America is getting me down and I need a distraction. Perhaps you do, too.
To help us get through the week, instead of a pithy post about some socially relevant concept or [snicker] a staggering work of artistic prose, here’s a diversion.
My wife. Continue Reading »
Posted in Culture | Tagged animated short subjects, bill plympton, enough of politics, your face | 1 Comment »
I’ve been having difficulty selecting topics for my blog posts lately.
I’ve been having difficulty not because I don’t have ideas. I have plenty. My problem is, the topics that have been consuming me of late have been political, and I really really try to avoid partisan politics on this blog.
Why avoid politics? Continue Reading »
Posted in Politics | Tagged avoiding politics, blogging, Clinton, Cruz, FeelTheBern, generating ideas, presidential politics, Trump, Writing | 11 Comments »
I was about halfway through Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Goldfinch, when I stumbled while reading the following:
Whenever he was gluing up a piece of furniture it was my job to set out all the right cramps, each at the right opening, while he lay out the pieces in precise mortise-to-tenon order—painstaking preparation for the actual gluing-and-cramping when we had to work frantically in the few minutes open to us before the glue set, Hobie’s hands sure as a surgeon’s, snatching up the right piece when I fumbled, my job mostly to hold the pieces together when he got the cramps on (not just the usual G-cramps and F-cramps but also an eccentric array of items he kept to hand for the purpose…
The reason I tripped over these lines is due entirely to the use of the word cramp. It popped me out of the story, puzzled me, and continued to nettle me through the ensuing days, enough so that it engendered this blog post.
The stages of my reaction were as follows: Continue Reading »
Posted in Books, Writing | Tagged copy editing, Donna Tartt, editing, Pulitzer Prize, self-editing, The Goldfinch | 23 Comments »
Late winter is my “difficult” season. Maybe it’s Seasonal Affective Disorder. Maybe it’s the combination of allergies and holiday letdown. This year, it’s also the ongoing can’t-look-away train wreck that is our electoral process. Either way, I’ve been depressed and unmotivated for the past couple of months.
Plus, as it’s March, I now have to deal with all sorts of passive-aggressive reminders—in ads, on billboards, and from the end-of-broadcast human-interest fluff pieces on the news—that, here in Seattle, I should be out there jogging, kayaking, hiking, biking, and tossing balls for the dog. It’s my civic duty, the expectation of a nation, that here in this region of stunning natural beauty I will be out, in it, enjoying every second of it that I possibly can.
Feh. Continue Reading »
Posted in Culture, Gardening, Seattle | Tagged gardening, seattle gardening, winter depression, winter doldrums | 4 Comments »
I thought this was only a problem with men of my generation and older, but (surprisingly) I’ve heard complaints from enough young folks that I’m now convinced a fair fraction of hipster males also exhibit this…deficit.
Gentlemen, you MUST learn how to cook.
Why? Consider the following.
Posted in Culture, Food | Tagged cooking, hipsters, learning how to cook | 8 Comments »
To my young friends:
You’ve posted a lot of memes about how my generation (Boomers) really screwed up things for you, like education, the economy, the environment, and the world in general.
And you’re right. Continue Reading »
Posted in Culture, Politics | Tagged Gen X, Gen Y, Millennials, voter turnout | 4 Comments »
It amazes me how, every time I read something I’ve written, I want to change it. When I finish it I think it’s great, then I put it down for a while, and when I pick it up again, I’m like…bleah…and I’ve got to make changes.
This has never been more true than with “The Book of Solomon,” my most recent short story, which I’ve recently ceased trying to sell to the “literary” markets.
Now, in my defense, this story is a major departure from my previous fiction, on many levels. It’s a genre I’ve not tried before (historical fiction), and it’s a style very unlike most of my other work. influenced heavily by authors like Gabriel Garcia Márquez and Alice Hoffman, I purposefully avoided dialogue, working toward a more internal narrative and fluid style. Also, I did not shy away from complex syntax; I wanted to let the narrative flow in the way my character might think rather than how a storyteller might speak. Lastly, there’s a flipping ton of chronological intrication, jumping around from present to past to deep past to near future to imagined future.
The result was a minefield. Every page carried dangers. Continue Reading »
Posted in Writing | Tagged Alice Hoffman, creative writing, editing, gabriel garcia marquez, short fiction, short stories | 2 Comments »
Kurt R.A. Giambastiani 