Crossposed at Politicook.net

This is a request for the wisdom of this community to serve as a guide for me.  There is a ninth grade physical science text in my mind.

My question is simply this:  should I invest my energy to do so?1

Writing With One Hand Tied Behind My Back
By David Glenn Cox

For the better part of two decades I have played guitar, writing and singing songs, chasing a dream that always eluded me. After much hard work I managed to raise myself up from nothing to a state of extreme poverty, until I was forced to get a real job.

The 26th annual Bulwer-Lytton contest winner was announced this week.  Just what type of contest is it?

The Bulwer-Lytton, in fact, rewards the most wretched, the most inept, the most fantastically awful abuses of English writing. The kind of language that should be taken out and shot. Each year applicants submit putrefying one-sentence openings to bogus novels...

As the New York Times reminds us, "[t]he contest is named after 19th-century author Edward Bulwer-Lytton, writer of the much-parodied opening 'It was a dark and stormy night.'"

And now, without furher ado, the winning opening line:

"Theirs was a New York love, a checkered taxi ride burning rubber, and like the city their passion was open 24/7, steam rising from their bodies like slick streets exhaling warm, moist, white breath through manhole covers stamped 'Forged by DeLaney Bros., Piscataway, N.J.' "

Are you up to flexing your creative muscles?  If you were to write a book about George W. Bush, his presidency, Republicans, or, really, any political topic, what would your fantastically awful opening line be?

Update:  For more opening line goodness, check out The Termite's diary here.

Or maybe you don't.  My own knowledge of George Orwell was limited to his most popular novels (Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four) until graduate school, when I also delved into some of his essays.  Any would-be writer, and almost anyone interested in political rhetoric, should be familiar with "Politics and the English Language".  His piece on "Why I Write" had a powerful impact on me, and I still find that this passage at the end resonates strongly:

That the advice often given in writing workshop: Write what you are afraid of. It is good advice because it allows you to get past your own fears and figure out what your truth is. It's hard to do, too. Follow me below the fold for a reflection on how to discuss what scares us collectively.

OK, this has almost nothing* to do with politics, certainly nothing to do with the current election cycle.  But I wanted to share a bit of news that I think is kinda cool - yesterday we crossed the threshold of 10 thousand downloads of my near-term Science Fiction novel Communion of Dreams.

    The first and latest Associated Press story is entitled, "Obama says kids won't be doing any more interviews." It contained the following passage -- please read it carefully:

In the "Access Hollywood" interview, Malia said she sometimes finds her father embarrassing, such as when he shook a friend's hand instead of waving to her or saying hi. Asked what makes their parents angry, Sasha said whining and Malia cited arguing with each other.

Link.

    Although only up for a little over an hour before I sampled it, there was already a correction, noting that they had gotten "Access Hollywood's" status wrong earlier in the piece. This article was not attributed to a specific AP reporter.    

I love wordplay.  When I am skimming articles and my eyes fall upon a pair of words that combine to create that sense of poetry that enlarges, I bless this distinctly human condition all over again.

This morning I found Joe Klein turning the phrase "Impotent Ferocity" to describe The Campaign That Is Almost Over.

So, I surfed around and made a list of twelve phrases from the recent news that are both tangy and zesty - simultaneously poetic and informative.

And, if you meet me after the break, I made a trading card for my favorite potential Vice President!

I began my blog about four months ago, because I love politics and I think it's a great way to keep one's ideas focused.  Today, I am proud to say I completed my 300th post and reached more than 5,000 hits in the last four months.  So, for those few of you who have stopped by The Left Anchor to see what Big Blue has to say, I sincerely thank you.  I know it's not much, but it's nice to know that each of us -- through this wonderful medium of the interent, the most democratic form of communication in history -- can reach out to one another from great distances and bridge the divides of race, age, or class.  Many thanks to those of you who have been generous enough to follow along with me on this experiment.

But I'm not going to devote an entire blog post to something that likely matters only to me, so here's the real thrust of my argument today:

As I said in an earlier post, I feel it is really time for me as a writer and poet to do something concrete and meaningful to put my efforts into helping end this war.

(cross posted at Fernham); UPDATED TO NOTE: first mentioned in Paul Werner's diary

An old friend who writes in a rather urgent, heated style, emailed me last week with news and a request for action. I skimmed the email, saw that she and her family seemed to be in good health, and moved on.

My hesitation comes partly out of the exigencies of my own life but also the dilemma her email posed: the European Reading Room at the Library of Congress is slated to close to make way for an Abraham Lincoln Exhibit. Would I speak out about this outrage?

