“There’s nothing to writing, that all you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
— Ernest Hemingway
For whatever reason, pain and sadness for a writer function in much the same way as Nitrous Oxide for the souped-up 1986 Toyota Supra.
It gives the scribbler added oomph, punch…
Yesterday, I went to my friend’s daughter’s birthday party –– who was unapologetically using the celebration as an excuse to get hammered on a Pontoon boat with a bunch of her adult friends.
Being that neither myself nor any of the adults in attendance were owners of a lake-faring vessel…
Elmore Leonard’s Swag is the literary equivalent to Grand Theft Auto.
It’s a page-turner you can’t help but burn through, fueled by sex, drugs, murder, armed robbery and automobile theft.
Towards the beginning of the novel, Frank Ryan (one of the robbers) reflects on his days as a car salesman.
…
In the introduction to Breakfast of Champions, Vonnegut tells the story of a mentor he had once upon a time, a copywriter named Pheobe Hurty, who hired him to write advertising for her department store.
I found this to be a fascinating introduction, primarily because the book itself feels like…
Wright Thompson, the marvelous sportswriter and author of Pappyland, warns of the dangers of advertising, specifically in the world of whiskey…
“More and more today, we don’t want to do the work or take the chances required for greatness, and we try to fix all those shortcuts on the back…
Bruce Springsteen has secured a longevity in his musical career that the vast majority of creatives never do.
(To date, he’s the only artist to have a Billboard Top 5 Album in six consecutive decades.)
Much like Hemingway’s writing, his songwriting and storytelling are terse in their word usage —…
In Nora Ephron’s hilarious yet heart-wrenching autobiographical piece of fiction, she writes of a world-renowned therapist she has frequented throughout much of her adult life.
Like so many of the characters in this novel, the reader is wildly aware of the fact that while Ephron presents her therapist as being…
Unless you’ve read the intro to Kurt Vonnegut’s “Breakfast of Champions”, there isn’t a snowball’s chance in a microwave that you have any idea who Phoebe Hurty is.
Hurty wrote copy for the William H. Block Company, a department store headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana that shuttered its doors in 1987.
…
I would never recommend anyone read Ernest Hemingway if they’re sad and are looking towards reading as an escape from their sadness.
Both Hemingway’s life and work were one long and beautiful tragedy and while I can’t speak to the former, the tragedy in the latter, the writing, is what…
Nora Ephron’s stunning novel, Heartburn is autobiographical.
But, it’s also fiction, which makes it a bit of a chore to separate what is true from what is not.
What I do know is that it’s loosely based on her tumultuous marriage to Carl Bernstein (the investigative journalist made famous by…
