Consortium of Seven: Year 4

  Every other Wednesday,  I post a new installment of this modern suspense story, in audio form with a slideshow.  If the story is new to you, you can start from the beginning by going HERE . Or you can get a quick summary of previous episodes by going HERE , and then pick up from here you are.  Here's the newest episode.  

  A long-time ceramicist friend has a daughter who's a musician. This young woman was living in San Franciso, and tsenty-some years ago when Sarah's band (The Husbands) was on tour, I bought an LP at a gig. I came across the record recently and I'm about to donate it to a fundraising sale put on by the community radio station. Before I do, I wanted to take a moment and celebrate the record.   This  was recorded in an era in which a band of women musicians was less common. Want to hear them? I found a couple of the tracks on YouTube. This blog mentions that "On the Basement" is a cover The Husbands did of the Etta James original.       Here's the way Etta did it.             This is another track I like.     I took pics of the front and back covers as I enjoy remembering how lively and exciting the gig in Columbus was. Next week:  A book that became a biopic.

I got to thinking about 1977 this morning, and about this date specifically. In anyone’s life, there are – as I may have noted here before – days that stand out, that mark a clear division point, a definitive before and after.   One of those dates in my life was November 28, 1977. It was my first day of work for the Monticello Times , a weekly paper in a small town about thirty miles from my hometown of St. Cloud. And thus, it was the first day of the career for which my college courses had prepared me.   Except, as I think has happened to almost everyone, I hadn’t been prepared enough. One of the first things I learned that Monday forty-five years ago was that I had a lot to learn: about reporting, about being an employee, about life in a small town, and about myself.   The day was a whirlwind of introductions, a couple of interviews, and generous – and useful – advice from my boss and colleagues. I covered a girls basketball game in the evening and then went home ...

Lined up acorns Lined up for satisfaction  Lined up for loss Overlooked  Perfectly good  Sometimes lost Found again  Forgotten Disdained Regretted Desired Days and nights and weeks go by.  We think we are moving toward something or away from something. But that probably isn’t what we are doing.  We’ve got a line up situation. 

In which we look at an image, I keep quiet for once (although it's here because I like it) & you can make up your own mind about it.   Glasgow School of Art (Front Elevation) drawing  by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, c. 1910 In memory of  Erik Storm Green  (12th January 1945 - 22nd November 2022)  who inadvertently taught me how to be an art lover. 

      This is an odd holiday block of days for me, in part as half the household that was here for Thanksgiving last year now lives elsewhere, and I'm suddenly dropped back into a new version of a pattern from years ago, where I'll be going to someone else's house for Thanksgiving, but as I'll then be coming back home I still stuck with prepping for cooking here. One of the aims with Thanksgiving for me is being able to coast on ample leftovers, through Friday into Saturday, ideally not having to go anywhere between the time I get home Thursday night until the following Monday.       The blog-related takeaway is that time's going to be limited, and such discretionary time and energy as I might have as Thursday rolls on was very uncertain. So, I wanted to have something in place, set to auto-publish at the usual 7am on Friday, and so I set this up early. Always (always) room for improvement, it was good knowing there was something re...

 Happy Thursday, everyone!  Thanksgiving for us here in the States and between travel and all that,  this is a short one but I have a bunch planned for next week.   So let's get too it! ____________________________________ An absolute blind-buy for me but a blurb from N. K. Jemisin for Malaysian horror? That's a must-buy. (Cassandra Khaw is apparently a Maylasian-born novelist and short story writer who also works in the RPG industry, a combination that has me intrigued.) ____________________________________ Absolute admission, I still have never seen this despite the massive praise when it came out for Criston Mingu's work about someone trying to find an abortion for their friend in the last days of the Nicolae Ceaușescu regime in Romania (for which he won the Palme D'or in 2007).   It's one of those movies that almost looked like homework, but I took a chance since we're currently in the Barnes & Noble Criterion sale. ____________________________...

This is  a story about the Weirdy triplets: Barnacle, Melancholy, and Garlic. They were born to a very wealthy set of parents, and one day found themselves abandoned by parents and servants alike.  This family, and the one created by Charles Addams for the funny papers have much in common, and yet are miles apart. And these poor children get left all on their own. Eventually the authorities get involved and the Weirdies are sent to an orphanage. Imagine Pugsley and Wednesday Addams in an orphanage. Chaos ensues. So much chaos that the orphanage is going to kick the triplets out. A kind woman takes them to her home, and does her best to teach them how to be normal. She replaces their clothes with more ordinary fashions, and provides them each with a bedroom out of the Ikea catalogue. This suburban home might have been pulled right out of Home and Garden magazine. To their credit, the children really do try. Perhaps, they try too hard. This is a very well-written children's stor...

Earlier this year, I did a couple of connected posts about John I. White (1902-1992). White was the editor of a popular history book I'd been looking for and finally found through the statewide library system. This volume, American Vignettes , was so interesting that I looked up information on editor White. Turns out he'd been a performer in the earliest days of radio, where he was known as The Lonesome Cowboy. The post about all of that can be found HERE .   As I researched a bit more, I discovered that John I. White had written a whole book about the tradition of singing cowboys, including some of his personal experiences singing on the radio. That book, Git Along Lil Dogies , was also available from our state library system and I wrote the follow-up blog post about it. You can find that one  HERE   Once I brought home  my checked-out copy of  Git Along Lil Dogies (published in 1975), I discovered a never-played flexible record inside the back cover. It...

