Blog Love Omega Glee

Friday, I plan to start serializing my new novel, Blog Love Omega Glee, on this blog. It's about two bloggers who fall in love while the world falls apart. If you liked my first novel, then you'll probably like this new one. And, if you've never read anything by me before (not counting this blog post), then the new novel is a good place to start.

Mac's Backs Reading Thanks!

Thanks to everyone who came out to the reading at Mac's Friday night, and thanks to Mickey, Sean, and Suzanne for putting it together! It was a lot of fun! Sean Carswell's book tour continues through August, so if you live in a city he's coming through, then please check him and Train Wreck Girl out!

Tomorrow's Reading

Cool Cleveland and The Free Times have both noted my reading tomorrow at Mac's Backs at 7 p.m. with Sean Carswell and Mickey Hess. I'll be reading an excerpt from my new novel Blog Twilight. It's free so please come on out if you're in the area.

Yip!: Bad Money by Kevin Phillips

The new book by Kevin Phillips, Bad Money is an interesting read if you're trying to figure out why the U.S. economy has been so affected by subprime mortgage loans. It effectively boils down to greed, but Phillips will guide you through the details. His other books are interesting too, particularly American Theocracy and American Dynasty.

The Rocker Rocks!

Yesterday, I was lucky enough to see a sneak preview of the new film The Rocker starring Rainn Wilson. The film's set in Cleveland (though mostly filmed in Toronto as most of the street scenes make evident--Cleveland doesn't have streetcar tracks in the streets anymore alas) and Wilson plays Fish, a heavy metal drummer who gets kicked out of his band in the 1980s. The hair metal band goes on to success while Fish stews bitterly in low-level cubicle jobs for twenty years. Just when he seems to have hit bottom and almost becomes homeless, he starts drumming for his nephew's emo band and sees a second chance at rock glory. While the film has the standard rock and roll story plot of the band getting big or nearly getting big (I think only my novel The Pornographic Flabbergasted Emus and maybe the Australian film Garage Days don't), it is pretty hilarious. The film definitely shows that Wilson, like his fellow The Office actor Steve Carell, can carry a movie almost by himself. He also strips naked--providing probably the movie's funniest scene ("The Naked Drummer")--proves himself adept at slapstick, and makes Fish a character the audience roots for. If you liked Emus and you're looking for more rock and roll laughs, check out The Rocker!

Ernest Hemingway Urban Legend

Over the past couple of years online, I've been seeing a six word short story ("For sale: baby shoes, never worn.") being claimed to have been written by Ernest Hemingway. The story is usually cited as an excellent example of flash fiction. You can see an example of this in an article about very short stories published by Wired. The story is often accompanied with a longer story explaining that the six word masterpiece was created by Hemingway to win a bar bet that he couldn't write a complete short story in just six words. Both stories are great, but they both smell of urban legend. I couldn't find the story in my copy of The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, and having read a lot of Hemingway, I couldn't recall ever hearing about this story before. I checked with two experts, one on Hemingway, and one on misattributed quotations (Robert Trogdon and Ralph Keyes respectively), and neither knew of any source for the Hemingway story beyond the only legitimate source I could find. That source is Arthur C. Clarke, who in an 1980s essay on Reader's Digest called "The Power Of Compression" relates the anecdote of how Hemingway created the story (you can find it on page 354 of his essay collection Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds!: Collected Essays, 1934-1998). Clarke doesn't cite a source himself, and unfortunately he died earlier this year so we can't ask him where he heard the story. It's possible he heard it from Hemingway himself (though I haven't been able to determine if they ever met), or through writer circles, but since Clarke is rarely cited as a source for the story, much less where he got it from, I think the legend of Hemingway's composition of the story is probably a case of people seeing something on the Internet and then perpetuating it whether it's true or not. But, if anyone has more information on the source of this Hemingway legend, please pass it along. I suppose we should be thankful no one claimed the short story was written by William Faulkner, though that would be more amusing, since I don't know that dear old Faulkner could compose even a grocery list as brief as six words, much less an entire story.

