robert.admin – Page 212 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

July 1, 2012

The Point of Honor (Review)

We’ve all been through high school. And we’ve all experienced the bully who will just not leave us alone, who makes our lives living hells for no reason we can discern. Nothing will stop them it seems. Not avoiding them, not standing up to them, nothing. Being in a Navy family had its advantages – I just had to endure until we moved away. And so Lieutenant Armand D’Hubert, a staff officer assigned to the 7th Hussars in Strasbourg finds his nemesis, a fellow Lieutenant, Gabriel Feraud. Feraud has just gutted a native in a duel only this morning, an […]

June 28, 2012

The Air that I breathe (Dog Ear)

We’d just come out of the movie Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, and a scene was stuck in my head, a beautiful image that’s a bit of a spoiler so I’m not going to tell it other than it was magnificently sound-tracked with the Hollies’ The Air That I breathe. In this, the music and imagery really worked to form a perfect meld, the moment where what the director wanted me to get, I got. Before the music industry became the hip-hop ring-tone thing it is today, individuals could still produce music that touched our souls, […]

June 24, 2012

Troy (Review)

I like the story of Troy. I liked the Iliad. I liked the recent movie (everything but the last 10 minutes – can’t Hollywood keep a you-go-girl moment out of a movie where it doesn’t belong?). I like Agamemnon’s political manipulations. I like Menelaus and Paris squaring off, with the latter’s failings. I like the sulking Achilles. I enjoy his opt-out strike, where the Greek king is nearly chopped off at the knees when his hubris gets the better of him. It’s a story with so many things to like. And Richard’s Matturro does a fine job with his Troy, […]

June 21, 2012

Rejection (DOG EAR)

This was how my story started… The shotgun trembled in Hector’s grip, his crucifix tinkling across its twin barrels. He was frightened – dry-mouthed, ass-puckered frightened – more frightened than when Mr. Sethman had come to their town meeting with his damned proposition. But this current fear wasn’t diluted by misgivings and second-thoughts. This fear was final. And this was how the rejection started… Choosing which stories to accept has been a difficult decision, and we regret that we won’t be taking it for the collection. It was a very creative semi-western, semi-gothic, all-wonderfully-bonkers-and-evocative piece, and we hope that it […]

June 17, 2012

Casca, the Outlaw (Review)

Let me just say that this review has all sorts of tangles to it. I’ve reviewed the Casca series in total recently (HERE). I really liked them, not for their literary sake, but just for the blunt idea of the thing (an eternal mercenary that fights in every battle across history). I’d read up to #22 where I’d finally stopped, but mentioned they were up to #37. So at Oasis 25 (a scifi convention I attended as a dealer), my booth was right next to Michael Goodwin’s, who’s written two of these himself. It was one of those bookish-small-world moments, […]

June 14, 2012

The man with the can (DOG EAR)

“If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.” -Anton Chekhov I don’t know who this old black man is. Usually I see him on days I bike in, over on the other side of Lake Destiny Road, going south to my north. He’s always riding a ratty little bike, so non-descript I can’t really remember what it is – maybe one of those banana-bikes popular twenty years ago, […]

June 14, 2012

Penny-farthing

Was in a melancholy mood on my way to the dentist this morning. It was supposed to be riding day but this side trip ended that. Saw a cyclist commuter a mile or so out and heaved a sigh. Even with the heat and effort and danger, I wished it was me. Then I saw her. On the Lakemont bike lane, she was riding one of those old fashioned bikes (penny-farthings are one name for them). But this wasn’t an old one – it looked remilled, built along those lines. She was sitting about four-five feet up, just spinning that […]

June 12, 2012

DOH! Apologies to my registrants!

A couple of months ago, I changed the setting for registration, allowing people to pretty much autoregister themselves. It was not a big thing. Been seeing people join the site since then. Didn’t really pay it any attention. After all, they were registered now, right? Wrong. Last night while moving columns about, I happened to duck into the user lists and saw about 30 people who’d registered and not been “approved”. I’m not sure if that meant you couldn’t post or get it easy or whatever. I didn’t know I’d dorked it up. But that’s what you get from a […]

June 11, 2012

A new arangement!

I‘ve been thinking about this for a while. The Book and Writing blogs are what this site is about – it’s what I think a lot of the writers I’ve met and corresponded with are most interested in. Well, before I formalized the postings about writing, it used to show up in the general blog. Once I formalized it, I marked it “Dog Ear” and moved it in with the book reviews. There are people interested in reading. There are people interested in writing. But not all readers are writers and vice-versa. After some consideration, I’ve decided to break the […]

June 10, 2012

The World Set Free (Review)

According the Wells, all it will take for world socialism and sunlit-fields-upon-high utopia are radioactive volcanoes. The World Set Free was written in 1913 (under the looming war). In its format, it’s very similar to In the Days of the Comet, another Wells’ book. We have a “Dickens” view of the world, bleak and unfair and evil (I agree with him on this). The middle act is the disaster, the events so amazing that it would take Hollywood in all its CGI to do them justice. And after that, the level world reexamines itself, sorts itself out, corrects itself (and […]