Differing Opinions on John Storer

*Architect Sketch of John Storer House

Sometimes, I like to go surfing. I'm somewhat lacking in balance and live on the East Coast, so I of course mean wikisurfing. Oh, the times I've had; the pub-quiz trivia knowledge I've gained! Sometimes though, I stumble across discrepancies, especially when it comes to tangential people in history.

John Storer had his home, of Frank Lloyd Wright's textile-block-house era, built for him in 1923. There's precious little information offered about him on Wikipedia. One spot is in the Millard House entry, while another is in the John Storer House entry. In both articles he is described as a "doctor," yet in one he's described as "homeopathic" and in the other he is described as "failed." The former entry cites Ruth Ryan, a former Celebrity Homes Columnist," but does not provide an active link to the article. Meanwhile the latter does: Hugh Eakin's article is a riot of adjectives; tempestuous, obsessed, untested, free-spirited, and motley, all make appearances in the first two paragraphs of the article, along with rhetorical questions and broad cinematic pronouncements; I can't help but distrust it: there are just too many adjectives to wrangle with.

So my question is, who's right? Or are they both right/wrong? Was he a successful homeopathic doctor, but not a "real" doctor, and thus a failure? Or did he turn to homeopathic medicine after failing to make it as a conventional doctor? Or something completely different?

Searching for "John Storer" and "Frank Lloyd Wright" together on Google returned 9,370 results, but it took till page three to find a substantive article here.

The article is from a series Young calls "Biographies of Homeopaths" (I will, for the purpose of inquiry accept "homeopathy" as medicine), and further down the page she also writes that John Storer was a professor and Dean of The Hahnemann Medical College of Chicago. Hey, professor and Dean (just like my Mom!), that doesn't sound much like "failed" to me. And if like me, you think the failure Eakin refers to may be the mere practice of "homeopathic" medicine, then this article, cited by Young, becomes especially helpful in gauging if not the legitimacy of homeopathic medicine, at least the status of homeopathic medicine in Chicago around the time The Hahnemann Medical College of Chicago was founded.

With a little historical perspective, and with Dr. John Storer's titles, I hope that's not what Eakin is referring to. And anyway, let's remember that at the time (or even sometime after) Dr. Storer moved into his house in 1923, Heroin Cough Drops, Benzedrine Asthma Inhalers, and Lobotomies for Depression were all accepted medical practice.

So, if "homeopathy" isn't what Eakin was referring to at all, what could he be basing his adjective choice on? Another answer emerges when you read deeper into Young's article, as she suggests that Dr. Storer went bankrupt because of the cost of the home. Here the linked source is within a book, Frank Lloyd Wright's California Houses by Carla Lind, which states in the sidebar on the right that Dr. Storer died bankrupt in 1927. The 6 reviews of Carla Lind's books on Amazon are somewhat inconclusive. A few say the books are great, and a few say they're thin and slight on information. That sort of statement makes me doubt that they include a work cited, and I'm not about to buy the book just to find out, which means that without some extra work I can't confirm the possibly sad fate of Dr. Storer.

Regardless, while "failed doctor" adds the flair of desperation to the "motley" bunch that Eakin assembled, and while in assessing his lot at the end of life it's possible that Dr. Storer considered himself a failure, it just doesn't seem like a fair phrase because it implies that Dr. Storer failed "as a doctor," and ultimately, unless other evidence can be presented to contrary, misrepresents the man...

Anyway, if anyone has more information about Dr. John Storer, do let me know.

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Differing Opinions of Dr. John Storer

Found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storer_House_(Los_Angeles,_California)

The Storer House was built in 1923 for Dr. John Storer, a homeopathic physician.

Source: Ruth Ryon (2001-02-03). "Home of the Week: Restoration Has All the Wright Detail". Los Angeles Times.

About Ruth Ryon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Ryon


Found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millard_House

As The New York Times later said of the California houses built by Wright in the 1920s: "It didn’t help that he was obsessed at the time with an untested and (supposedly) low-cost method of concrete-block construction. What kind of rich person, many wondered, would want to live in such a house? Aside from the free-spirited oil heiress Aline Barnsdall, with whom he fought constantly, his motley clients included a jewelry salesman, a rare-book dealing widow and a failed doctor."

Source: Hugh Eakin (2005-08-14). "Fixer-Uppers That Need Love and Concrete". The New York Times.