Well, I wasn’t sure it was an outrage.

Besides, it’s not just any exhibit. It’s a Lincoln exhibit.

How often do you get to praise the Wall Street Journal?

Check out my story today at Every Day Fiction: http://www.everydayfiction.com/...
The publisher, Jordan Lapp took a chance on a boxing story, remembering that many of the great writers, pulp and otherwise, wrote 'em. Now, as I am best known as a fantasy writer, this was a double chance on his part. Comment is greatly appreciated!

I just read this on the Drudge report so you know it might not be true. It might not have even been on the Drudge Report. It might have been at the Onion. Or perhaps it was a dream. So I chose not to use anyone's name, because, well, that might be construed as, well, you know, a "misstatement."  And I know it's against the rules to call out a diarist in the title. So I put a ? at the end of it, though I hated to. But what the heck has alegre been doing to fill up her/his/its day, anyway?
UPDATE:RubyGal answers my question:life is imitating my snark. O  M  G  !

I was going through the stacks at the local library and came across a book by Primo Levi that I hadn't read yet.  Primo Levi is a fine, precise writer and I've enjoyed and learned from every book of his I've read.  This book consists of newspaper essays, stories, and reviews that he wrote over the last few decades of his life.  He was an industrial chemist and used words as carefully as he analyzed the components of stains, paints, and coatings.

The Mirror Maker:  Stories and Essays by Primo Levi
NY:  Schocken Books, 1989
ISBN 0-8052-4076-4

(85)  But they were all identical [the German guards], those faces, those voices, those attitudes:  all of them distorted by the same hate and the same anger, and by the lust of omnipotence.

See what I mean?  "The lust of omnipotence" is a clear description of the unthinkable and an extremely useful description of the authoritarian mindset.

Writers are often asked why they write, and whether writing matters. Such simple questions belie difficult answers, ones so deeply hidden that for as long as pens have known paper early graves have been dug for writers who’ve suffered their bodies to ill health searching desperately to find them.

We should be especially curious in this the Age of Image why writers nonetheless go on writing, why they spend themselves conceiving ideas, nourishing them and helping them grow, and laboring to deliver them as words few others will see when put to paper or screen.

Words, even the most beautifully arranged words, words that can liberate, possess, bewilder and intoxicate, are struggling in our time to compete against the ubiquity of new media. Thoughtful writing has been reduced to drops of ink in an ocean of mindless information and imagery, an ocean every day wider and shallower. And for that we all suffer.

Dear diary,  I'm wondering what has happened to you my diary.  

Last year I ventured inside the walls of kingdom kos and like any newbie I jumped back out and said whoa.  My diary you didn't grab me, in fact you scared me.

Kos is a scary place for those unfamiliar with the system.  Myself, I come from the forums of Democraticunderground.  Forums I understand with the indexing and classification systems.  Want to read about Israel then drop into the Israel/Palestine forum and browse the posts from the last 48 or 72 hours.  I also have my own Wordpress Blog at Partizane.com which with syndication has really just become a cross post of my Kos writings along with other's I respect.

As many of you know(or used to before the Publishing for Kossacks series went on hiatus), I'm a writer and editor, but I'm also a regular program participant and sometime organizer at Lunacon, the New York regional science fiction convention, run by a nonprofit group called the Lunarians. The convention features about 600 hours of literary, media, science, art, gaming, music, and other programming over this coming weekend (March 14-16). It also has a world class art show, 24-hour gaming and anime rooms, and a hopping bar where you can meet about 200 writers, artists, and editors who you didn't catch up with during the day.

And because there's so much overlap between genre fans, genre professionals, and Kossacks, for the second straight year there will be a DKos meet and greet on the actual program schedule.

I was going to title this diary, "Outrageous Lies and Desperate Bids for Attention," but this piece deserves to get lots of attention, so I won't change the title.

I have refrained from posting a Diary Against Candidate Dairies.  They're annoying, but harmless, in my opinion. But I have been seeing an annoying trend in diary titles that I do feel is harmful and it is starting to affect the Recommended List.  I'm talking about absolute lies in headlines used as a cheap bid for attention to otherwise unremarkable diaries.  

Once you learned that Barak Obama was not disqualified in VA and MD, did this diary's title piss you off?  Well then Rec this UP!  Rec Me! Rec Me!  Show your protest against these tactics by recommending this diary to the top!  

Well, I know that request seems kinda counter-productive on the surface, but if you know what I mean, then you understand.  More below the dots.