From whiskey river:
Have you been to the source of a river? It’s a very mystic place. You get dizzy when you stay for a while. An especially big river has several sources, and the real source, the farthest point which turns to the major stream, is moist and misty, with some kind of ancient smell, [...]

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A couple weeks ago, I posted on the importance of selecting a good title for your work. Here’s what I said then, in part:
I’ve struggled for years, off and on, with the title of the WIP. When I tell you I’ve been calling it Grail, I know that instantly summons up certain… certain somethings in [...]

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[Image at the right depicts Swedes celebrating Midsummer's Day in a maypole dance. I found this at sweden.se, "The Official Gateway to Sweden."]
By tradition, June 24th is Midsummer’s Day. (So you know what that makes the evening of June 23rd, right?) It’s a public holiday in Quebec and a handful of countries in Europe (although [...]

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Every now and then The Missus and I look at each other over a meal or while rambling through cable TV’s Food Network and wonder, Who first thought to do X with this recipe?
Okay, reasonably, I know we’re beneficiaries of tens of thousands of years of trial-and-error. Somebody in a grass or furry loincloth didn’t [...]

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In a side conversation on a recent post here, my pseudonymous occasional correspondent known as “Froog” recently undertook some research for me. I’d come across this extremely cool wallpaper (well, I think it’s cool; that’s it at the right, and you can click the image to see a larger version); alas, I knew nothing about [...]

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[Gotta get back into the online rhythm again after a couple days off... digging out the draft of a post I'd meant to put up some time ago...]
If I had my own personal MacArthur Foundation-like setup for rendering “genius grants” to people in all walks of life, I would give one tomorrow to Mark Cline. [...]

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In the previous post, I sort of blew off the significance of the day as if I didn’t take it seriously.
It’s not a joke. I’m trying real hard not to get too puffed up and all “Gee aren’t we Americans wonderful?!?” (As a column in today’s paper said, we don’t even know yet whether he”ll [...]

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The Missus roamed the aisles of the video store a few nights ago, not looking for anything in particular. (Which is to say, she’d ceased looking for anything in particular: it was one of those in-between times when all the “new releases” on our must-see list had already been claimed by renters with more disciplined [...]

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Wow — four hundred years, and (many) people still don’t even furrow their brows when you say the name “John Milton.” Most of us aspire to be remembered for one-fourth of that span, if that much.
Today, Milton’s memory is honored (if not read, exactly) principally for his epic works, Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained — [...]

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Yesterday would have been William Shakespeare’s and Anne Hathaway’s 426th anniversary. Whew.
Per yesterday’s Today in Literature newsletter, which I’ve just got around to reading, we have this excerpt from Chapter 3 of Mrs. Shakespeare: The Complete Works, “Richard Nye’s fictional send-up of their marriage”:
When Mr William Shakespeare asked me that idle question as to whether [...]

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