About Hugh Eakin: http://www.nybooks.com/contributors/hugh-eakin/

Short and Sweet

The end of the year is approaching, and as I do each year about this time I take stock of the writing I've sent out to literary journals. Around fall, when my submission fatigue set in, it appeared that this would be a bumper-year for publications, however after several publications dates were postponed, it ended up just keeping pace with past years. Here's a selection from/of pieces that appeared on the world wide strangeness this year:

". . . His fingertips are like gentle sandpaper, soft from years of rubbing." - from Night Hungers, in Kill Author

"On the horizon a red sunset walls off the earth from grey rain clouds." - from Brick Harvest, in The Prose Poems Project

"Naturally, it is important for all business to be conducted reclining." - from To the Heart, in the Nashville Review

I know of a few pieces I'll have published in 2012, and meanwhile here's a final piece for 2011. After I submitted to Serving House Journal I had a brief exchange with the editor, Steve Kowit, about one piece, then SHJ decided to publish another and forgot to tell me.

No matter; it's so small (the smallest I've ever had accepted) that I might have forgotten to tell me too. You can read it here:

"At night, cars with one burned out headlight pretend to be motorcycles."


Thanks for reading. Happy Holidays and New Year!

Reflections: on the Death of Literary Journals

This morning I had a little free time and so I checked in on some of the internet publications I enjoy. I started by checking to see if Slurve Magazine, "The Arts & Culture Review that Masquerades as a Baseball Publication," had bit the dust yet.

Slurve was one of my first publications. I'd heard from a writing peer that she had been published there, and as I was somewhat publication-lite myself, and interested in having at least some work available online to the three people each year who probably Googled me, I decided I'd check them out.

Slurve was nascent. I looked around and liked the potential. The published contributors each had "baseball cards" with their stats and author info. I had just finished an essay about baseball cards and so it tickled my fancy. The editors asked not for "submissions" but for "tryouts," in all genres, including reviews and political commentary. This, I thought, seems like a good idea.

I submitted several pieces, had three accepted and published just a few months later. Not to say that I've had any pieces published that I'm not proud of, but I especially like the three they selected: an alternative-universe piece about baseball and poetry, and two about growing up in slightly odd ways. I was pleased to have them available to the world.

But they never managed to get my baseball card up on the site. And after another three months no new work had been posted. Then another three months passed. About two years later I checked in and discovered that the Slurve team was under new-management. The Head Coach had been jettisoned. The team had been moved from Boston to Los Angeles. New work was coming soon. It didn't come that soon. I stopped checking Slurve for new writing and instead visited periodically to see if it had died yet.

Their Facebook page indicates that the new work did come, and that in fact for at least a few months this year Slurve was posting regularly, however as of today, it's gone. I expected the end for so long, but that it's gone I'm a little surprised. Publication by Slurve was a minor milestone in my young writing career, and now they're gone. Selfishly, I guess I'm glad that their literary career petered out before mine.

Fortunately, internet is filled with many worthy little literary journals (both original and offshoots of print publications) that collect pieces you could never hope to run across in the Paris Review or Poetry, or some other high-falutin' journal, but are nevertheless beautiful and provocative. Through submissions and word-of-mouth I've discovered dozens of them (too many to read regularly) including elimae, which merrily trucks along in minimalist glory and PANK, which I check somewhat more regularly, and not just because they've published me.

Within the last couple years I also discovered two other journals whose format I especially liked, Wonderfort, and Abjective. Both featured one author or collaboration a week, a format which I found both simple and pleasing. To be fair (or maybe a little unfair), Wonderfort appeared to be a rather direct parallel of the style of Abjective, and the editor of one was published by the editor of the other at least once. Maybe it would be better to say they had a rapport.

Regardless, when I checked them today only Abjective remains online, for now displaying the somewhat terse message: "ABJECTIVE no longer publishes". If you go to the main site it displays random pieces from its archive, which are filled with many delightfully strange pieces.

Wonderfort, on the other hand, is completely gone. Where did it go? When was the fort breached? When did the wonder stop?

Death of a Corpse

Exquisite Corpse, one of the first journals I ever submitted writing to, is dead. A friend had just given me one of Andrei Codrescu books and I was eager to see more things he was associated with (though I kept messing up his name, and still do). Plus, I had just completed a course on experimental poetry. When I searched for "exquisite corpse," it was the first site to come up. It was hip. Far hipper than me, and I instantly sent them something. I never received a response: I wasn't even put in the "body bag," a section of the journal for pieces that for whatever hazy reason did not make it into the main pages.

