Negative is the New Positive: Part I

I knew if I just hung on long enough, the world would eventually come round. After all these years of being abused and shamed for my so-called negativity, it’s suddenly becoming chic.
The first time I recall being chided for negativity was by a friend on a snowy mountain in Vermont during a high school senior [...]

Anthology: My Baby Rides the Short Bus

The anthology My Baby Rides the Short Bus can be ordered now at Amazon. For more information, see my earlier post.

Will You Take Me As I Am: Book Review

Will You Take Me As I Am: Joni Mitchell’s Blue Period, by Michelle Mercer

After enjoying Girls Like Us so much, I began looking around for other books about the most interesting of its three subjects, Joni Mitchell. Lucky for me, bios of Joni seem to be on the way to becoming a cottage industry. Will [...]

Seven Years of Herotica 7

7 X 7:  Seven-Years of Herotica 7:

Writing, Publishing, Diversity and Political Correctness

Herotica 7, a collection of erotic fiction I edited in 2003, has suddenly and without fanfare finally been published. (The first print run of 2000 sold out, but a second printing is on the way.) Amazon shows it as a re-issue, [...]

Bad Mothers Come Out

Hello Hooray I’m ready!
That’s a line from an old song by Meg Christian, one of the standard bearers of “wimmins music” in the early 70’s, in celebration of lesbians coming out everywhere. I invoke it now to hail the coming out of the bad mother, which–keeping fingers crossed–might at long last be happening .
I base [...]

Literary Misfit

As some readers may know, I recently uploaded my novel, Halfway to the Stars, on Scribd, a relatively new service that offers unpublished/unpublishable books for sale. I’d only sent it out to a few agents/editors since completing it two years ago, and then stopped trying to publish it: after four previous novels I no longer [...]

Halfway to the Stars

You can buy a copy of my novel, Halfway to the Stars, at Scribd, for a mere 5 bucks. I’m trying this out. If anyone else has used Scribd I’m interested in hearing your stories.

Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape

Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape
Frans De Waal and Frans Lanting
University of California Press, Berkeley
210 pp. $39.95

The bonobo ape was discovered relatively late–1929–and for decades was largely dismissed as a pigmy chimp, a smaller version, rather than a distinct class, within the chimpanzee species. What little information reached mainstream media tended to sensationalize their sexual behavior, without [...]

My Own Personal, Quirky, and Wildly Eclectic Cultural List for 2008

The following list of books, television shows, and movies is not to be construed as a “Best Of…” It isn’t even grounded in 2008, but wanders through time the way most of us do. These are merely the cultural phenomena I’ve delved into during the year about to end. I’ve probably forgotten a few, [...]

Freedom of the Press

Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.—A.J. Liebling
That’s why I love to blog: I own this press! That’s why I love it that the blogosphere exists—we all own this press! I see blogging as a subversion of power, formerly–and still to a large extent–concentrated in fewer than a dozen [...]