Posts tagged literature

Look, Down In The Hamper… It’s ‘Captain Underpants!’

I ventured into the kids section during a recent browse through a local Borders liquidation sale (which really isn’t much of a sale). Seeing this series of books and its eponymous protagonist always produces the same grin.

Such an awesome character.

In-flight Captain Underpants illustration
More powerful than double elastic.

Chicago Magazine: Chicago's Top 40 Artistic Breakthroughs

1. April 1948, Leonard Chess, a white Polish immigrant who owns a Bronzeville nightclub, records a few songs by Muddy Waters, a black truck driver who migrated to the South Side from Mississippi and has been sitting in on “country blues” sessions that feature the piano and acoustic guitar. Waters begs to let his electric guitar rip on two originals, “I Feel Like Going Home” and “I Can’t Be Satisfied,” and when the effort lands on Billboard’s “Most Played Jukebox Race Records” chart, Chess’s company, then called Aristocrat (later Chess Records), claims its first national hit. The partnership boosts the careers of both men and changes the direction of the music business. Waters becomes a sensation, and his success sparks the rise of the postwar electric blues. With his brother, Phil, Chess chaperones more black musicians with blistering talent (Howlin’ Wolf, Chuck Berry, Etta James) into the mainstream and injects popular music with the powerful progressions of blues and R & B. 

You’re welcome, Rock ‘n Roll.

Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you’re doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.
E.L. Doctorow
If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.
J.D. Salinger (1919-2010) - Opening line from The Catcher in the Rye
The first draft of anything is shit.
Ernest Hemingway

Talk Like Shakespeare Day


On this, The Bard’s 445th birthday. Get thee to a bakery!

AlphaDictionary: The 100 Most Beautiful Words In English


By no means a panoply (#79), but felicitous (#37) to a wordie. (Via)

A few to ponder:

  • blandiloquent - Beautiful and flattering (#7)
  • colporteur - A book peddlar (#13)
  • niveous - Snowy, snow-like (#70)
  • sempiternal - Forever and ever (#97)

Personal addendum:

  • please
  • thanks
  • forgive

“Uncle Jim”

by Peter Meinke


What the children remember about Uncle Jim
is that on the train to Reno to get divorced
so he could marry again
he met another woman and woke up in California.
It took him seven years to untangle that dream
but a man who could sing like Uncle Jim
was bound to get in scrapes now and then:
he expected it and we expected it.

Mother said, it’s because he was the middle child,
and Father said, Yeah, where there’s trouble
Jim’s in the middle.

When he lost his voice he lost all of it
to the surgeon’s knife and refused the voice box
they wanted to insert. In fact, he refused
almost everything. Look, they said,
it’s up to you. How many years
do you want to live? and Uncle Jim
held up one finger.
The middle one.

© Peter Meinke, from Liquid Paper: New and Selected Poems, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991. (via)

Any idiot can face a crisis - it’s day to day living that wears you out.
Anton Chekhov (via)