Rejecting the Rejecters

If you've ever dreamed of writing a scathing letter to an editor who's rejected you, making him seem like the oaf instead of you the ingrate supplicant, take heart. It can be done. Just look at this one by William H. Gass.

Happy Birthday Chet Baker

Don't bother

Paths of Glory by Jeffrey Archer


My rating: 1 of 5 stars
Can you give zero stars? That's what I'd prefer to. I found nothing to like about this book. There's no characterization at all. The minor characters are virtually nonexistent, and the one major character is cardboard. The historical background is shallow; the plot drags, the mountaineering stuff gives no insight. And did nobody tell Jeffrey Archer that "Paths of Glory" has already been used as the title for a great Stanley Kubrick movie, a twentieth century masterpiece?

View all my reviews >>

Harvey and Barbara in Italy

I don't have any words for this. Just trembling with excitement at finding it.

A Storm in the Blood

A Storm in the Blood: A Novel by Jon Stephen Fink


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
A novel about a historical era I not only didn't know about, I didn't know it existed: Latvian revolutionaries/terrorists in London in 1910. The story was interesting -- I wished I had been made to care more about the characters.

View all my reviews >>

The End of Music?

Glenn Branca thinks so, in the NY Times.

I posted this response to Branca, which is buried somewhere on page 18 of the responses, but easier to read here.

I don't know that music is over, but the American Century in music -- blues and blues-based music, that is to say jazz, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, even country -- is over. And ... See Moreit will be considered one of the great artistic flowerings, like Elizabethan drama, Renaissance painting, baroque music, the Victorian novel. Those all came to an end, and so has the American Century in music.
That doesn't mean music is over. But we may not have the ears to hear the new thing.

New Hudson Valley guide

Opus 40 is given a writeup in a new online guide to Hudson Valley attractions -- Design Sponge. They're listed under "Woodstock" -- no section for Saugerties. The Hudson Valley stuff is written by Raina Kattelson, who is currently a Tivoli resident, but she grew up above the Tinker Street Cinema in Woodstock, then owned and operated by her father.