Junior Lee Klegseth

The big blow it -- the Colts' lost season

noreply@blogger.com (Junior Lee Klegseth) — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 02:44:00 +0000

Three minutes left in the Super Bowl and what I predicted is coming true: after chosing to throw away a (strong) chance at an undefeated season with six quarters of football left in the regular season and now they will lose the Big One. The agony will be so much worse for not having the undefeated season or the ring. At least the undefeated season would have given them something redemptive if they'd continued to where they are now and lost.

Meanwhile, congratulations to New Orleans and the Saints! No city deserves the pride and lift more.

The Writer's Landscape

noreply@blogger.com (Junior Lee Klegseth) — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 20:16:00 +0000

This article in the LA Times succinctly summarizes the attitudes of both publishers and writers today.

Dani Shapiro writes of how the "writer's apprenticeship -- or perhaps, the writer's lot -- is this miserable trifecta: uncertainty, rejection, disappointment" has changed today, so that "Today's young writers don't peruse the dusty shelves of previous generations. Instead, they are besotted with the latest success stories: The 18-year-old who receives a million dollars for his first novel; the blogger who stumbles into a book deal; the graduate student who sets out to write a bestselling thriller -- and did." Writers today, she says, "do not include insecurity, rejection and disappointment in their plans. I see it in their faces: the almost evangelical belief in the possibility of the instant score."

JD

noreply@blogger.com (Junior Lee Klegseth) — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 01:26:00 +0000

From the L.A. Times article, "JD Salinger: a gift of words and silence":

"Don't ever tell anybody anything," J.D. Salinger wrote in the closing lines of "The Catcher in the Rye." "If you do, you start missing everybody."

"Wasn't this, after all, what Salinger was rejecting, a culture of celebrity in which the most important thing was appearance and no one cared about the level of the soul?"

Goodbye.

But hold on...

noreply@blogger.com (Junior Lee Klegseth) — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 19:52:00 +0000

In all fairness to the quote in my last post, I thought it might be useful to examine the current bestsellers and see if I could spot the trends suggested: I couldn't. There is a wonderful mix, with plenty of "my ilk," though granted many of them are quite established. I suspect the quote referred to breaking a new author in, but I am still salved to see that people want to read about the characters and genre I write in.

I did find this, however, at #8 on the Paperback Trade Fiction list:

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIES, by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith. (Quirk, $12.95.) The classic story, retold with “ultraviolent zombie mayhem.”

So that got me thinking....maybe I'll do Conrad's Heart of Darkness, except it will be two young lovers who go up the Mississippi in a canoe....(ok, he's super hot, has lost his shirt, and anyway, she's the protagonist here, he's just an accessory)...and they find an unknown tributary that leads to a world of vampires, zombies, ghouls, goblins...ooh, yeah, yeah...then I'll use Rossetti's Goblin Market as the guiding allegory...and if these two lovers can't navigate the backwaters they will never return and the Mississippi will drain like an unstopped toilet, taking towns and cities and people, oh the people, oh the madness, the madness...and there they will remain, doomed to wandering the swamps of UnkNOwnLaNd, hearing the lonesome voice of another girl who met a similar fate, her sad Rossetti song drifting on the haze:

MORNING and evening
Maids heard the goblins cry:
"Come buy our orchard fruits,
Come buy, come buy:
Apples and quinces,
Lemons and oranges,
Plump unpecked cherries-
Melons and raspberries,
Bloom-down-cheeked peaches,
Swart-headed mulberries,
Wild free-born cranberries,
Crab-apples, dewberries,
Pine-apples, blackberries,
Apricots, strawberries--
All ripe together
In summer weather--

Say it ain't so...

noreply@blogger.com (Junior Lee Klegseth) — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 19:28:00 +0000

From November, over at Agent in the Middle:

However, it's become increasingly difficult to sell any genre fiction from a male protagonist's perspective, unless he's really hot. But even if he's a really hot teen vampire, it's better to tell the story from a female point of view. If you have a male character, I'd almost suggest that you change the gender of your main character to sell a novel in this climate.

