Author: D. A. Hosek
-
Ceci n’est pas Graham Greene
I somewhat randomly found myself at the website for the Harry Ransom Center and remembering that they had some (most? all?) of Graham Greene’s archive there, I thought I’d see what they had and found this picture, labelled “Gabriel García Márquez and Graham Greene”: My first thought was, whoa, is that a picture of Greene…
-
“Place de Stalingrad”: The story behind the story
In both Paris and Brussels, there are metro stops called “Stalingrad,” a fact I found fascinating, especially since the city of Stalingrad was renamed Volgograd in the wave of de-Stalinization under Nikita Krushchev. On my last visit to Paris, I decided I had to see what was at the stop with this name so one evening…
-
Writerly resolutions: April status
Another interesting graph month. This time the odd shapes are because I added a new chapter to the book (and life intervened a bit more than usual). I got a bit stuck on the new chapter since I wanted it to be about more than the chapter title and historical event that I was relating…
-
Song of the Month: Feelin’ Love by Paula Cole from This Fire
This song was never a single from Paula Cole’s second album, but it really should have been. In his song, Cole manages to convey in music and lyrics the feeling of sex perfectly. Some of it is in the doubles-entrendes lyrics, but it also comes from the music itself. Cole’s breathy singing conveys a sense…
-
Sonnet 18 after much machine translation
Do I cut your summer?You are very beautiful and very sweet.Can change by a strong wind.And put the summer in a short time.It’s hot in the eyes of the sky,It’s a gold weight.The best time of this time is correctActivity or changeBut all the summer never passes.To lose damage;His garden not dead when the timeIf…
-
Writerly resolutions: March status
Sometimes a graph doesn’t tell the whole story. My graph looks like for about a third of the month I didn’t make much progress but in fact, even though my word count didn’t move around much (and even dropped a bit), that was a result of wrestling with a troublesome passage in the first draft and…
-
Song of the Month: I’d Have You Anytime by Evan Rachel Wood from Chimes of Freedom: The Songs of Bob Dylan Honoring 50 Years of Amnesty International
This is a bit of an odd bird on a tribute album to Bob Dylan in that it’s really much more of a George Harrison song than a Dylan song (the melody on the verses is unmistakably Harrison-esque), but let’s put that aside. I first became aware of Evan Rachel Wood from her turn in…
-
It’s Lent
Trigger warning: earnest religiosity ahead. Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent. There are a lot of folks who seem to take this as a sort of performative event, kind of missing a key passage from today’s reading: “When you fast, do not look gloomy like the hypocrites. They neglect their appearance, so that they…
-
Writerly resolutions: February status
Even though there was one less day and I missed a day of writing, I managed to get more words rewritten for the novel this month than last. I’ve also been in a bit of a research binge of late with even more books added to my list and more books read. Israel Joseph Singer’s¹ novel…