25 June 2009
25 June 2009
ON ELMORE LEONARD…
0830 by Jeff HessFrom Daily Routines:
AMIS: What is your routine and how do you go about it?
LEONARD: I write every day when I’m writing, some Saturdays and Sundays, a few hours each day. Because I want to stay with it. If a day goes by and you haven’t done anything, or a couple of days, it’s difficult to get back into the rhythm of it. I usually start working around 9:30 and I work until 6. I’m lucky to get what I consider four clean pages. They’re clean until the next day, the next morning. The time flies by. I can’t believe it. When I look at the clock and it’s 3 o’clock and I think, “Good, I’ve got three more hours.” And then I think, “I must have the best job in the world.” I don’t look at this as work. I don’t look at it as any kind of test, any kind of proof of what I can do. I have a good time.
AMIS: And it just seems to flow? There are no days when whole hours are spent gazing out of the window, picking your nose, making coffee?
LEONARD: Oh yeah, there are whole hours’ work to make one short paragraph work.
25 June 2009
FROM MY CHAPBOOK…
0230 by Jeff HessFound in my electronic chapbook.
Pidgins are degraded, agrammatic collections of vocabulary that results when speakers have to interact without the opportunity to fully learn each other”s languages. When young children are exposed to pidgin, they turn it into a grammatically rich language called a creole, which far exceeds what they have heard from their parents. p. 197
From The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer”s Block and the Creative Brain by Alice W. Flaherty.
24 June 2009
FROM MY DAD…
2030 by Jeff Hess
I could never bring myself to forward all the email jokes, cartoons and other Internet comedy that land in my inbox. But then I started posting the ones my dad sends me. Judging from my comments and emails, my dad has become one of my greatest blogging assets. So for your evening blog chuckle I present: From My Dad.
Because they had no reservations at a busy restaurant, my elderly neighbor and his wife were told there would be a 45 minute wait for a table. “Young man, we’re both 90 years old,” the husband said. “We may not have 45 minutes.” They were seated immediately.
24 June 2009
ROLDO RIGHTS…
1730 by Jeff HessThe Plain Dealer got the headline and photo it wanted today with County Commissioner Jimmy Dimora”s “temporary” abdication of his chairmanship of the County Democrats. It will be a long “temporary.”
Dimora makes a hard-to-resist “bad guy” for the PD. (Also, a chance to waste more space that might accommodate news. But who needs that.)
The more important story, I think, is the quieter front-page headline that K & D – involved in the County corruption scandal – has decided to drop out of the deal with the County at E. 9th and Euclid Ave. That”s where the County first was going to relocate its administrative offices. Then it was going to have K & D develop the crucial downtown corner.
The County Commissioners should have quashed that deal long ago. The PD should have been asking for K & D”s dismissal as heartedly as it was seeking Dimora and County Auditor Frank Russo”s dumping. Continue Reading »
24 June 2009
24 June 2009
ON WILLIAM GRIMES…
0830 by Jeff HessFrom Daily Routines:
I have never experienced writer’s block. I write quickly. I’ve never been stuck for a lead. But I still experience the queasy feeling that most writers know all too well when faced with a blank piece of paper. The night before I have to write, I feel anxious and peevish. I can’t really concentrate. This only gets worse with time. I read somewhere that neuroses only intensify with age, in the same way that nuts tend to tighten on a car wheel as its spins. It’s true.
24 June 2009
FROM MY CHAPBOOK…
0230 by Jeff HessFound in my electronic chapbook.
When arousal gets too high it can overload the nervous system so that opposing impulses collide…. (T) p. 190
From The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer”s Block and the Creative Brain by Alice W. Flaherty.FROM MY CHAPBOOK…
23 June 2009
FROM MY DAD…
2030 by Jeff HessI could never bring myself to forward all the email jokes, cartoons and other Internet comedy that land in my inbox. But then I started posting the ones my dad sends me. Judging from my comments and emails, my dad has become one of my greatest blogging assets. So for your evening blog chuckle I present: From My Dad.