So let's see...I'm white, straight, middle-aged and male, and I write mystery/suspense novels rather than YA, vampire, zombie, and my male protagonist's are not really hot in the classical sense. That's like nine strikes...if this was baseball I'd have struck out the side all by myself! Too bad for me that I will continue to write what I am passionate about, published or not. Still...not exactly a cheery post....(read the whole thing here).

The Big Lebowski ala Shakespeare (and the Coen Brothers do True Grit)

noreply@blogger.com (Junior Lee Klegseth) — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 05:48:00 +0000

During the first Dubya term I wrote a Shakespearean play called King George II : A Drownéd Man, A Fool, and a Madman and billed it A Shakespearean Tramedy. It was written for a creative writing class, for an assignment called the Subversive Project, and I had a blast. While mostly fiction, all the lines of the King are actual Dubya quotes (I mean, really, he provided the stuff jokers are made of). It remains obscurely online at http://www.juniorleeklegseth.com/king_george_ii/.

I was watching The Big Lebowski tonight (again) and went to IMDB to read about it (again). While following links I found that the Coen Brothers are remaking True Grit with Jeff Bridges as Cogburn and Matt Damon as La Boeuf (more at IMDB). I'm trying to imagine True Grit run through the CB mindset...

Anyway, I also found a link to an article that told of screenwriter Adam Bertocci's rewriting of The Big Lebowski as a Shakespearean play called Two Gentlemen of Lebowski. Read it here.

The opening goes like this:

CHORUS
In wayfarer’s worlds out west was once a man,
A man I come not to bury, but to praise.
His name was Geoffrey Lebowski called, yet
Not called, excepting by his kin.
That which we call a knave by any other name
Might bowl just as sweet. Lebowski, then,
Did call himself ‘the Knave’, a name that I,
Your humble chorus, would not self-apply
In homelands mine; but, then, this Knave was one
From whom sense was a burden to extract,
And of the arid vale in which he dwelt,
Also dislike in sensibility;
Mayhap the very search for sense reveals
The reason that it striketh me as most
Int’resting, yea, inspiring me to odes.

Quote

noreply@blogger.com (Junior Lee Klegseth) — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 08:42:00 +0000

Not far from the invention of fire must rank the invention of doubt.
-Thomas Henry Huxley

"Rage Against the Machine humbles Simon Cowell"

noreply@blogger.com (Junior Lee Klegseth) — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 17:44:00 +0000

Rage Against the Machine fans rise up in holiday spirit. Fun read here from The Associated Press.

Excerpt:
"There are other ways to make music than to stand in front of a panel and perform like a circus bear," Morello added. "Free expression, uncompromising content are sitting on top of the U.K. pop chart this week."

David Foster Wallace interview

noreply@blogger.com (Junior Lee Klegseth) — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 06:32:00 +0000

For any writer, but particularly if you are an English major who remembers literary theory and creative writing classes, I highly recommend the interview of David Foster Wallace found here. The chat gets a bit intellectual occasionally, but most of the time it's a frank look at pop culture and literature.

A few highlights:

That’s not what fiction’s about. Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being. If you operate, which most of us do, from the premise that there are things about the contemporary U.S. that make it distinctively hard to be a real human being, then maybe half of fiction’s job is to dramatize what it is that makes it tough. The other half is to dramatize the fact that we still "are" human beings, now. Or can be.

You’ve got a gift for lit-speak, LM. Who wouldn’t love this jargon we dress common sense in: "formal innovation is no longer transformative, having been co-opted by the forces of stabilization and post-industrial inertia," blah, blah. But this co-optation might actually be a good thing if it helped keep younger writers from being able to treat mere formal ingenuity as an end in itself. MTV-type co-optation could end up a great prophylactic against cleveritis—you know, the dreaded grad-school syndrome of like "Watch me use seventeen different points of view in this scene of a guy eating a Saltine." The real point of that shit is "Like me because I’m clever"—which of course is itself derived from commercial art’s axiom about audience-affection determining art’s value.

