Who am I to blame?

Nobel Medal, Prize for Physics (medal)

Is anyone as surprised as I am that the Nobel Prize in Literature went to an old pasty white dude?

I’m mean, it’s only been four years since the last one was selected with Peter Handke, and five years before that since Patrick Modiano was selected, and three years before that since Tomas Tranströmer was selected.

Of course, Bob Dylan doesn’t count in 2016, because, well, wtf was that all about anyway?

Nor does Kazuo Ishiguro in 2017, unless you are of the mindset of the former South African apartheid government and regard those of East Asian descendancy as honorary whites.

Of course in this day and age it is treading in dangerous territory to assume the particulars of anyone’s identity, even that of assumed pasty old white dudes such as mentioned above, sans Ishiguro of course.

But I’m pretty damn confident of my assumptions.

Come to think of it, that’s a whole lot of old white dudes selected for the NPL in just a little over the past decade.

What’s up with that?

I thought, with the state of the world as it is, with global sensibilities as they are, old pasty white dudes were persona non grata when it comes to just about any form of praise or recognition.

Oui, no?

It certainly is a oui for me and I’m as old and male and pasty white as they come.

I say, to hell with old pasty white dudes, regardless of their particular talents, or lack thereof.

Can I get an amen?

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Memories of a Movie’s Production

It’s hard for me to believe that it has been seven years this month that my sons and I hauled ass out to North Hollywood, California to film Leave, a short film based upon my short story of the same name.

That was one fun and memorable experience.

The movie premiered as the 2018 LA Femme International Film Festival, and shortly thereafter found a home at Amazon Prime.

Unfortunately, Amazon, in a huge diss to independent filmmakers all over the world, shut down its service to short films a couple of years ago and Leave has been without a distributor since.

I had plans to find a new home for Leave, but as we all know how way leads on to way, I never did…

Until now.

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A Privilege to be Apart

I wonder if there could be scientific research done that could come up with a way to measure how much privilege an individual possesses and then create a scale that tells us that this amount of privilege will lead to this amount of life. Presuming that more privilege equals more life. And visa versa, I … Read more

ESPN for the Hat-trick

And by hat-trick I mean the Rachel Nichols sh*t show at ESPN that features a disappointing trifecta of racism, sexism, and privacy rights issues. Here’s a quote at the center of the controversy that comes from a phone conversation of Nichols that was inadvertently recorded to ESPN servers and then discovered and (illegally?) dispersed by … Read more

The Bird As Language

The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language … Read more

Love is the answer?

There’s a rather talkative pigheaded brute of a character in my WIP whose name is Rick, Happy, Henderson. Happy loves to philosophize and pontificate to…at?… his work partner about whatever the latest topic is he’s studying during night school as if he’s now a subject matter expert. He’s not of course and he always manages to maneuver whatever it is he’s rambling on about toward a general diatribe of how the weak with their Rule of Law and “societal norms” have managed to upend the universal natural order of might makes right, which, in the end, as he sees it, limits his ability to pick up chicks.

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Don’t be a Doormat

I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat. ― Rebecca West #notetoself #timesup

Poetry is for Girls

humor-image

I may occasionally write the junk, but rarely do I read it.

And it is not because I don’t like it that I rarely read it…

It’s because it, the really good stuff anyway, is so durn hard to read.

I’m talking Poetry here…

Poetry with a big, bold capital P.

And it is so hard for me to read (And by read I mean read. I mean really digging into the poem and fighting through the initial confusion and the complicated and often archaic words. I mean, not just reading the poem, but studying it and trying to close the gap in time from when the poem was written to when the poem is being read by learning about the poet and where and when and why and how he or she is from and where and when and why and how he or she lived and then coming to my own understanding of what I think the poem means and then trying to apply that meaning to my own life and where and when and why and how I live it. That’s what I mean by read.) because it takes more than a little bit of effort to read it.

I certainly don’t have time for all that junk.

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My Uncolorful* Character(s)

I don’t know about you, but as for me – unless it is absolutely critical to the movement of a story – I don’t need to always know every item in each room, or the style and brand of every shoe in the protagonist’s closet… and I especially do not need to know about the … Read more

No Gun, No Respect…

First off, I’m not anti-Second Amendment (if you’re an American (of the U.S. persuasion) and you don’t know what the Second Amendment is then that’s a problem)… See, I live out in the sticks and I had to call 911 once because I thought there was a gas leak somewhere in my house and all … Read more