting them to run a color-match on the organ sound in this song, because I think I want to paint it on every wall of our house. I expect it won’t look quite right until it accumulates a couple decades of nicotine grime, but I’m willing to play the long game here.

From the Numero Group’s Eccentric Soul: The Tragar and Note Labels, two discs worth of the best songs you’ve never heard from 1970s Georgia.

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Somebody else post something, please. I’ve read all my stuff already. I need something new to read.

Found the following attempt at humor pretty typical, and am attaching my letter of response. I’m not giving the name of the friend who copied it to me (from something a friend sent that person), because I am quite certain no insult was intended. I don’t care whether you side with my detractors. I just feel this sort discourse deserves wider exposure.

And I did, in the heat of the debate, commit one untruth. I HAVE driven a $60,000 car. Just never bought one or owned one.

Read the rest of this entry »

At about the same time my son-in-law and I were watching, for the first time, Kill Bill, the second half, the scene where Bill finally gets it from the Five-Palmed Strike Point or whatever, David Carradine was dying in Bangkok.

Read the rest of this entry »

Don Harington, the great novelist, is in the hospital with pneumonia and a broken hip. If you’ve read his novels and admired them (and I frankly do not see how you could read them and not admire them), you might wish to send him a note at kimharington at sbcglobal.net. Kim is his wife and will deliver the messages. If you don’t know what to say, put yourself in his place: You suffer from diabetes, in the last ten years you’ve had throat cancer, a broken ankle from a disastrous auto accident, a broken hip, pneumonia twice, you can’t eat or drink (because of the throat surgery), but have to take glucerna several times a day, and although you are one of the most brilliant and beautiful writers this country has ever had, all your life you have been routinely neglected in favor of fakes, frauds, wannabes, also-rans, incompetents, and suck-ups.

Not that you have to address all of that. Hell, one line will do. Just tell the man what his writing means to you. Just say something, anything.

This culture is so obsessed with the new that we neglect the true achievers. Harington’s not just some factory process to produce stories. He’s a human, and right now a human in pretty serious trouble. He could use a bit of encouragement.

Don’t act like it ain’t been coming for a while.

This turned into a postcard for that esteemed icon of journalism, the peerless Donna Ladd. I don’t always agree with Donna (indeed, sometimes I vehemently disagree with her), but I will always take her side in a knife fight, because she’s got Jackson’s back, and because when everybody else was leaving, she did the unthinkable:

She came back to Mississippi.

And, she’s making a newspaper work—because it actually serves the community. The Jackson Free Press has news, kultur, laffs (we love that Jackson Breland loves Jabari Toins), and investigative powers beyond that of our Gannett-funded, and oft-furloughed, daily. Newspapers aren’t dying because of internets: newspapers are dying because they quit offering a value.

Don’t you think I’d buy the Ledger every day if it had huge page-sized offerings from Frank King and Winsor McKay? Why would you think I’d buy it if you lay off Orley Hood and keep Rick Cleveland and Gary Pettus and Sid Salter riding the bench a week at a time?

I shan’t; I shan’t.

AND LO, THE CLARION-LEDGER SHALL DIE COLD IN ITS SLEEP, ALONE AND UNLOVED.

So you know how Contessa and I had a baby a month ago? And you’re all like, “What, can he not get his stuff together well enough to teach his classes, raise his daughter, and tell us whether or not we should be buying Dan Slott’s Mighty Avengers?”

But see, here’s a good example of my mental state: I got up to check the baby’s diaper last night. This should be automatic by now. Yet here were the steps I followed at approximately 2:30 am:

1. Go to the kitchen.
2. Get a bowl filled with leftover cereal milk from the sink.
3. Take down a stack of coffee filters.
4. Carry these items through the house with great purpose.
5. When called on my apparent insanity by Contessa, huffily go back to the kitchen.
6. Return with ONE coffee filter, carried with same amount of purpose.
7. Place it on coffee table, go to sleep on couch.

So, in conclusion, Dan Slott’s Mighty Avengers features a promisingly rag-tag group of Avengers but can’t quite overcome the jarring tonal discordances of the script: Is it a psychologically probing rehabilitation of Hank Pym’s character? Is it lighthearted quippy-fun adventure? It can in fact be both of these things at once, but it is not yet, at least not successfully. If you want me to take your spin on Hank Pym’s character seriously, you should probably refrain from gags where it looks like he’s having sex with a robot. Just for instance. Maybe it will gel down the road.

(Also, since when did Hank Pym need rehabilitating anyway? Didn’t he get pretty thoroughly redeemed in a gradual years-long process that began with the “Lost in Space-Time” arc in West Coast Avengers and culminated with his being back with Jan again? I’m okay with ignoring these decades old stories, but let’s ignore them in the service of doing something new, for pete’s sake.)

Morphodite
FFV
“cunctative as Fabius Maximus”
Lucubration

I do so love this book.