If you mean a post-industrial, mediated world, it’s inverted one of fiction’s big historical functions, that of providing data on distant cultures and persons. The first real generalization of human experience that novels tried to accomplish. If you lived in Bumfuck, Iowa, a hundred years ago and had no idea what life was like in India, good old Kipling goes over and presents it to you. And of course the post-structural critics now have a field day on all the colonialist and phallocratic prejudices inherent in the idea that writers were "presenting" alien creatures instead of "re presenting" them—jabbering natives and randy concubines and white man’s burden, etc. Well, but fiction’s presenting function for today’s reader has been reversed: since the whole global village is now presented as familiar, electronically immediate—satellites, microwaves, intrepid PBS anthropologists, Paul Simon’s Zulu back-ups—it’s almost like we need fiction writers to restore strange things’ ineluctable "strangeness," to defamiliarize stuff, I guess you’d say.

(Chastising the interviewer for making Raymond Carver = minimialism):
I was talking about minimalists, not Carver. Carver was an artist, not a minimalist. Even though he’s supposedly the inventor of modern U.S. minimalism. "Schools" of fiction are for crank-turners. The founder of a movement is never part of the movement. Carver uses all the techniques and anti-styles that critics call "minimalist," but his case is like Joyce, or Nabokov, or early Barth and Coover—he’s using formal innovation in the service of an original vision. Carver invented—or resurrected, if you want to cite Hemingway—the techniques of minimalism in the service of rendering a world he saw that nobody’d seen before. It’s a grim world, exhausted and empty and full of mute, beaten people, but the minimalist techniques Carver employed were perfect for it; they created it. And minimalism for Carver wasn’t some rigid aesthetic program he adhered to for its own sake. Carver’s commitment was to his stories, each of them. And when minimalism didn’t serve them, he blew it off. If he realized a story would be best served by expansion, not ablation, he’d expand, like he did to "The Bath," which he later turned into a vastly superior story. He just chased the click. But at some point "minimalist" style caught on. A movement was born, proclaimed, promulgated by the critics. Now here come the crank-turners. What’s especially dangerous about Carver’s techniques is that they seem so easy to imitate. It doesn’t seem like each word and line and draft has been bled over. That’s a part of his genius. It looks like you can write a minimalist piece without much bleeding. And you can. But not a good one.

In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.

Christmas Shopping Rant - or, Online Retailers, Get Your Act Together

noreply@blogger.com (Junior Lee Klegseth) — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 22:11:00 +0000

We hear a lot about struggling merchants, poor sales, bad economy, etc., and while retailers claim to be responding I am amazed by a recent experience with online shopping. As someone who does user interfaces (UI), I know the damage poor UI's can do, which for shopping sites translates to lost sales, often invisible because the user just leaves.

I had a simple goal today: buy a pair of dog-themed pajamas. Simple enough, right? I started by following a link from a catalog to Sahalie.com. The catalog had exactly what I wanted, but when I typed in the item number I saw a page with a red version (I wanted cream). Okay, maybe they were out of the cream. But nowhere on this page did it reference that a cream version even existed. Why does that matter? Because users want to understand. Without any reference I am left wondering, is the item number wrong, did they stop carrying it, what do I do next? Many shoppers are lost there, but I followed navigation to the pajamas and there it was, a large image of the cream colored version. I clicked on it and found myself back on the original page, with--you guessed it--no reference to the image I just clicked. I'm done at that point.

Next, a Google search showed some pajamas that looked cool at Eddie Bauer. So I click through and the product page matches the Google search image. Great. There are two radio buttons for me to choose: Regular and Petite. Regular is checked for me. Except next to the radio button are options for color and size, and both are empty. Hmmmm. So I select Petite and now find one color and several size options. Clicked Regular again...no options. So my assumption is, they are completely out of the Regular...but why make me deduce that by having the Regular option and letting me choose it? Why not gray it out, or remove it, or say, Out of Stock next to it? Next.

I find a site with links to dog print pajamas on various sites. I find one to The Pajama Company. Except when I arrive at the site I am greeted with: Access denied! You are not allowed to access that resource! Love it. Now, to be fair, they can't control what link someone gave me, but they sure could provide alternate paths to keep me shopping. And really, if access is denied and there is no further messaging to explain why, perhaps the best thing to do is take me to their home page and let me start looking for my product. Regardless, I am gone.