Sometimes the blank white space on my screen mocks me.   The cursor blinks impatiently, urging me to get on with things. And there’s nothing there. This used to happen occasionally during my newspapering days, especially on Wednesday mornings, deadline time at both the  Monticello Times , where I began my career in weekly journalism, and the  Eden Prairie News , the last community weekly of my career. Quite often at both papers, the final thing I’d write for the weekly edition was my column,  Musings .   I’d sit at my desk, pondering the blinking cursor – or, in the earliest days at Monticello, the blank sheet of paper in the typewriter – and think about the events of the last seven days to see if any of them sparked an idea. I’d page through the morning’s newspaper quickly, looking for news of an event somewhere, anywhere, that might bring inspiration.   If those brought no deadline joy, I might begin, tentatively: “I wonder . . .”  Sometimes th...

Roseate Spoonbills are a reason to like Florida. Especially when you find them so close to your own backyard. The sky above is full of winged beauty, here, the cranes and herons crisscrossing the clouds is a sight to behold. The hilarity of a soaring pelican will make your day, like Belvederes of the vast open sky, or Flinstone’s sassy put upon pterodactyls.  Child with sticker earrings. Yes, she had a set. Florida will grow on you.  Plus, you need a lot less moisturizer. 

Hooray! It’s the Art Alphabet! We’re not even halfway through yet & we’ve still to meet those tricky Qs, Xs & Zs. I remain quite optimistic at this point however, so we’re ploughing on. J 1. An Artist (Johnston) : The Pillar Box by Alexander Johnston (1815-1891) From what I’ve seen, Johnston’s works tend to be lavish & accomplished but quite dull. This however smacks a little of something furtive going on. Who is the letter addressed to? Why does the woman look so suspicious? & why does she also seem somewhat excited…? 2. An Animal (jaguar) : Cheval Attaque par un Jaguar (Jaguar Attacking a Horse) by Henri Rousseau (1844-1910) I often find Rousseau’s work odd & confounding, but this is more weird than usually. It does look as if the horse is attacking the jaguar & that can’t be right. It’s a peculiar pose for both animals although in fairness, that horse does look very taken aback.  3. A Bird (jackdaw) : Jackdaw by Edna Bizon (1929-2016) I love a corv...

        This is another padded weekend for me, with me taking Friday off (I have an almost absurd pile of PTO hours, and finally some opportunity to use some of them), which will then roll into an abbreviated week, with at the very least both Thanksgiving Thursday and Black Friday off.         The press of the holiday season -- and in general I'm becoming all the more welcoming of it each year, wanting to let it settle in early -- has this year brought us a more formal sequel to a film that's become a holiday classic, 1983's A Christmas Story . That much-revered (and much-played) film was based largely on some of Jean Shepherd's very loosely autobiographical anecdotes from his 1966 book In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash . In recent years it's found itself played back to back for 24 hours straight on TBS or TNT -- and that might even be the case again somewhere this year. I didn't find it in the immediate listings, though ...

 Happy Thursday, everyone!  Bit of a late one this week due to some work stuff but I have three good things for you. ______________________________ Nancy and Lawerence Goldstone are excellent non-fiction writers and occasional novelists, but I'm a big fan especially of their books about how they almost stumbled into being book collectors.  Being a book  collector can be a bit of a sickness, but it's also a joy of learning about new authors and old authors and the joys of a great binding.  This book is a ton of fun as they explore large bookstores and tiny town stores and in-between, as well as talking about weird things like book thieves and how New York has a completely illegal private park with a statue of Edwin Booth. ______________________________ We're in the offseason for sports at the moment as Baseball doesn't start until the middle of February, so I I thought it was maybe time to finally read the other novel by W.P. Kinsella, who wrote the classic Shoel...

  Every other Wednesday,  I post a new installment of this modern suspense story, in audio form with a slideshow.  If the story is new to you, you can start from the beginning by going HERE . Or you can get a quick summary of previous episodes by going HERE , and then pick up from here you are.  If you're all caught up, then you are ready for the newest installment:  

  My project for Consortium of Seven this week was to gather the links for each Blogger site with a year of the blog on it. A few months after the blog was begun, onother group member and I agreed that we'd build a new site for each year. That way there wouldn't be one monolithic collection growing ever more unwieldy and more likely to crash.  So now, in this fourth year, we have yet another site, ha ha.  But it seemed the easiest way to get each year's mass of bloggy wonders in one place. The new site (Consortium of Seven: All Together Now) has not only links to each year of writing and images found on the Blogger sites, but also links to the Facebooked archives. There are separate Facebook Pages for Years 1, 2, 3, and 4 (the current one), so now the links to those are nicely grouped together.  Making the directory was a bit of work, but I felt like the third little pig who made a house of brick. Any creative project in the digital world is like a house of straw or...