I’m not yet trained to drink coffee, eat icecream, and meals out on my nearby shopping street in the Central West End. City life, cafe life eludes me. I mostly still entertain at home…including entertaining myself. You’ve seen those little tykes in grocery stores with their tiny carts and the tall flags that say, “Shopper…
I left The Space (see post below) to rush home through our big thunder and lightening storm…headed for Bill Moyers’ Journal on PBS…featuring an interview with Reverend Jeremiah Wright and looking for insights into… Black Churches, Black Theology and American History James H. Cone’s quotation set the tone of Rev. Wright’s conversation with Moyers: Black…
“Ironically, our appetite for ‘reality’ fare has created an audience for the phony memoir,” says Rubén Martínez in today’s L.A. Times article “Why we fall for the fakes.” Click here to read the entire, excellent article.
First off, let me say I consider that the reader section on the Amazon book product pages are, for the most part, best termed as “comments” rather than “reviews”—which usually would be rather over-stating the case. Secondly, I am frequently appalled by the casual way in which readers in these comment sections reveal their ignorance,…
Tracking the Fallout of (Another) Literary Fraud By MOTOKO RICH Click here to read about the author of “Love and Consequences” who confessed she “made up the memoir about her supposed life as a foster child in gang-infested South-Central Los Angeles, the focus turned to her publisher and the news organizations that helped publicize what…
Here’s a follow-on to my March 22, 2007 post “The Secret: Packaged In America.” Burying the Secret, by Carol Rutter Within the framework of responding to Rhonda Byrne’s “The Secret,” Carol Rutter’s “Burying the Secret” weaves autobiography, expose, searching cultural commentary, and an analytical compendium of helpful books on important psychological and spiritual issues. If…
Both my father and I are Holiday Drop-outs, lying low for the most part until after New Year’s Day when the world turns back to sanity. Our holiday spirit is a quiet one…dedicated to continuing to do the things we usually do…and keeping it all on a small, human scale. Last night was one of…
“It almost killed me to do so, but I kept my mouth shut….” Tell us about a situation in which you found you had to just shut up, or you’d be in really big trouble, one way or another, or just a big bore, or unkind. For John Flinn, it was that no place is…
Tonight I just came back from a presentation at my local library; I caught the tail end, and that may have been one of the juicer parts, who can say? The audience was primarily African-American and they were firing questions at the speaker in a hunger to know more about the continent the African part…
Velda Brotherton and I were chatting under the electronic shade tree, sipping lemonade, trading our pet language peeves one day when we decided we’d post and link on some of them at the same time. Velda’s started her list on her blog “On Being a Writer.” My top language peeve at the moment is the…