That same page of links takes my next to Cherrybrook. The image is confusing...just a dog in a triangle on a black background...not sure if the background is the color of the pajamas or ?? So I click Zoom & More Views, but it is just the same view on the page in a pop up window. Then, I see this disclaimer (not a UI issue but I'm on a roll): "ORDERS PLACED AFTER DECEMBER 1 MAY NOT ARRIVE FOR CHRISTMAS." Are you kidding me? Have they looked around the web and noticed that retailers are guaranteeing deliver if ordered by the 23rd? Do they understand that a large percentage of shoppers coming to their site this time of year are shopping for Xmas? Are you kidding me? Gone.

Now, retailers can/wil/do sell out of merchandise and/or sizes. Of course I understand this. What I am talking about here is user experience. They must know that being out of what I want already risks me moving on, unlike a store, where I will walk by other items and perhaps find something to substitute. The key for the online experience is to a) communicate clearly (and honestly) and b) to give options that might keep the user on the site.

For example, if I am told an item is sold out or out of stock (and I should be told if more stock is expected), my frustration might be mitigated somewhat if I am given links to similar items. In no case should I be left to figure things out in the ways I mention above.

Web based analytics is the statistical analysis of what users do--where they enter a site, what paths they follow, what actions they take, what ads work and what ads don't work, how long they stay on a site, what pages they leave from. But none of that numerical/percentage-based analysis conveys the frustration of a user, how a poor UI decision can actually drive people away, and, most importantly, how many times such an experience means the person will never come back. For retailers I already know and like, such as Eddie Bauer, I will probably return to shop at some point. But for retailers new to me, like Cherrybrook or Sahalie, I have a chip on my shoulder now and will not return. That's their loss and they'll never realize it.

Quote

noreply@blogger.com (Junior Lee Klegseth) — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 03:16:00 +0000

I gave them all the truth and none of the honesty.

-Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

From the legendary Persian poet, Hafez (d. 1390)

noreply@blogger.com (Junior Lee Klegseth) — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 23:46:00 +0000

Don't surrender your loneliness
So quickly.
Let it cut more deeply.
Let it ferment and season you
As few human
Or even divine ingredients can.

State of Play: See both of them

noreply@blogger.com (Junior Lee Klegseth) — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 06:02:00 +0000

I barely noticed when State of Play (IMDB | Amazon) was released in theaters. A couple of weeks ago I tried out Amazon's Video on Demand for the first time and that was the movie I picked. I am picky, picky, picky when it comes to mystery/suspense movies and generally go in expecting to be dissatisfied, but this movie rocked. Like any movie, I can pick some holes in it, but the combination of action, mystery and suspense kept me enthralled (it gets a 7.4 at IMDB, which is an excellent rating). And though not a huge Crowe fan, I thought he was awesome here. I think it fortuitous that Brad Pitt backed out...I just can't see him in the role.

Reading up on the movie I discovered it was based on a BBC series by the same name (IMDB | Amazon). The BBC has a reputation for good mystery series (I'm a fan of the Inspector Lynley Mysteries), and their original version gets a 8.7 at IMDB. The six hour span obviously allows for more character development and prolonged suspense.

I think comparing the two, or more to the point, expecting the same things, is like comparing novels to screenplays--it's a lost cause. What is so cool here is that both are wonderful mysteries and the writing is good to great. Given a choice I would suggest you watch the U.S. release first, as I did, because the BBC version expands on it and slows it down.

I now own, and recommend, them both. Oh, and about being a picky mystery viewer, the truth might be that good mystery movies are a rare thing. Of the IMDB Top 50 Mystery Movies:

Only 11 were made in this century (only 1 in the top 10, 3 in the top 20), and 31 came before 1990. Fortunately, great mystery novels are not quite so rare (emphasis on not quite).

Writer Series: Openings #3

noreply@blogger.com (Junior Lee Klegseth) — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 02:34:00 +0000

Here's the intro to John Fowles', The Collector (Back Bay Books),called the first psychological thriller by many. If you read thrillers this kind of prose will seem familiar--but keep in mind Fowles wrote it in 1963. The tone could be a lover reminiscing about the woman he would eventually meet and marry, but the chilling undertone tells us that is not the case.

