My grandmother’s not the biggest fan of Ralph Stanley. But it’s not Ralph’s fault. “Bill use to follow him around every weekend. Playing music. He’d leave me at home.” Bill’s her husband. Bill is Pa. When we got there. By the time we left there were about six more fiddlers, bass players and guitarists. My
Monthly Archives: May 2008
Socratic, romantic, nihilistic. Post modern. Honestly. Is there any wonder? An Oxford professor once put it to me simply: Man invents wheel. Wheel rolls over man. Man dies. That’s irony. Not Alanis Morrisette. Americans may not understand irony – Lord knows that’s the general European consensus, one I have pointed out to me on a
In 1946 George Orwell outlined his four great motives for writing in the essay “Why I Write”. He believed these motives exist, in different degrees, in every writer. I’d be lying if I said he wasn’t right. For me, it’s mostly about Aesthetic Enthusiasm. It’s also about a kind of peace that comes over me
No Country for Old Men. Cheerful by comparison. Never watch P.S. I Love You unless you plan on feeling like you’ve just bottomed out. Do, however, watch Lars and the Real Girl. There are no words for Ryan Gosling and his awesome talent.
Long story short, I feed the starving writer that is me by designing albums. I wont have time for much else over the next few weeks but I do plan on reading Stephanie’s new memoir, “Moose”, from cover to cover when it’s released on the 27th. More therapeutic than my actual therapist. She’s an amazing
I get to see my sister soon; and I’m pretty darn stoked about it. Her husband’s leaving the country on business for a day or so and I’m going in to laugh at her toes. She has these tiny little toes that look like they’ve walked through a hornet’s nest. Those are my brother’s words,
Buffy, You know how Tonya takes ‘G’ (6 years old) to dance class on Tuesday nights. Well, last night this was the conversation: Tonya: ‘G’, would you like to come back to our house and go for a walk with us? G: I would like to but I’m not sure if mommy and daddy would
“There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences.” – Jane Austen, Mansfield Park —————— Iaeger, West Virginia. Nineteen seventy nine. The old bus terminal that use to sit somewhere along the river bank. Maybe next to Sears & Roebuck? Maybe not.
Open up your mind to the possibility that 1+1 can equal 48, a Mercedes-Benz, an apple pie, a blue horse. Don’t tell your autobiography with facts, such as “I am in sixth grade. I am a boy. I live in Owatonna. I have a mother and father.” Tell me who you really are: “I am
“Each day is like an enormous rock that I’m trying to push up this hill. I get it up a fair distance, it rolls back a little bit, and I keep pushing it, hoping I’ll get it to the top of the hill and that it will go on its own momentum…I’ve never given up.
British novelist Arthur Quiller-Couch (pen name “Q”) published a series of lectures titled On the Art of Writing (1916) while serving as a professor of English at Cambridge University. Here he warns of purple prose… “To begin with, let me plead that you have been told of one or two things which Style is not;
“It is folly to believe that you can bring the psychology of an individual successfully to life without putting him very firmly in a social setting.” – Tom Wolfe
