From whiskey river:
Then away out in the woods I heard that kind of a sound that a ghost makes when it wants to tell about something that’s on its mind and can’t make itself understood, and so can’t rest easy in its grave, and has to go about that way every night grieving.
(Mark Twain, The [...]

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Courtesy of Steven Spielberg and, well, pretty much everybody.

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[Working today on tomorrow's post -- my contribution to tomorrow's Halloween Blogapalooza blog party, hosted by travel writer Angela Nickerson.
In the meantime, I thought you might find this useful. For, y'know, when They land and we have to, like, fight our way out of impending intergalactic apocalypse and stuff. Dude, these people know.]

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Kidding. Sort of.
I mean, look, the guy’s made almost 60 movies, in a career spanning more than 25 years (per his Wikipedia filmography, at least). It’s pretty much impossible to make that many films and have nary a stinker in the bunch.
Granted, I haven’t seen all or even most of those five dozen films. (Which [...]

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From whiskey river:
At Blackwater Pond
At Blackwater Pond the tossed waters have
settled
after a night of rain.
I dip my cupped hands. I drink
a long time. It tastes
like stone, leaves, fire. It falls cold
into my body, waking the bones. I hear them
deep inside me, whispering
oh what is that beautiful thing
that just happened?
(Mary Oliver)
And:
In the tea ceremony, the expression [...]

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Talking Heads was one of those bands which I probably never would have picked up on — not on my own, anyhow. Predictably, in retrospect, it took a nudge from my brother.
Or rather, a couple of different nudges. One of the later ones came in 1986, with the release of the musical film True Stories. [...]

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[First, to get this out of the way, allow me to introduce you to Miss Globe-head. That's her over there on the right. And if you don't know why I'm introducing the two of you, please check my previous post.]
For a number of reasons — most of them having to do with writing, by the [...]

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Once again, I’m shirking my blogging responsibilities today in order to work on a review, for the Book Book blog. (This time around, it’s Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi’s The Monster of Florence.)
As before, I offer you instead a couple of YouTube treats.
Let’s start with a trivia question. Who said this?
There is nothing quite so [...]

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Writer’s dilemma: “Show, don’t tell.” “But how do I show somebody who’s uneasy? Isn’t that why we have the adjective ‘uneasy’ in the first place — sort of shorthand for all the… the stuff an uneasy person might do?”
Um, no.
Enter The Emotion Thesaurus, a (weekly?) Thursday feature at The Bookshelf Muse.
You start to type how [...]

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I don’t read many graphic novels, but I do read some. There’s no pattern, apparently, to the ones I’ve chosen to read, except that I tend to favor ones heavy on story (and not necessarily on action).
Watchmen (written by Alan Moore, illustrated by Dave Gibbons) is in a class by itself.
Published as a regular “comic”-book [...]

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