"When she was home from her boarding-school I used to see her almost every day sometimes, because their house was right opposite the Town Hall Annexe. She and her younger sister used to go in and out a lot, often with young men, which of course I didn’t like. When I had a free moment from the files and ledgers I stood by the window and used to look down over the road over the frosting and sometimes I’d see her. In the evening I marked it in my observations diary, at first with X, and then when I knew her name with M. I saw her several times outside too. I stood right behind her once in a queue at the public library down Crossfield Street. She didn’t look once at me, but I watched the back of her head and her hair in a long pigtail. It was very pale, silky, like Burnet cocoons. All in one pigtail coming down almost to her waist, sometimes in front, sometimes at the back. Sometimes she wore it up. Only once, before she came to be my guest here, did I have the privilege to see her with it loose, and it took my breath away it was so beautiful, like a mermaid."

RIP Ted Kennedy

noreply@blogger.com (Junior Lee Klegseth) — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 06:45:00 +0000

I tend to see the political system in the U.S. as cracked, if not broken, but I felt Teddy Kennedy got better with age and fought passionately for some important issues. No matter how you look at it, forty-six years of public service is significant.

I was reading about Kennedy in the NYT tonight and this paragraph, written by John M. Broder, caught my eye. It encapsulates Ted Kennedy perfectly. I would be proud to write it in a fiction novel:

"He was a Rabelaisian figure in the Senate and in life, instantly recognizable by his shock of white hair, his florid, oversize face, his booming Boston brogue, his powerful but pained stride. He was a celebrity, sometimes a self-parody, a hearty friend, an implacable foe, a man of large faith and large flaws, a melancholy character who persevered, drank deeply and sang loudly. He was a Kennedy."

Sweet (the quote, I mean).

Writer Series: Openings #2

noreply@blogger.com (Junior Lee Klegseth) — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 18:47:00 +0000

I've mentioned before how great I think Denis Johnson's "Jesus' Son: Stories" is. The opening I am posting for this installment is from a short story called "Work." For writers in particular, I think just the opening paragraph shows how a talented writer can make prose both entertaining and potent. Johnson came to fiction from poetry and that lineage is evident throughout the collection. BTW, Jesus's Son is also a movie, starring Billy Crudup. The movie averages four star reviews at Amazon, but I wouldn't go that high. I felt the movie played too much to the humorous side -- and there is wonderful humor in the stories -- while marginalizing the darker side. But then, Johnson has a cameo in the movie and I assume he approved of the tone, so what do I know? Anyway, check it out:

I'd been staying at the Holiday Inn with my girlfriend, honestly the most beautiful woman I'd ever know, for three days, under a phony name, shooting heroin. We made love in the bed, ate steaks at the restaurant, shot up in the john, puked, cried, accused one another, begged of one another, forgave, promised, and carried one another to heaven.

Quote

noreply@blogger.com (Junior Lee Klegseth) — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 18:43:00 +0000

The doubts of an honest man contain more moral truth than the profession of faith of people under a worldly yoke.
-Ximenes Doudan

Quotes

noreply@blogger.com (Junior Lee Klegseth) — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 18:43:00 +0000

I believe I found the missing link between animal and civilized man. It is us.

-Konrad Lorenz

Every sin is an attempt to fly from emptiness.

-Simone Weil

Who breaks the thread, the one who pulls, the one who holds on?

-James Richardson

Writer Series: Openings #1

noreply@blogger.com (Junior Lee Klegseth) — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 20:40:00 +0000

