Yeah, we’re bold in the first post. It’s one of the few HTML tags I actually understand, so I plan to use it for a while.
This is a literary blog with occasional forays into politics, art, The Rule of St. Benedict, Roman history, original fiction and poetry. Thanks to Booksquare, my hostess, I’ve been able to complete one orbit around the blogosphere. Some of you may know me from Collected Miscellany, another literary blog, where I review books and offer candid and sometimes shocking insights into the world of book publishing. I also write The Untrained Eye at Publishers Marketplace. Quite soon I’ll have links to these and other blogs mostly to do with books. I welcome comments that have nothing to do with Texas Hold em or revolutionary spatulas. Breakthroughs in spatula design, while exciting, are really too incremental. If you’ve got one that’ll toss an entire steer into the air, go ahead and comment.
There are a lot of good literary blogs out there, many with a genre focus like Booksquare for Romance, Sarah Weinman on crime fiction. I’ll post book reviews here, author interviews, agent interviews, and things that I feel deserve attention. Here’s my secret: I don’t know what I’m doing. The dashboard on WordPress bears an alarming resemblance to a push button Plymouth I once owned. My little brother removed all of letters, like D for Drive and R for Reverse, making the safe of operation of that Plymouth all the more tenuous. Naked prongs in no particular order issued commands to the vehicle, commands like “hit Dad’s car” and “crush all trashcans.” Despite a scintilla of enjoyment of V-8 harnessed Random Play, I think it’s just as well the push button tranny has gone the way of slime covered diners and irradiated locusts, fifty foot women, and Tab. Taken in combination these icons formed the basis of the Pax Americana, allowing fertile minds to devise such things. “We were somewhere near Barstow when the drugs began to take hold.” Raoul, we miss you, bro.