In 2008 the submission page was changed and this announcement added:

We will not accept submissions until May 2009. We have not lost our optimism! We just ran out of time! And we are drowning in text! From now on we'll only read checks!

I checked back in periodically, but it never changed. Now the submission page is the same, with the addition of "dead dead dead" scrawled across the whole page in digital blood.

To be fair, EQ died years ago, maybe as soon as they closed submissions in 2009. But I wonder why. Earlier today I was looking at Double Room, the journal of prose poetry and flash fiction. Like Exquisite Corpse I submitted to it a few years ago, and like Exquisite Corpse, this journal has been languishing since 2009.

It seems a real shame to me, especially for an e-journal, for whom the cost of printing and posting isn't an issue, that journals should go gently or totally silently into the digital night. Could Andrei Codrescu or Mark Tursi not have found some young and eager writer/editor to take over editorially responsibilities for their site if they no longer have the time/inclination/money?

Phreelance Writers Forum - Love Letters

Last weekend I organized a drawer in my bureau that I’ve been using as a memory dump for many years now. Special finds include identification cards from 6 years of schooling, ticket stubs from every high school dance, and a sealed, unused condom, expired in 2002, which I think must have been from the first package I ever bought.

But the artifacts I was most excited to uncover were bundles of love letters. The first I ever received was written by my kindergarten-sweetheart after I moved from Mississippi to Massachusetts. The envelope is bordered in tiny hand drawn red hearts and they replace the dots on each “i”. The last batch was written to me at a writing residency where in order to encourage artistic isolation, the proprietors did not provide internet or phone access.

Every few years for the last 20 years some philosopher, writer, or technophile feels the need to proclaim that print media is dead and will soon be supplanted by digital media. Print media endures because people enjoy books not just as ideas, but as objects. Someday convenience and price may put an end to the print era; however, I hope we never reach the same point with love letters. Love and writing
love letters should never be matters of convenience. The extra effort helps makes love letters special.

But even if a lover were also a digital designer and took the time to craft a compelling digital billet-doux, it still wouldn’t compare. You can’t touch an e-mail knowing that your lover touched it. An e-mail will never be S.W.A.K. (sealed with a kiss). An e-mail cannot carry the scent of your lover. And on the darker side, if a lover spurns or betrays you, you can delete the e-mail, but that’s a cold and empty gesture, whereas burning a stack of love letters can be
extremely satisfying and at least pays suitable tribute to the passion the relationship inspired.

Check out more opinions and discussion of love letters in today's Phreelance Writers Forum.

Get Out the Vote

Something strange is going on here:

We are being invited to vote for the winner of the Roberto Clemente Award, an award to the ball player who’s the most charitable, or philanthropic, or engaged in their community. Entering gives the voter a chance to go to the 2010 World Series, and what's not to like about that?

Well, first of all, the interface is cruddy. The only pictures are of the ballplayer. In order to see each player’s community service, you must first select them, which flips over their picture so you can read three sentences about the player’s deeds.

What? No media? Really? The site is basically designed for a quick popularity contest, and while that's as good a way as any to pick players for the all-star game, for a community service award it feels a bit weak. There’s really nothing about the charities and programs that the ball players are associated with. No video. No pictures. No quotes. No numbers. Seriously. Is anyone actually going through and reading about these? There’s not even a link to the organizations they support.

Meanwhile, Chevrolet isn't doing much to encourage a meaningful vote. The website encourages you to "Vote for your favorite player," not to "Carefully examine the off-the-field contributions of each player and decide who best emulates the selfless contributions made by Roberto Clemente and other baseball-humanitarians.

Really, there's nothing wrong with the public getting to vote for the Roberto Clemente Award , but if you're going to hand the decision over to the fans, at least make sure they have the information they need to make an educated decision.

Endangered Internet Species

Who here remembers the Google Whack? There are many variations on the Google Whack, but the way I've always played is that you must enter two words, no proper nouns, without quotes, into the google search engine producing a search with 1 google hit. That's the purist form. Other variants allow proper nouns, and in another, the goal is to get as many hits as there are characters in the two words.