When you have a spare half hour, walk to your bookshelf and pick out ten fiction novels or short story collections at random. Sit down and read the opening, not going beyond a page or so. What effect does each opening have on you? What authorial techniques make some so effective? What is missing from those not so effective?
As a writer and a reader I just love the openings of novels and short stories. Openings are daunting for all writers I think, because of the weight of responsibility they bear. Their simple task is, of course, to orient the reader (even if to orient means to disorient). The opening is there to give us some or all of who, what, where, why, when and maybe how. Deciding how much to give of just these can be a challenge.
But openings in the hands of a talented author are so much more—they set the tone of the novel, foreshadow, set up the theme, let us know what we can expect from the language (is it erudite and complex and you better have a dictionary at hand, does it use historical references, is it childlike?), and the word choice can tell us if our POV character is a child, a racist, uneducated, genius, arrogant, etc.
When not done so well, the author’s failed attempts at some or all of these can confuse the reader before they’ve finished a few pages. Why are the thoughts of a philosophy teacher given to us using mostly monosyllabic words? Why is a child of nine referencing the feelings of a broken heart or lust? Why are the thoughts of a teenager lamenting his first lost love almost clinical in their detachedness and language? It’s not that I think readers ask these questions (well, writers who read do), but rather they perceive it at a subconscious level, and it may be enough to make them close the book. Stand in an airport bookstore sometime and watch people considering books. They tend to read the back cover and then the first page—that’s all we writers get, and the only part we have any control of is that first page.
For the next several posts I want to examine some openings I enjoyed, starting with a few short stories. Although short stories differ in many ways from novels, the openings must try to accomplish the same things. The openings I have chosen are not the result of any serious research on my part…just a few I think hit the mark.
I am a serious Raymond Carver fan. One of my favorite stories, and one I analyzed to death in college, is the title story from What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: Stories. Here are the first four paragraphs:
My friend Mel McGinnis was talking. Mel McGinnis is a cardiologist, and sometimes that gives him the right.
The four of us were sitting around his kitchen table drinking gin. Sunlight filled the kitchen from the big window behind the sink. There were Mel and me and his second wife, Teresa—Terri, we called her—and my wife, Laura. We lived in Albuquerque then. But we were all from somewhere else.
There was an ice bucket on the table. The gin and the tonic water kept going around, and we somehow got on the subject of love. Mel thought real love was nothing less than spiritual love. He said he’d spent five year s in a seminary before quitting to go to medical school. He said he still looked back on those years in the seminary as the most important years in his life.
Terri said the man she lived with before she lived with Mel loved her so much he tried to kill her. Then Terri said, “He beat me up one night. He dragged me around the living room by my ankles. He kept saying, ‘I love you, I love you, you bitch.’ He went on dragging me around the living room. My head kept knocking on things.” Terri looked around the table. “What do you do with love like that?”

Plus ça change

noreply@blogger.com (Junior Lee Klegseth) — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 02:24:00 +0000

I was reading tonight about the Salem Witch Trials and I took comfort in knowing that now, more than three hundred years later, we no longer condone Peine forte et dure, French for "hard and forceful punishment."
Those silly Puritans just didn't know what to do if a person wouldn't cop to the crime, but they figured out a fair and sensible solution, which was for the prisoner to be:

remanded to the prison from whence he came and put into a low dark chamber, and there be laid on his back on the bare floor, naked, unless when decency forbids; that there be placed upon his body as great a weight as he could bear, and more, that he hath no sustenance, save only on the first day, three morsels of the worst bread, and the second day three droughts of standing water, that should be alternately his daily diet till he died, or, till he answered. (Wikipedia)

Take Giles Corey, for example, of who like scores of others in 1692-3 was accused and refused to enter a plea. Unthinkable and unacceptable! So here was the process for good old Corey, taken from Wikipedia:
As a result of his refusal to plead, on September 17, Sheriff Jonathan Corwin led Corey to a pit in the open field beside the jail and in accordance with the above process, before the Court and witnesses, stripped Giles of his clothing, laid him on the ground in the pit, and placed boards on his chest. Six men then lifted heavy stones, placing them one by one, on his stomach and chest. Giles Corey did not cry out, let alone make a plea.

After two days, Giles was asked three times to plead innocent or guilty to witchcraft. Each time he replied "more weight". More and more rocks were piled onto him, and the Sheriff, from time to time, would stand on the boulders staring down at Corey's bulging eyes. Robert Calef, who was a witness along with other townsfolk, later said, "in the pressing, Giles Corey's tongue was pressed out of his mouth; the Sheriff, with his cane, forced it in again".

Three mouthfuls of bread and water were fed to the old man during his many hours of pain. Finally, Giles Corey cried out at Sheriff Corwin, "I curse you Corwin and all of Salem!" and died.

But the English beat the Puritans to the punch (stone?) and proved themselves not to be sexist (or opposed to feticide) either, when they subjected pregnant Margaret Clitherow to a similar fate in 1586 for being a Catholic (bastard!).

Yes, it's not just for Virginia Slims we can say--you've come a long way, baby!

