Last night, The Missus and I attended a combined reading-talk-Q&A session with Margaret Atwood. (For the curious, if you’re ever in this neck of the woods in (mostly) February, do check out this arts festival.)
The bandwagon of people who believe that those of diminutive physical stature tend to compensate with outsized personalities and ambitions is [...]

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“Ambivalence” doesn’t even come close to capturing my schizoid views about magic (or magical) realism.
The term has been around since the early part of the twentieth century, and for most of its life has been associated especially with the work of certain Latin American authors. Here’s part of the definition from A Glossary of Literary [...]

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On a recent wintry day, The Boy (Who Was No Longer a Boy) and The Missus decided to go to a movie.
Now, because the day was in fact wintry, and because “wintry” seldom applied to weather conditions where The Boy and The Missus lived, they needed to undertake certain careful preparations in advance. Warm clothing [...]

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[Another in a series of occasional posts about popular American songs with long histories. And if you are seeking information on the Justin Timberlake song by the same name, believe me, you are 100% in the wrong place.]
On paper, it doesn’t appear to be a “big” song. Nearly always, the arrangement features a single vocalist [...]

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I like to think of myself as a flexible guy — able to roll with the punches, able to work around problems, able to, y’know, cope. It’s amazing how quickly and how profoundly that self-image can be shaken simply by adding an extra person to the household.
Recently fallen on some sudden, transitory, but inarguably hard [...]

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From whiskey river:
Let me make this perfectly clear.
I have never written anything because it is a Poem.
This is a mistake you always make about me,
A dangerous mistake. I promise you
I am not writing this because it is a Poem.
You suspect this is a posture or an act
I am sorry to tell you it is not [...]

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[Above, a set of miniature Egyptian canopic jars depicting, according to the retailer, "Anubis, Horus, Monkey God, Prince."* Click image for original.]
From whiskey river (which this week celebrated eight years of bringing to the Web wisdom about things we generally know, but generally do not speak of):
Shinto
When sorrow lays us low
for a second we are [...]

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A couple of stray tidbits for your daily (weekly, hourly, etc.) writerly use…
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First: You may have noticed agent Nathan Bransford’s recent contest, for which he invited readers to submit as contest entries the first paragraphs of their own works-in-progress. (He announced the winners yesterday.)
Regular RAMH commenter Froog has been observing Nathan’s contest as well. But [...]

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The Missus and I saw District 9 on Saturday. I’m tempted to review it in full, but fear I’d reveal too much of its plot. So I’ll just say that District 9 is one of the, I don’t know… two or three best movies I’ve seen for the last 10 or 15 years — in [...]

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An old Monty Python skit posits a service called “Confuse-a-Cat.” (Veterinarian to anxious elderly couple: “I think I can definitely say that your cat badly needs to be confused.”) I started to explain the whole thing but was laughing too hard to type properly; I’ll include the seven-minute routine in its entirety at the foot [...]

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