I was in the Express Lane at the store, quietly fuming. Completely ignoring the sign, the woman ahead of me had slipped into the check-out line pushing a cart piled high with groceries. Imagine my delight when the cashier beckoned the woman to come forward, looked into the cart and asked sweetly, “So, which six items would you like to buy?”
23 June 2009
ROLDO RIGHTS…
1730 by Jeff HessI”m against any public money going into an aquarium for Jeff Jacobs who now must be a big-time multi-millionaire. Let him buy his own.
However, I would consider helping to fund a snake pit for Jacobs.
At least that would be so appropriate.
Jacobs said he”d put up $9 million and the city, state and county should pick up the other half. The other half, if I know anything about the Jacobs family, will be in the $20 to $30 million. His $9 million will be a lot less even if he does pay himself a finder”s fee. That”s the way these things work out. Believe me.
Of course, the location of this aquarium would be at Jacobs” Powerhouse in the Flats.
What”s so amusing about this story that greeted me on my return to Cleveland is that it is reported straight-facedly by the Plain Dealer, the paper of convenience for developers and their ilk.
It”s reported on the front page under a major headline starting with this paragraph:
“Downtown Cleveland could hook residents and tourists with a plan announced Wednesday to put a state-of-the-art aquarium in the Powerhouse in the Flats.”
Who sez? Jacobs? His PR firm?
Please, let”s have just a little bit of truth with our news.
The paragraph should have said that Jeff Jacobs “could hook Ohio, Cleveland and Cuyahoga County taxpayers” into subsidizing his desire for an aquarium to help his Powerhouse project, just as his dad, Dick, did for a new stadium.
Can”t we have a little reality in these Pee Dee drumbeating articles for greedy developers? Not a lot. Just a little. And maybe only once in a while. Or maybe just ONCE.
Get the snakes ready.
23 June 2009
23 June 2009
ON W.H. AUDEN…
0830 by Jeff HessFrom Daily Routines:
Perhaps the finest writer ever to use speed systematically, however, was W. H. Auden. He swallowed Benzedrine every morning for twenty years, from 1938 onward, balancing its effect with the barbiturate Seconal when he wanted to sleep. (He also kept a glass of vodka by the bed, to swig if he woke up during the night.) He took a pragmatic attitude toward amphetamines, regarding them as a “labor-saving device” in the “mental kitchen,” with the important proviso that “these mechanisms are very crude, liable to injure the cook, and constantly breaking down.”
23 June 2009
FROM MY CHAPBOOK…
0230 by Jeff HessFound in my electronic chapbook.
Arousal may be more important than valance in determining whether someone will pick up a pen and write. (T) p. 190
From The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer”s Block and the Creative Brain by Alice W. Flaherty.
23 June 2009
GONE THINKING…
0001 by Jeff Hess
I’ll be back on Monday, 13 July. Talk amongst yourselves.
22 June 2009
22 June 2009
22 June 2009
POSITIVE IS NEGATIVE…
1026 by Jeff Hess“From at least as far back as Norman Vincent Peale’s “The Power of Positive Thinking” (1952), the media have advocated saying favorable things to oneself,” the researchers wrote in a recent issue of the journal Psychological Science. “At this moment, thousands of people across North America are probably silently repeating positive statements to themselves.”
But in one of their studies involving 32 male and 36 female psychology students, the researchers found that repeating the phrase did not improve the mood of those who had low self-esteem, as measured by a standard test. They actually ended up feeling worse, and the gap between those with high and low self-esteem widened.
22 June 2009
WHAT THEY SAY…
1019 by Jeff HessIt is puzzling that such promising and prurient subject matter would lead to such flat books. This stylized form of sexuality seems to lend itself to cliché. In all of these memoirs, there is something false in the revelation and mechanical in the execution, that is-if we take the word of these bored and jaded ladies-something like stripping itself. Some of the writers, like Eaves, are smarter than others; some, like Cody, are more charismatic. But I think one could read memoirs about working in a diner that would be more various and diverse and interesting. (Think of Barbara Ehrenreich in Nickel and Dimed.)
