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Showing posts from August, 2014

Shane Stevens At Criminal Element

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I’m at Criminal Element today discussing (surprise, surprise) Shane Stevens’s By Reason of Insanity . If you have a minute, click-thru and share your thoughts.

Tell Them Robin Sent You

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I nearly wrote this very lengthy post, an essay really, about what Robin Williams meant to me and the impact he had on my life. I talked about how when I was a child and sitting home alone all day while my parents were at work, my two best friends were my dog and Mork (thanks to back to back episodes shown in syndication.) Nanu nanu. You cannot begin to fathom the impact of Dead Poets Society on my life, how many different formats I’ve owned that film, or how many times I’ve seen it. It lead me to so many good and perfect things. Least of which, I can quote a number of Whitman poems thanks to that movie. Every summer when the blooms on our lilac bush die, I stand on the front porch with the dog and recite the first stanza to one of Uncle Walt's poems: When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,   And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,   I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring. Ever-returning spring, trinity sure

A Dirty World Full of Dirty People

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I’m a longtime John D. MacDonald fan, honestly still in awe of the quality of his prodigious output. Years ago, coming out of a lengthy Travis McGee bender, I read The Red Hot Typewriter: The Life and Times of John D. MacDonald by Hugh Merrill. Starting at the bottom of page 71, Merrill reprints a funny spoof of Mickey Spillane that JDM sent Dick Carroll, his editor at Gold Medal, following their publication of The Brass Cupcake : "It was one of those afternoons when the greasy sunshine flooded Third Avenue like a men’s room with a broken john. She came out of the alley lapping at her juicy red lips with her pointed spicy tongue. I shouldered her out of the way and blew the smoke off of the end of the rod. He lay there in the alley and he was dead. I don’t know why I did it but I aimed at him and blew off the other half of his greasy skull. It was a dirty world full of dirty people and I was sick of it. I felt the crazy anger welling up in me. He lay there in the