At its onset the Google Whack was an extremely rare phenomena, but you could do it, if you knew a handful of obscure words and some chemistry terms. But like the unicorn, the Google Whack is and was an endangered species. Sites emerged that collected them, and news outlets did stories on them, but of course once they were recorded that Whack ceased to exist. Other websites emerged that seemed to simply catalog vast swatches of words. Google Whacks are a web phenomena that may soon be extinct. If it's not already. I haven't thought about them in a while. In fact, the last I found was a few years ago. On 8/3/06 I found this gem:

popsicle triskaidecagon

The same google search today yields 19 hits. This is compared to

Methuselah bobbysocks

(yes, I know I broke my own rule and used a proper-noun) which was once a Google Whack and now inexplicably yields 448 Google hits.

Googlewhacks.com has what they claim to be an up-to-the-minute and unindexed Whack List, and yet I've tested several of them and not one of those supposedly fresh whacks is even below the century club, several have more than 1000 hits.

... Anyway, yesterday I was using Google image search to find illustrations of emotive monkeys. There are plenty of enraged, happy, sad, and even "sarcastic monkey" (with quotes in the search) yields 400 hits. But a search for "sardonic monkey" yielded a singular hit (not even of a monkey), it's own sort of Google Whack.

Honestly, I'm surprised, I suspected by now monkeys and monkey illustrators would have uploaded images with titles covering all possible monkey attitudes. However, without the quotes sardonic monkey yields over 10,000 hits.

If you're hunting a Google Whack I've found in the past that you should

1) avoid words that could be near each other in the dictionary
2) avoid common favorite words like defenestrate
3) pair two words from two radically different highly technical professions
4) pair something innocuous with a highly technical term
5) pair a word no longer in common usage with a highly technical term

Can you find any Google Whacks, traditional, or your own variation?

If you find a true google whack you can post it in the comment section with dashes between the letters so as to preserve the thrill for future Whackers. Honorable mentions for single digit returns, or for bizarre word combos that return far more hits than expected.

Happy Hunting!

The lifespan of a poem

I had poems in the February edition of Pank Online. In "Facts About Marsupials," I take a stab at answering where poems begin. A couple of weeks ago J. Bradley, author of Dodging Traffic, interviewed me for PANK. He asked me where poems go when they die.

It's curious: there was a stage in my life where I was worried about where I'd go when I died. That stage has mostly passed. I don't know where, but it's less interesting to me than where I'll go while I live.

However, the life cycle of poetry is now very important to me. First there's the unpredictable gestation period. The poet can carry the first cells of a poem in them for years before they even know it's there. Then the actually birth may take a few minutes to several months.

Just a few back and forth talks and eventually the poems are sent out into the world to find a home. For the most part they become tempered by repeated rejection. When sent by mail they almost always return to the poet, who then must look them over for defects before sending them right back into the fray.

Hopefully, finally, the poem is accepted into the dormitory like pages of a literary journal. So many different poems, so many different types of writing. The poet can only hope that the poem is accepted by the other poems and by the other poets. Then, for a long time the poem remains in that one place. Very, very rarely it gets invited to hang out with other poems, in another place. Usually this happens within it's first year of life out of the poet's home. Other times the poem eventually finds a place to live with its relatives.

It's a strange life, and of course there's more to it than that.

If you're interested in where poems go when they die, or what the world would be like without typos, check out my interview over at the PANK blog. If you like it, if you makes you think of anything, leave a comment.

If you're not interested, sign up here. We have a gang of dinosaurs to kill.

Scooped: New NY Times All-Nighter Blog caused All-Nighter

For my Nonfiction M.F.A. thesis, written between 2007 and 2008, I put together a multi-genre piece called "The Insomniac's Almanac," which as it sounds, was meant to be a pamphlet styled as an almanac, but with articles, stories, and information that would be particularly interesting to insomniacs (such as myself). I figured I'd get to learn about a chronic ailment that had been affecting me for many years, as well as have a product that a publisher might be interested in. Almanac-style books such as John Hodgman's The Areas of My Expertise, Amy Krouse Rosenthal's Encyclopedia of a Modern Life, and Ben Schott's Schott's Miscellany were selling like hot cakes. At the same time pharmaceutical solutions for insomnia like Ambien and Lunesta were making tons of money. It seemed like the perfect combination.

My thesis, like many others, was both a success and failure in many ways. I learned over the course of writing it that I didn't have the design [or perhaps research]skills I needed to follow through on my idea in exactly the way I'd originally conceived.

I'm the sort of writer who loves computers. While most of my writing starts on tiny memo pads that fit in my back pocket, my handwriting is cramped and approaches sloth-like slowness. Without a keyboard I would get little done. But despite considering myself pretty savvy with some creative computer programs like ProTools and Adobe Audition, I'm just learning to use Adobe In-Design after years of becoming frustrated at not knowing how to turn off auto-functions (like numbering, or capitalization) in Microsoft Word. I still use the most basic word processor, Notepad, for most of my drafts and only put something into Word when I want to know how long something really is, or get spacing right.

