In the ink well

Dog Ear

December 29, 2022

Best of 2022 (DOG EAR)

t’s time for my site tradition, a review of the best five books from 2022. Of course, these aren’t when they were published but that I read them this year. Now, to be truthful, there wasn’t a lot that I remember that knocked my hat off this year. However, let me take a quick peek into my records and list the top five. And they are (in order from the beginning of the year)… Steamboats Come True (Review) – A very interesting history of the development of the steam boat and its importance to the settling of America. With a […]
December 22, 2022

Perverse (DOG EAR)

s I’ve mentioned, I’ve written erotica in the past. Even got paid for it. But that isn’t what this piece is about. One of my other interests in Zen meditation. We’ve joined a small group that meets in a bookstore Sunday night. It’s a very small and tight group and the master is very knowledgeable. Whether it’s making a difference, I cannot say. After the temple formalities are done, we go through two chants. To my surprise, the master mentioned that we had a word change. The original chant read as follows: Far apart from every perverted view one dwells […]
December 15, 2022

Rejected (DOG EAR)

nteresting find today. I was going through my drafts and found one from a year or so old. It was a bit where, in high school, I made friends with a guy from the smoking lounge and thought that, by knowing me and playing military games with me, he’d maybe take a higher path in life. But then I went over to his house (shabby and run-down) and met his drunken, abusive father. The guy slapped the shit out of his son and then told me to get the f**k out. Which I did. I never hung out with the […]
December 8, 2022

You call yourself a writer? (DOG EAR)

f there is one thing that peeves me, it’s when I misspell something (as I just did for mispell) and someone tosses that comment my way; “I thought you were a writer.” It happened the other day. Was at a party and some of the younger goers wanted to play a tile-based game where you kinda play scrabble against each other in a dead-heat rush. So out of three games, I didn’t win at all (though on the second, I was a contender). But at the end of the third game, two of the more-successful players actually took my tiles […]
December 1, 2022

Book of Love (DOG EAR)

o instead of one of my dystopian movies, one recent Friday night I selected one I thought JB would like, Book of Love, an Amazon flick from 2022. Well, she liked it. I was amused by it, but the more I thought about it, the madder I got. So, the plot is this: Henry Copper is a very nebbish author who has spent five years on a novel that nobody likes. He wrote it from his own heart, his cold suffering lonely heart, reaching out to those like him. It is a book about chaste and unfulfilled love. The book […]
November 24, 2022

Milk Carton Moment on Carnival Row (DOG EAR)

poilers spoilers spoilers! Spoilers for Carnival Row. For those who don’t know it, Carnival Row is an interesting show on Prime. It tells the tale of a fantasy world where an “English” nation, and specifically a steam-punky “London”, is pressed with a wave of immigration, specifically fairies and satyrs and the like. In the story, it turns out (last call for spoilers!) Piety Breakspear – the wife of the liberal chancellor – has been practicing necromancy (grafting dead things together and bringing them to life of sorts). The hero – Philo Philostrate – gets chased into her lair (under the […]
November 17, 2022

Word In Edgewise (DOG EAR)

‘ve got three people in my life who really know how to talk. Sometimes I’ll call them for a quick word. A question. Or just to check on on them. Sometimes they call me (usually when I’m playing a game or watching something on TV, sigh). Regardless, once the get their verbal boilers up to pressure, they are full steam ahead, no stopping them. And no getting a word in edgewise. One guy, when he tells a story, fills in every unneeded detail. And in the middle of what he and I both know is tedious exposition, he’ll even say […]
November 10, 2022

Word of Mouth (DOG EAR)

aybe this is one of the reasons the world is so fucked up. Oral histories. And their demise. It used to be, well before the 1920s, that people would get their opinions and world views from two places; books and word of mouth. If they knew anything about, say, World War One, they’d either read it (such as All Quiet on the Western Front) or directly hear it (possibly from Uncle Frank, who’d served with the American Expeditionary Force). They would get their insights either from an author (backed by his editor and publisher) or an uncle. Stories and accounts […]
November 3, 2022

Too much Bleach (DOG EAR)

eah, my guilty little pleasure – anime. I love Japanese animation. For every ten series I start, one stays with me and I’ll watch it all the way through. So, there’s one called Bleach, a fairly famous and very successful franchise. It started in the mid-2000’s and ran twenty seasons of twenty episodes each.That’s about (give or take) about 400 episodes. That’s a lot of bleach. It hit me while I was fast-forwarding through the opening number (as I do). Hulu dutifully informed me that I still had something like 730 episodes unwatched. Since half are subbed and half dubbed […]
October 27, 2022

Zen (DOG EAR)

he wife and I are attending a Zen workshop held at Joybird Books, a small local bookstore. I used to read about Zen forty years ago and make efforts to meditate. I don’t know if it helped, but maybe it rounded out my bookish intelligence. Did Zen open up my worldview, or did my opening worldview include Zen? Can’t tell you. So after three classes, I’m struggling with meditation, trying to quiet my churning brain. It’s actually quite hard to sit still for twenty-five minutes and clear my thoughts. But on a walk today, I got to thinking (always am). […]