Ride out on the two horses you rode in on, Howard!

At a certain point it is about the work, not the randomness of ‘success.’ Remember how hard people work on poetry, or small press-aimed literary fiction aspiring to a few hundred sales. Commercial genres can offer the illusion of money, a career making it, which complicates this.

Sadly, reportedly apocryphal too! Version I read never got to 4! Three is under host!

I hope James Thurber really said this, that it is not apocryphal… “One martini is all right. Two are too many, and three are not enough.”

I don’t tend to do this, but there’s a really lovely phrase here and I wanted to acknowledge how graceful and generous it is: ‘When you finish the novel, you know it has been going there all along. Indeed, could it ever have been going anywhere else?’ wetbrokenthings.wordpress.com/2024/10/03/b...

Book review – Ysabel

“We are the tale for here … The past doesn’t lie quietly. Don’t you know that yet?” Truth be told, I was going to give Ysabel a miss. It is the most universally panned…

It would be deeply pleasing if this unsealed filing by Jack Smith against CriminalTrump dominated American political discourse for awhile, if only to justify my having just read all 160+ pages.

I link this every few years, because I love the site so much. The Stephen Owen version, my favourite, likely locked in a book title for me (though hard to go back that far and be sure!). (And yes, this is a Tang poet, and that book was Song-inspired.) clatterymachinery.wordpress.com/2007/01/26/l...

Li Bai drinking alone (with the moon, his shadow, & 43 translators)

The Tang poet Li Bai–a.k.a. Li Po, Li Bo and the Poet Immortal–left us over 1,000 poems. Besides these, he is also known by the way it is said he died. He supposedly drowned drunk, tryi…

I don’t want to be SportsBanal and say this is a wide open baseball postseason but … this is a wide open baseball postseason.

It's October the 1st! Too late! (If you know, you know.)

‘But why look back is what she thinks. If she looked back she’d be eaten whole and alive by the past.’ This, from Kevin’s Barry’s *The Heart In Winter*, is a terrific example of a quote that perfectly fits a character but might not be … a life prescription?