Whenever I set out to make a graph for my thesis, or some other interesting and friendly presentation of information, I'd find myself thinking, "...maybe I can get the same message across by writing a story or a poem," and then, without wasting much more time that's what I did.

A friend sent me a link to a new NY Times online feature last night: All-Nighters.

I scrolled down to find out who was in charge of bringing these thoughts together and there it was: Ben Schott seems to have decided that an Almanac for Insomniac's is a pretty good idea too. But where as I wasn't ready, Schott has the experience and skills to pull this off beautifully.

I did have one sleepless night, or a all-nighter (har! har!) over this: if only idea known how to do a little bit more a little bit faster, if only my follow-through could have been better.

In fairness, I'm also excited: I look forward to seeing his (and my) idea unfold in his blog. The pieces in it are really quite thoughtful and interesting.

Meanwhile, I'm not throwing the baby out with the bathwater; I'm still pleased with the pieces in my thesis and many have been published. This has just made clear what I knew already: getting an M.F.A. isn't the pinnacle or capstone of a writer's creative journey. It's another clarifying step. At least this proves that I had a good idea, and fortunately, I think I've still have some pretty good ideas I've just begun to explore. There are skills I need to tend to if I want future ideas to be able to blossom properly, and I will.

Lolz!

I recently discovered that one of my friends with whom I often instant message is not always "laughing out loud" when he types the initialism "lol." In retrospect I know I shouldn't be surprised, but it always delighted me to imagine that the thing I'd typed moments before was so funny that he was unable to control himself, in fact so funny that he couldn't master the coordination to type anything but those two letters, conveniently located adjacent to each other. But this is not the case. This weekend, while he was on gchat I watched him type "lol" after a friend sent him a message that wasn't even remotely funny. Which filled me with doubt. Am I really not funny?

I have never typed "lol" myself when I have not just laughed out loud. Do I perhaps have a problem with being too literal? Almost certainly the latter. Clearly the "lol" is a symbolic meme. There are currently no published studies that determine just how many people are actually laughing out loud and I think it's safe to assume that the percentage is low. However if that's the case I don't know how "lol" overturn "haha."

"Haha" has the benefit of adaptability. An extra "ha" may be added at either end to convey more amusement, or reduced to a single "ha" to express a dryer and lighter sort of humor. Lol lacks that flexibility. Perhaps convenience is king: "L" and "o" touch each other on the keyboard while your fingers must travel to write "haha." Or maybe it's appealing because it's one pronounceable syllable. But neither consideration has impeded the popularity of other initialisms such as "lmao" and "lmfao." Furthermore those are clearly meant to be hyperbole for the sake of further amusement. But "lol" can be taken literally and thus using it so freely seems disengenous.

More about "LOL" here.

The Omnilogist

Artifice Magazine is an incredibly hot new Literary Magazine out of Chicago. My Author Dossier is now up on their mainpage. Also be sure to check out their submissions Wishlist. Then think about how nice it would be to get a year's worth of thought provoking literary curiosities delivered to your door.

Book Review #5

Dune by Frank Herbert


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Dune is a compelling landscape of ecology, technology, culture, politics, and ideas. In short, it's truly a masterpiece. That said:

Do you remember lateral thinking problems? They re-entered the vogue, or perhaps just my consciousness about 10 years ago. To be fair, I've never read any of Edward De Bono's books, and maybe I will, but I found those problems really annoying.. Some of the answers were borderline obvious ("he knew he was in Australia because the water went down the drain the opposite direction") while others were merely discarded beginnings of movies such as "Dude Where's My Car" or "The Hangover" (A man wakes up in the desert with one burnt match, frost bite on his left hand, a string of multi-colored hankerchiefs, and half a gallon of margarita mix. What the hell happened to him last night?). I remember that one of the notions [maybe apocryphal) of LTPs that I heard over and over was that computers couldn't do them. Only the unique and powerful human mind could, through yes or no questions, construct the stories that explained these scenarios.

And so I wonder, could a Mentat solve a lateral thinking problem?

The Mentat is simultaneously one of the coolest and most dated of Dune creations. Herbert reiterates several times that Mentat reasoning was more effective than the most powerful computers of Earth's golden age.

