View from the Peppermill casino buffet.
Casinos frown on photographers but I snuck this shot for you.
Casinos frown on photographers but I snuck this shot for you.
Cycling by the Sierra
My street at twilight
"Imagine a parallel universe where the Great Crash of 2008 was followed by a Tea Party of a very different kind. Enraged citizens gather in every city, week after week—to demand the government finally regulate the behavior of corporations and the superrich, and force them to start paying taxes.
"I care not for a man's religion
whose cat and dog are not the better for it."
- Abraham Lincoln
"Though never explicitly political, The Elements of Style is unmistakably a product of its time. Its calls for “vigour” and “toughness” in language, its analogy of sentences to smoothly functioning machines, its distrust of vernacular and foreign language phrases all conform to that disciplined, buttoned-down and most self-assured stretch of the American century from the armistice through the height of the cold war. A time before race riots, feminism and the collapse of the gold standard. It is a book full of sound advice addressed to a class of all-male Ivy-Leaguers wearing neckties and with neatly parted hair." sourceDon't get me wrong. I believe we have all benefited by the good professor's dictates. I will be wary of adjectives to my dying day, although mostly because of their egregious misuse by bad poets, but I have an unabashed fondness for the well done run-on sentence. Perhaps this is because I am given to a perpetual adolescent rebellion. Nevertheless, I have no interest in novelty for its own sake. I just do not agree with Strunk's overarching rule: “Prefer the standard to the offbeat” although, as Haslett notes, Hemingway managed to successfully blend the two.
Omit needless words". Of course, I too am always on the lookout for flabby writing but I also agree with Haslett's conclusion that:How far into uncharted territory can any rule book or map take me? I realize it's tacky to quote oneself but a line from one of my own poems comes to mind... "The glass breaks and I am gone." I don't know about you but, for me, that's the point.
"This rule leads young writers to be cautious and dull; minimalist style becomes minimalist thought, and that is a problem."