Consortium of Seven: Year 4

On the one hand, it’s going to be more time to do something else. On the other, I never thought I’d get this far, last this long or be able to sustain writing an arty entry EVERY SINGLE WEEK. Yet since starting almost three years ago, I’ve managed to keep it going & in particular through the past (& hardest) ten months of my life. So although it’s fine that the Consortium of Seven is coming to an end as a group of bloggers, it’s been a year of endings for me. Perhaps it is the right time after all. This is dedicated to all my fellow Consortium bloggers, who are members of what has been a generous & attentive group. In particular, thanks to Garbo who gently shoved me into doing something I didn’t think for a minute I could do. People like that are valuable. Let them wrangle you into the apparently impossible. In your bid to avoid disappointing them, you may find out something about yourself. Egon Schiele (1890-1918), Portrait of Paris von Gütersloh , 1918 Okay, I won’t lie –

  Wow.     Four years ?      Doesn't feel like it, but I suppose it never does.      I meant to do something more with it, but my time-management skills are often crap, and there seemed to always be something hanging over me, stressing me out, at any given time. Me "just" waiting for that thing to be "over", and then, surely, time would be mine and energy would return. Dream on.       Part of me thought this might be something I'd be carrying with me through the planned transition in my personal life sometime in 2026, but nothing lasts forever.     When Garbo told me about the Consortium of Seven project back in 2019, inviting me to be take one of the seven days after someone (I'm not sure that I ever knew who), originally in the mix to handle tv and film, had to bow out, I was interested. In large part I found it attractive because back closer to the start of this century one of my main online point of expression was blogging. Something I e

 And so, we come to the last of these columns before we come to an end next week.  I hope you've enjoyed them over the years and if you care to follow me elsewhere for the sheer silly nonsense I do on social media, you can find me on Facebook (as Joseph J. Finn) and on Bluesky as well.   Now on to the thrift stores! ____________________________________________ Let's start with the (presumably) classy; A New Kind Of Love  (1963) is a Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman vehicle written and directed by Melville Shavelson, an old-school comedy writer who I'm pretty unfamiliar with.  It doesn't appear to have gotten particularly good reviews but hey, Woodward and Newman! A New Kind Of Love  is available for rent and for sale at the usual places. ____________________________________________ On to the schlock!    Q: The Winged Serpent  is the most simple of premises.  Someone accidentally brings Quetzalcoatl to New York and he takes up residence, swooping down on unsuspecting New

    Welcome back, my Lovely Readers! Today,  I warn you,  you are in for more of a rant than a true review.  But y'all need to know. So one night,  hubby and I were doom scrolling, like ya do, and he shows me this meme...  That sends us to Amazon to check out this book someone says they'll read one hundred times this year. For four dollars, I now own the Kindle version of one of the worst books i have ever read. I don't know exactly what I expected.  As far as I am personally aware,  "Sender" is an androgynous name,  so I really had no idea.  I was hoping for a Jewish romance novel.  As a long- time romance reader,  I've stumbled onto lots of Christian romance. I have read so much romance, in fact, that, statistically,  I should have stumbled on a non-Christian romance accidentally by now. I have not. So,  i was hopeful. Our tale opens with an attack on a school bus full of young ladies being taken home from a local Jewish school.  As the girls

Recently I did a series of posts about The Fireside Book of Favorite American Songs and  in this post I wrote about historian Carl Van Doren, who had written a foreword to The Fireside Book shortly before his death. Van Doren was from a distinguished family. His brother Mark was a prize-winning poet and his sister-in-law Dorothy was a magazine editor, novelist, and, later in life, a writer of humorous family anecdotes, a bit like the work of Jean Kerr or Betty MacDonald, with perhaps a dash of Erma Bombeck.  Wikipedia supplied me with this info:  "Dorothy Van Doren was an editor at The Nation magazine for many years. During World War II she was chief editor of the English Feature Desk at the United States Office of War Information, which was responsible for presenting a human and appealing image of American life through the international broadcasts of the Voice of America, directed by John Houseman."     Van Doren edited The Lost Art , a collection of letters by seven

Earlier this year, I told the tale of spending a night in the small town of Kemi, Finland, in April 1974 and of the grand romantic gesture that arose from that visit. One of the events in Kemi that I didn’t relate in that post took place the following morning. I wrote about that omitted event in another venue about fifteen years ago when I was sorting out my thoughts about the 1971 record, “Never Ending Song of Love” from the album  Motel Shot  by Delaney & Bonnie & Friends. I said:  During my European travels, I spent about ten days wandering through northern Scandinavia with an Australian fellow named John. We spent one night in Kemi, a small town in Finland. The next morning, we learned we’d forgotten about a time zone change and had missed the first train back to Sweden. We had a couple hours to kill, so we sat in a café near the railroad station, drinking coffee and listening to the jukebox. At one point, a record came on that sounded familiar, but it took me a moment to

Three day weekend. Aah.  Friday night Slate sky Pretty superb Coffee shop. Divine in Naples  That’s the Gulf of Mexico at the end of that block. Still closed off due to last year’s hurricane Ian.  Bonita Springs For sale 400,000