Think about it. When Herbert was writing Dune the most advanced computer game was "SpaceWars!" They could not "play DOOM." Packet networks (the interwebs) were a mere theory. Transistors were brand new to the computing world.

So on rereading "Dune" I spend most of the time wondering about the limitations of a Mentat. I imagine a Mentat would have the edge on all of my friends who applied for investment banking positions five or so years ago when interviews asked questions like "How many golf balls would fit on a 727?" But would I enjoy going on a date with a mentat? Or, since Herbert refers to the "golden age," is it safe to assume that a masterful mentat (or at least Duncan Idaho) would be able to beat Deep Blue at chess?

View all my reviews >>

Jerry Beary's Cherry Cake

Not so much a cake as a shapeless muffin, this is another food product that I have had the opportunity to experience thanks to the GED program at the other end of the office.

As opposed to PB&J whose production is merely shrouded in mystery, or murky, the Beary packaging gives nothing away. In fact, several variations of google searches only served up one matching hit.

Jerry Beary's Cherry Cakes are disappointing. It doesn't have the heartiness I expect from a muffin or the sweetness I want out of cake. Jerry Beary does get some points for having real cherries mixed in with what I've been thinking of as "cherry pearls," though on further reflection that's much too generous. Most disturbing is the texture, which is waxenly-moist, like bread baked with crayons. It's not dry, it won't crumble, but if you eat it plain it sticks to your teeth and lodges itself persistently at the roof of your mouth.

For some reason I can't stop eating them.

And it's for Charity!

Selections from the Music & Entertainment section of CharityBuzz:

Justin Timberlake Personalized Steinway Baby Grand Piano

Meet Lady Gaga at the Concert of Your Choice with Two VIP tickets

I think the piano is the biggest ticket item available in that section, while the Lady Gaga offering is the one where the bids have already most exceeded the estimated value.

Engulfed

No, it's not the Zombie Apocalypse, but it's at least as terrifying:

Time Lapsed Map of Unemployment

Misadventures in Adcopy #4

Today's misadventure in adcopy is found at GECKO sfx. Okay, so Geico's spokesgecko's more doe-eyed cousin wanted to start a graphic effects company. I have no problem with that as long as he's done his homework and goes full out.

A smaller graphic tells me,

WARNING! Creative Blast Area

I've always got my creative hard hat ready (it absorbs the impact of explosive ideas rather than deflecting them). However, this website is totally stactic. There's not even a single link. I don't feel like I'm in any sort of danger, really, I'd welcome slightly more danger.

But I'm having most difficulty with the adcopy:

Creating Myths and Making Dreams ComeTrue is Our Mission. Switch On Your Creativity. Abuse of it.

GECKO sfx seems a little confused about what they want to capitalize, and there's a space missing between "Come" and "True," but what really throws me for a loop is the imperative, Abuse of it. Any interpretations?

Maybe this is a direct result of fragmentation from the afformentioned creative blast area.

*The accompanying blog has not been updated since 2008, so this pretty clearly a ghost site. I wouldn't have been so interested except that I was googling Artifice Magazine and a site supposedly under construction by Gecko sfx was one of the top hits.

Robodating: Mr. Eset searches for the Wobot of his dreams

Could it be this Svedka model? Yes, she's sexy and cheeky, but it's unclear whether she has the the intellect or gravitas to satisfy him.

Frankly, I think he's more likely to fall for Cameron.

Self-Promotion #3

Quoted on the same page as Milan Kundera, Margaret Atwood, and perhaps best of all, The Wonder Years.

http://zerite.net/literatti/love/

Scroll to the bottom of the page, and there I am.

Great Things Found on the Internet

Gay Bar or Steakhouse?

It seems simple enough until you're pulling your hair out because the Rusty Spurs just has to be a steakhouse SOMEWHERE and how could there NOT be gay club called the Pink Pony?

The Crystal Gavel of Spontanteous Writing

This is another bit of internet-writing-memorabilia akin to Michael Martone's Leftover Water. However, whereas the sale of Martone's water was laden with obvious writerly artifice from start to finish, it seems possible that the assortment of crystal hammer reviews may be born less out of a collective plan to create a postmodern essay or collection of stories, than a spontaneous response to the shear strangeness of the product.

However, this still doesn't come close to matching the fictional delight inherent to the products of merchant starry1_night on ebay. Though I may be close-minded. Perhaps there is nothing fictional about "offering authentic djinn on ebay since 2005."