(Oh, Plus ça change = the more things change, the more they stay the same)

Blogs -- Trees falling and Esse est percipi

noreply@blogger.com (Junior Lee Klegseth) — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 22:18:00 +0000

A blog is the proverbial tree in the woods...are you, the blogger, content knowing the tree fell, or do you argue it only exists when someone has heard it? Berkeley argued Esse est percipi or "to be is to be perceived."
I don't know if I've decided that for my blog yet...the argument is essentially, is your blog a diary you leave out to be read or an online opinion column you need/hope is read. In the first case you really don't care about visitors, while in the latter you do. If you do the question becomes, what is the value of all that commentary? The recent social phenomenon of the web has inundated us with "amateur experts"--or put another way, those who know nothing but know it all.
As a writer, I enjoy the concept of a blog because my brain engages differently when I write (versus thought or speech). I also like the idea of turning somebody on to a writer, a musician, a thought, an article, a poem--whatever--that they may not have known before. I know I have picked up all of those and more at other blogs. Still, I don't know if I care about visits or comments--or is that self deception? If I don't care, why post to a public place at all, why not just write a journal?
I think ultimately blogs are representative of everyone's desire to be heard more than a desire for community. Community is an open forum where there is no leader, no namesake, just a threaded discussion (as painful as these can be), not a blog where One starts all dialogs and you are then free to respond to One. But at least it encourages discourse. My biggest lament for American Democracy is that we have moved from debate to hardcore, my-way-or-the-highway ideological points-of-view. Sad, too, because you can be no stronger in your ideas than when you crave and welcome challenges that shake your ideas to their cores.
What's the point? Hell if I know...I'm the One and I don't need no stinkin' point...but I think I'm trying to decide if I need to hear that tree fall or not.

Tonight - 8.30PM ..Earth Hour 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Junior Lee Klegseth) — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 19:51:00 +0000

It just seems so little to ask, whatever your thoughts on the issues involved. You don't have to do it for the Earth, or to comment on global warming, or to raise energy awareness (although all are certainly worth consideration)--how about doing it just to be part of the global community? More at the global Earth Hour site or the U.S. Earth Hour site.

Lehane's Shutter Island - the movie

noreply@blogger.com (Junior Lee Klegseth) — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 07:37:00 +0000

Dennis Lehane is fast becoming an author whose novels wind up as movies. First it was Mystic River (Book| Movie), then Gone Baby Gone (Book | Movie), and now, Shutter Island (Book | IMDB page). Heavy hitters have signed on, too, including Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley, Max von Sydow, and Michelle Williams, all directed by Martin Scorsese...wow. I was pretty sure as soon as I read Shutter Island that it would be picked for the big screen, since it is cinematic in setting, character and a monster twist. I just found a copy of the screenplay and look forward to reading it. The movie is due out this fall. And for the record, Lehane is four for eight--four movies from eight novels (the fourth is from a short story of his, Until Gwen, supposedly in the works).

New story published

noreply@blogger.com (Junior Lee Klegseth) — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 07:21:00 +0000

My experimental short story, "Revised Standard Version," has been published in the Spring 2009 issue of The Northridge Review. You can get information on ordering by emailing mhd03 AT gmail DOT com. As I've mentioned before the publication is quite impressive, both in presentation and content, which includes art, drama, poetry and fiction.

Marathon #2 - Hello again Death Valley

noreply@blogger.com (Junior Lee Klegseth) — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 07:09:00 +0000

Back on February 7 I returned to Death Valley to run the Death Valley Trail Marathon that goes through Titus Canyon. However, the canyon was closed due to snow and mudslides, so we ran Westside Road, a road not far from Furnace Creek, the entire course below sea level. What made this run fun was the starting temperature of about forty-four degrees and rain. In face, it rained for over two-thirds of the race for me, with the road getting increasingly sloppy, but I love cool weather and rain, so this was an adventure to cherish.

As we ran, though, the weather was causing increasing problems in Death Valley, which, despite being so dry, does not handle heavy rains well at all. By the time we took the shuttle bus to Furnace Creek, where our vehicles were, roads were being closed. I was two cars behind a Highway Patrol officer who shut down the road back to Stovepipe Wells, where I was staying. With more roads closing and the Furnance Creek resort sold out of rooms, it started to look like a long night. Finally, the Highway Patrol led a convoy of us back to Stovepipe Wells, driving through a water flows across the road ranging from a few inches to a foot or more, with rocks and sand--quite an adventure.