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Whiplash Misreadings
So I’m in bed last night, reading a little bit (as is customary) before shutting out the light. I finish one article and move to the next. The title of this new article is “Sleeping with the Enemy”; and the subtitle, “What happened between the Netherlands and us?” The Netherlands? I wonder. An enemy? Are we [...]
Looking for a Writing Prompt?
Long-time RAMH friend Marta has started a new blog. It’s based on something other writers may have thought, from time to time: I bet in another world I’d be appreciated more than I am in this one…! Marta’s taken it a step further: writing the blog as if her famous-mirror-counterpart — called simply “M.” — were writing [...]
Midweek Music Break: Theme-Park Earworms
The Missus and I took a much-needed mini-vacation this past weekend, trekking off to central Florida for (among other things) our first visit to the other theme park in that neighborhood. We love amusement parks and fairs (county, state, you name it), but neither of us is a big roller-coaster fan; most of the rides at [...]
A Conspiracy of Pages
[Etching: "The Hall of Planets," by Erik Desmazières, #5 in a series of eleven illustrating an edition of "The Library of Babel," by Jorges Luis Borges; click to enlarge] From whiskey river: The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust in them; it was [...]
Oceanic Complications
[Video: "Ten Things I Have Learned about the Sea," by Lorenzo Fonda. One of whiskey river's posts this week was based on the text in this video. For more information, see the Vimeo page.] From whiskey river: Clam Each one is a small life, but sometimes long, if its place in the universe is not [...]
Book Review: Children of God, by Mary Doria Russell
A few weeks ago I reviewed Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow at the Book Book review blog. I just posted a follow-up there, a review of The Sparrow‘s sequel, called Children of God. However, if you have not read The Sparrow, please don’t read my Children of God review: it assumes that you know what [...]
Savage Beasts
A first for Running After My Hat: a guest blogger! Kate Lord Brown is already familiar to some of you as the curator of the blog What Kate Did Next. (She also instigated the Burning Lines experiment in collaborative online fiction of a couple years ago.) More recently, though — and the reason she’s feeling [...]
“Issue Fiction”
Today’s the birthday, per The Writer’s Almanac, of an author named Gary Soto. I haven’t read anything by him, but the Almanac provided an interesting quotation. This is the whole thing, including the question which prompted it, from a 2007 interview with papertigers.org: Are there issues which you think are particularly relevant to young adults [...]
Not Trying Quite So Hard, But It Feels Right
[Image: "Comb of Retrospection," by Michael Leunig] From whiskey river: How I Would Paint Happiness Something sudden, a windfall, a meteor shower. No – a flowering tree releasing all its blossoms at once, and the one standing beneath it unexpectedly robed in bloom, transformed into a stranger too beautiful to touch. (Lisel Mueller, from Alive [...]
The Blogger to His Sanity Checks
Here in the USA, April is National Poetry Month. (Yes, among all the other months it is. See here for a bunch of others — scroll down the page a ways. Frog Month! Straw Hats Month! National DNA & Genomics & Stem Cell Education & Awareness Month! (The posters for that last one are about [...]