Review of Private Screenings by Lawrence Richette

The announcement of a new Larry Richette book is always good news. This novel sees Larry (since I know him, we'll call him Larry, and not the more formal Richette) branching out from his usual setting of Philadelphia to take a look at New York City in the 1980s. AIDS, greed, career obsession, cocaine, and all your other 80s favorites are there, mixed in a tale that could be a spiritual bookend for The Moviegoer by Walker Percy. Instead of a character having an existential crisis as well as being obsessed by the movies, Larry's protagonist and narrator, Tony, a film school student, has an existential crisis while being obsessed with making movies. Another good reference point would be all the 80s blank generation fiction novels such as Bright Lights, Big City. This novel glamorizes things a bit less, probably because of the distance in time, but has similar themes to those novels in that the characters risk losing their souls seduced by their own ambition and that of others in the big city. The major literary path followed here is that of F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose sensibility is referenced explicitly in the novel as one of the characters prepares to play the role of Zelda Fitzgerald in a movie. Of course, Fitzgerald was writing of the same themes in the 1920s and Larry explores them in the 1980s, particularly how individual ambition can destroy love and marriage. Though you root for them, none of the characters are particularly admirable (here's an indication of what they're like: the most likable character, Manfred, is a pornographer and pimp) so what keeps the novel moving is the strength of Larry's writing. He captures the feel of the time in lines such as "She led me to the master bedroom. There were signed photographs of Ronald Reagan, Nancy Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher. In the Cape Cod moonlight they looked like signed photographs of Beelzebub's chief three attendant demons." A lot of Republicans try to convince us today that Reagan was a great president. I lived through Reagan and I can tell you that he wasn't. He was a fake down to the color of his hair, and ultimately a lousy shill for General Electric his whole life, first as a tv host (General Electric Theater) and then as President so we went into massive debt buying weapons and other defense products we really didn't need (Star Wars) so the rich could get richer chomping at the trough of the public treasury. Hmm . . . communism as the bogeyman to scare us into coughing up tax dollars so that the rich can loot the treasury with their corporations, and now terrorism as the bogeyman to scare us into coughing up tax dollars so that the rich can loot the treasury with their corporations--the classic scams never go out of style in America, do they? Even though Larry doesn't get terribly political here, he does get the feel of the times exactly right, reminding us that Reagan and the rest of the 1980s weren't as pleasant as our hazy memories want to remember them as. Instead, it was an era when greed invaded not just our dreams (the ultimate private screenings), but also our beds, and whom we shared them with.

Wred Fright The Pundit: Democratic VP Pick

So, I went to The Chestnut Street Cafe, a bar in Sharon, Pennsylvania with my pal Dave on the weekend before the Pennsylvania primary in April. Coincidentally, there was a Barack Obama rally there, and it turns out we had just missed seeing Kathleen Sebelius, the governor of Kansas. Huh? The governor of Kansas in a Sharon, PA bar? I mean the Chestnut does have a pretty good beer selection, but I don't know if it's worth a trip from Kansas. What I suspect Ms. Sebelius was doing there was betting on the right horse and helping to sew up a spot on the Democratic ticket in the fall. A female governor who's won twice in a red state has got to look pretty good paired with Obama, and the VP signs are looking pretty good for Sebelius: she gave the Democratic response to the State of the Union, she apparently attended Bilderberg in Virginia, and now she's giving the keynote at the the 2008 Ohio Democratic Party Family Reunion Dinner. For a governor of Kansas, she's been spending a lot of time in presidential battleground states. I'm not a betting man, but I won't be surprised when Obama picks her to be his running mate. Of course, I could be wrong. I was almost certain Hillary was going to move back into the White House in 2009. I wasn't thrilled about it, but it seemed pretty much inevitable. So much for pundit predictions, eh? Still, watch that Sebelius--I think we'll be seeing more of her over the next four-five years!