Periodically.org

Mr. Steven's is the main protagonist and narrator of the most excellent book, "Remains of the Day". It might help you to think of Anthony Hopkins at his most restrained and polite while you read this. It has come to my attention that while it was, indeed, lovely to spend time in Coventry last year, it being the home of Eliot and being a wonderful metropolis still possessed of small-village England that, I think you'll agree, is essential in this age, it might perhaps be time to reconsider how I might spend my next sabbatical. There's something to be said about the roar of the engine, don't you agree? Twenty First Century barrelling down upon the gentlemen of England, and indeed, the gentleman's gentleman. One should be steadfast in ones ways, to be sure, but there's something to be said for foresight, and the courage to embrace approaching trends, no matter how low they might seem at first. We can't all keep our desires lashed against the very ide...

The work newsletter I've been writing for had their editorial board meeting a few weeks ago. I volunteered to attend; the horrors of meetings long since worn with time and ignorance. Maybe it was morbid curiousity, maybe it was the unreasonable belief that I'd some how come out of my shell and start contributing and brainstorming and gesturing manically towards trenchant Power Point slides. Maybe the solitude of staring at a computer screen for weeks on end had gotten to me. Maybe I was hoping that I'd enter in a smoke-filled room thick with the heady brew of cross-talking think-tanking and creative outbursts the likes of which haven't been seen since Hollywood did their impression of a New York newsroom. Ah, I know why I really went. It was to meet people who had almost certainly actually read my articles. I mean, they'd have to, in the course of doing layout of editing or whatever it is that editorial boards do. And sure, maybe it'd only be in passing, or by ...

So I've been added to a Facebook spam list by one of my former classmates from that YA fiction class. It's related spam, anyways, Creative Things Going On Aboot Town That Are In Someway Related To Him. At least, that's how I read it. And maybe it's not a spam list, but when you send an invitation out to 121 'close' friends it's hard to feel like the invite was really personalized, you know? Anyways, I was invited to a fund raiser for a literary magazine I'd never heard of. Not that I know of many literary mags. And I'm pretty sure the mark of a good lit mag is that no one has heard of it. Street cred, as I understand. There was a nagging part of me that told me I should probably attend. Images of hanging out like Hemingway with all his writerly friends, discussing... well, whatever writers discuss, Post-Modernism, Derrida, liver cirrhosis. I had in my verdant imagination an idea of a culturally rich group of peers all riffing off each other. Discussi...