Last Bender

I’ve added two new links today. One is to Obooko, an English website dedicated to the free distribution of e-books. They contacted me about posting The Man Who Can’t Die there, Which I Have Done.
The other is personal. At my friend Bob’s 50th birthday in Brooklyn last weekend (a bash not to be forgotten, at [...]

perhaps its a cylon probe but some entity has been looking at my 3 Berry Place, Darwin, Australia, 1983 post. If you are indeed human, and know anything of 3 Berry Place, Darwin, Australia in 1983, please reveal yourself…i too am of the tribe of humans. there are few of us left, perhaps only 2 [...]

7.1
It didn’t take long for me to settle into the afternoon shift at Pain et Poisson. The two heavy rushes were at breakfast and lunch, and a diligent, pigtailed waitress worked them both. On a good day she could make 80 bucks in tips. I filled in the afternoon and evening hole, a long, tedious [...]

I try to be holistic in my thinking, but it is impossible not to feel that I have a poet brain and a prose brain. There is a lot of counterpoint between them. When I am writing fiction my own poetry seems alien. I either don’t like it, or don’t know how I wrote it. [...]

put down your fiddles
and pick up your guns
for the emperor’s clothes are burning

6.4
There was no point in trying to sleep. It was like living in a bowling alley. I stumbled out of bed and barely looked at the few human remnants of the night before, coasting back and forth as I left. I looked around at the empty street, still deep in shadow and cold. Everything smelled [...]

Anne Edsall, 1962-2010
A short note for those who knew her, who were around. There’s a ‘friends of Anne’ Facebook group for anyone who wishes to reminisce. It just makes me terribly sad that she is gone. Anne was someone I knew from the late seventies to the early eighties. I haven’t seen her since. She [...]

FIRE
A Brief History
By Stephen J. Pyne
University of Washington Press, 2001
“According to many myths, we became truly human only when we acquired fire. So it is natural to assume a parallel awakening for the place we live. Rather, the Earth likely simmered through more than four billion years before its biotic broth boiled over.”
So begins chapter [...]

There was a discussion yesterday at Ward Six about Elmore Leonard. John was saying that he loved Leonard’s dialogue, and then someone posted a link to Leonard’s rules for writing, published some years back in the Times. The rules are simple and indisputable, as far as they go, and they have the limitations of any [...]

6.3
Simon and Tammy walked right by us. They stopped a few feet down the sidewalk and backed up. “Hey,” they said.
“Hey,” we said. They each had a six-pack of beer under their arms. They looked at each other, we moved up and apart and they sat down.
“Help yourself to the beer,” Simon said.
“His is better [...]