We all need to support #OWS
In early October, Suzanne and I had a run in with the police. It was a silly moment on Broadway on the east side of Zuccotti Park. The large police man needed to push us off the sidewalk if we weren’t taking pictures or waiting for a bus. I wasn’t blocking the traffic on the [...]
The current and the remembered
I have been asked lately if the events at OWS are making me remember more of what happened in the 1960s and 1970s in terms of protests. I have to say of course what the people are now able to elicit in many of my generation has to be a sense of a re-ified deja [...]
Seeing Double
As I wrote last week, the OWS movement has made me see the past with double vision. While working on Scags at 18, and watching what is happening in Zuccotti Park (and all over the globe, too), relevant pieces of memory begin to surface in new ways. I like that about our memories, by the [...]
What is old is new again
I resist every day the desire to join the growing numbers of people who are Occupying Wall Street–and for good reason. I mean, they have a good reason to occupy Wall Street. I don’t have the best of reasons not to be there. I know that I should be there. But I am at home [...]
At the Fair
This past Saturday (September 10, 2011), I had the good fortune to spend the day at the Richmond Hill Block Association 38th Annual Park Fair. Previously, I had only wandered through the Fair. I was the kind of wanderer seeing the same stuff every year–the Army is always there trying to recruit, local craftspeople show [...]
I finished reading Keith Gessen’s e-book, “How a Book is Born: The Making of The Art of Fielding” the other day. It’s an expanded version of his Vanity Fair article about his friend’s, Chad Harbach, first novel. Both men are editors at the literary magazine n+1. In the Kindle version of this expanded piece, readers [...]
Here is the new situation: Once an author finishes her novel, she begins dreaming of ways that people will find out about it and want to read it. There is a marketing plan in place and much of that is behind the scenes of what these potential readers will see. But the need to scream [...]
Tell us your story
Now is the time for SSP to begin adding more fun to our website and facebook pages. I know that we have lots of friends who have stories to tell that aren’t yet written fully but are in that early stage of thought. You know, when you have the idea, some scenes, a great opening [...]
To charge or not to charge for a reading
The world won’t end if bookstores choose to charge for readings. If you go to a cafe or to the other venues where readings are commonly held, there is either a charge of some kind whether for a drink or a donation. Having run a book series for three years, we always charged, as it [...]
So much gets written about the e-book these days that I had to weigh in again on some of the things that are important to me about what makes a good e-book. It seems just the other day I was blasting away at the pricing talk. (In fact I was,.) Now I want to blast [...]
