By Bob Hicks
Someone called Singlet, responding online to the obituary in The Guardian for the novelist and children’s writer Russell Hoban, had this to say: “A few comments that Hoban’s other novels don’t come close to Riddley Walker make me think of what Joseph Heller reportedly said when asked, ‘Why have you never written anything [...]
By Laura Grimes (with help from the Large Smelly Boys)
Shhhh! Be vewy vewy qwiet! Sneak attack in progress.
It’s a big day in the Scatter household, when patriarch Mr. Scatter is feted (not fetid). So the Large Smelly Boys and I are hijacking the blog for a surprise post. The fun part [...]
By Laura Grimes
Today the blog takes a moment of silence. Richard Vincent Grimes passed away 20 years ago today, but that’s not really the day I’m honoring. I’m remembering instead a quiet moment I shared with my dad nine months after he died.
By Bob Hicks
Must everything we see and do be an “event”?
Mr. Scatter noticed this pernicious form of marketing and advertising breathlessness beginning as a trickle a couple of years ago, and it’s become an all-taps-open flood. The most ubiquitous torrent is the “major motion picture event” — which means “movie that cost a lot to [...]
By Bob Hicks
Two years ago, in this post, we passed along a few quotations from Martin Luther King Jr., whose spirit and birthday we celebrate today. In light of a frayed public discourse that verges on the ridiculous and the obscene, it seems an appropriate time to highlight King’s committed nonviolent approach to doing the [...]
By Laura Grimes
Wordstock is all about community. It’s about taking the very private act of reading and celebrating it with a giant public festival that attracts thousands of people. It’s a shared experience of language. It’s stories that connect people.
Over two packed weekend days at the Oregon Convention Center, it was a treat to hear [...]
Mr. Scatter has been seeing much too much of this nonsense of late.
To all perpetrators:
DONT DO IT.
Thank you.
That is all.
(Mr. Scatter would say more, but his copy editor has removed his colon. Fortunately, his spleen remains.)
By Bob Hicks
Actors have a parlor trick they like to pull out to amaze and amuse their non-thespian friends. I’m not sure if it has an accepted given name, but I sometimes call it the “laugh-cry game.” It’s simple, really: They cover their faces, start making an odd guttural sound, and challenge you to tell [...]
By Laura Grimes
Today is the last day of National Poetry Month. Tomorrow is the one-year anniversary of my last day at a large daily news organization. So it seems only fitting to reimagine a new, inspiring era of journalism … that incorporates poetry.
*****
For more than half my life I was a journalist. At least that’s [...]
“We did not believe in God,” Lawrence Howard recollects. “We believed in chicken soup and matzoh balls.”
As Mrs. Scatter has recently intimated, Mr. Scatter has embarked on a quest deep into the wilds of the exotic North American continent, hunting the elusive Snark. Today the Snark sleeps, and it is only sporting for Mr. [...]