100 Years of Assistance in Playing the Ponies
Frank Deford has an interesting piece on SI.com about the 100th anniversary of the Daily Racing Form printing the esoteric and confusing past performance statistics for horse races. Deford writes “The scales fall from your eyes when you learn to read past performances. There are various signposts in your youth which speak to growing up:…
continue readingRIP R.L.
More sad news today… North Mississippi blues legend R.L. Burnside passed away last night. The AP reports “Burnside died Thursday morning at the St. Francis Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. His health had been declining for some time, said Matthew Johnson, owner of Burnside’s record label, Fat Possum.” Burnside was a sharecropper early in his life…
continue readingMS Bookstores Destroyed
Publishers Weekly continued their investigation into the status of bookstores in Louisiana and Mississippi and received unfortunate news yesterday. Hurricane Katrine inflicted irrevocable damage on Susan Daigre’s Bookends Bookstore in Bay St. Louis, MS. Also destroyed was Pass Christian Books in Pass Christian, MS, run by Scott Naugle and Richard Daley. “Both of those stores…
continue readingInterview: Billy Sheehan, Musician
The discussion of just getting started writing, don’t wait, don’t talk, just jump in, is a perfect segue into this week’s interview. I thought it might be interesting to talk to artists in other art forms and see how their lives, frustrations, and aspirations parallel those of authors. I’ve always been a guitar lunatic and…
continue readingMore on Mr. Koch
After my rant yesterday about all the formatting in The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop by Stephen Koch, a thoughtful and considerate reader thought I overreacted and that there is a tremendous amount of good material in the book. While I still do think the formatting and emphasis on emphasis is overkill, the reader’s polite comment…
continue reading