Just another writer
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2014 in rejections (and acceptances)
2014 apparently ended up being the year that I got the most pieces out thusfar (although the general trend has been upwards). My personal rejection rate is up to 25% from 20%, a new record and this year’s acceptance rate came out at 3.1% (three acceptances versus 93 rejections). My plan for 2015: Finish draft…
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070.92 THO Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Some time after college, I realized that drunk and stoned people were not all that fun or interesting to be around. This, in the end is the big problem with Hunter S. Thompson’s book. On the flip side, the narrative voice here is so compelling that it’s hard not to read on. The second part…
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051 GRO The Receptionist
When the current craze for memoirs struck, I kept finding myself wondering who these people were and why we should care about their lives? It seemed to me that having done something notable with one’s life was a prerequisite for a memoir being worth writing, let alone being read. Janet Groth falls on the edge…
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069.5 OLD The Secret Museum
As a child, one of the treats of the year was members’ night at the Field Museum. We’d get to go to the top floor of the museum where the researchers worked and see the stuff that wasn’t on display, that was being actively used in research. More than anything else, what remains in my…
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031.02 MAT The Concise Guide to Sounding Smart at Parties
Here’s a rule: If you’re going to put together a humorous collection of facts, it should be (a) humorous and (b) not contain unintentional mistakes. Matalon and Woolsey manage to miss the mark on many fronts, with factual errors that were unintended (e.g., saying that Bohemia became part of modern-day Austria) and having humor which…
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The Big Countdown
In this year’s edition of my countdown to death, I drop from 90 years to 84 years. My biggest source of additional life expectancy would be diet and exercise. Losing six years of life is a bit sobering. I knew this last year, but it’s even more important now, especially that I have progeny to…
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We got more or less diverse poets (depending on how you look at it)
In the aftermath of some of the discussion about diversity in publishing, I thought I’d check how this year’s Best American Poetry stacked up against last year’s for diversity. There were 73 poets in the 2014 anthology compared to 76 in the 2013. In 2014, 31.5% of the poets had appeared in the three previous…
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022 MAN: The Library at Night
A series of meditations on libraries, public and private, personal and universal. Manguel’s writing meanders on occasion, but even in meandering it has a light poetic tone. As an Argentine living in France, he could reasonably be expected to write in any language but English, but as near as I can tell, this is the…
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011.62 ROL: Read to Me
I knew that there would be decades in the Dewey Decimal System like this one. Where the books are nearly all dry reference materials forbidding linear reading. I hope that when I reach dictionaries, it will not be restricted to dictionaries in its span of the shelf. 01x is bibliographies and most of the books…