Every art form has rules. Some forms, like the Elizabethan sonnet, specify the number and emphasis of beats in a line and lines in a verse. Other forms operate under dicta that (to borrow from the Pirates of the Caribbean script) function more like guidelines. I’m not sure how formalized the rules are in Revenge Stories but I can tell you one thing about Andrew Hilbert’s Death Thing. It has the elemen...
It’s no secret that I’m addicted to reading. I started staring at printed pages before I learned to walk and I was pulling the meaning from them before I could tie my shoes so reading was never hard. Want to hear a secret? Reading the Classics, those old, required plays and poems was hard for me, at first. My eyes, trained for the fast-paced, economic sentences of the twentieth century, stopped dead a...
We like to scare ourselves with autumn stories. Whether the celebration is Halloween, Guy Fawkes Day, or Dia de Los Muertos, this is the season when we remember that life is chancy and death is real. Because these truths are frightening, most of us arrange our lives to minimize danger and invent spooky stories for fun. It took Sebastian Junger to remind us that some folks still earn a living doing hazardous work and w...
It’s Banned Books Week again, that week cherished by bibliophiles and lovers of intellectual freedom, a time when the stupidity and bigotry of would-be censors is exposed to the light of day. Granted, a small part enjoying of BBW comes from a feeling of coalition; it’s nice to meet others who prize big ideas over small minds but the core of the celebration are the books themselves. Banned Books are some of the best sto...
Our culture celebrates accomplished people, especially accomplished creative artists. This means many celebrities have more of a “fish-bowl” kind of existence than a personal life and they often require a small army of helpers to meet all of their personal and professional obligations. These Assistants can start out as an artist’s devoted fans or followers but their work and the trust of their employer give...