Category Archives: Uncategorized

Less is More Advice

Being an accomplished white middle aged man in my sixties, it’s my burden to give advice to others especially when they don’t ask for it. They’re the ones who need my advice the most.

I was walking to work after stopping at Breadcraft for my tasty morning pastry and large iced coffee. Ordinarily I don’t see color. Like, seriously, this was the first time I ever saw a brown man on Church Street. He was walking towards me hugging a cardboard box to his chest, as if it held all his worldly possessions. His clothes were wrinkled and dirty and his hair was tussled, but not in a fashionable way like mine.

I always treat people with the respect they deserve so I told him, “Hey, you there, these possessions are weighing you down. You need to jettison them. Be fleet of foot and light of heart. Don’t chain yourself to meaningless things. They just slow you down. Oh, yeah, and get a job, okay?”

When I got to my office of many windows, where I can look down on the street people, I wondered. Do I follow my own advice? Am I weighed down by useless possessions? Of course not, I laughed. I don’t need that mountain house. I haven’t been there in 18 months. I’m perfectly happy with just my high-rise condo and my beach house. I could jettison that mountain home tomorrow. As for my Mercedes, I could get rid of that, no problem. I’d just drive my Range Rover or Lexus. And three girlfriends? I don’t need three. Becca’s a pain in the ass. I could jettison her tomorrow. In fact, let’s get started on that right now.

Knowgood Carp, Owner of all the Hotels on Block Island and Some in Connecticut.

An Aggravating Amount of Paperwork

The promotional materials for any novel in Mick Herron’s Slough House series must include one reference to Herron being the John LeCarre of current spy novelists. Peruse the press for Slough House, Herron’s seventh installment in that popular series, and you’ll easily find it. No, not on that page. Go back a few pages . . . stop . . . no, one more . . . there it is.

The lazy and frivolous compliment is an insult to both. LeCarre was a savant who elevated the spy novel to art. Herron is a master entertainer with a sharp eye for absurdity and an acerbic tongue. They’re only the same in terms of their intentionality. Herron is intentionally funny. LeCarre is intentionally not.

LeCarre is the master of ceremonies in the spy fiction genre, and there is justice in that. Genius will always be welcome at any literary feast. But what about the talented and amusing entertainer? Shouldn’t that writer get a prominent seat and full plate as well?

Herron’s Slough House certainly qualifies as entertaining. Even better, in terms of storytelling, it’s one of the stronger installments in the series. It’s fast and fun to read. If you’re unfamiliar with the novels, Slough House is where Britain’s MI5 puts its Slow Horses – those incompetent, unlucky, or annoying spies that the service doesn’t want to deal with anymore. Slough House is where they work under the insufferable Jackson Lamb, a hilarious HR nightmare. The hope is these agents will become so bored they decide to quit, because firing people involves an aggravating amount of paperwork.

This installment opens with MI5 celebrating another “bold new enterprise.” That’s usually bad news for the Slow Horses. And, sure enough, Slough House has been erased from MI5’s database. The Slow Horses are still getting paid but otherwise it’s like they never existed. As with everything they do, the Slow Horses can’t decide whether they care about it or not.

This is probably unrelated, but a certain Russian dictator has sanctioned a hit on a double-agent Russia swapped with Britain. MI5’s “bold new enterprise” is a revenge killing. Putin now wants tat for that tit, and someone has informed him that the Slow Horses are skilled assassins. Now two of them are dead. Others are being tracked, as if they might be next. Slow Horses are experts at nothing, but “once the label’s been applied, the facts cease to matter.” So it’s the Slow Horses up against Russian-trained assassins in cynical London where no one can be trusted, especially the people who are supposedly on your side. I wonder who will win. The reader, of course.

Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor

The Poetaster

Why does Homer’s Muse disdain me?
Why won’t nymphs touch my flute?
When heroes sail the wine-dark sea
why do I stay home and salute?
When will I know love from lust?
Why do both turn my brain to peat?
Why are lies the only words I trust?
Why is mud the only pie I eat?
My muse is a mouse in a cage
who refuses to obey my command
and when I touch the cold, chaste page
it slaps the dry pen from my hand.
Wicked muse, eat your stale cheese
but breath your stench on another fake,
allow my feeble tongue to unfreeze
for I’ve forms to fill and calls to make
and I’m near the end of my coffee break.

Luvgood Carp, Editor-in-Chief

This Isn’t Twain’s Jim

What is it that guitar-shredding word slinger, Everlast, says about perspective and storytelling?

I stroked the phattest dimes at least a couple of times 
before I broke their hearts.
You know where it ends, yo,
it usually depends on where you start.

That's it.  Thank you, Mr. Everlast, there's no fiction in your diction.

So if I’ve correctly interpreted Everlast’s hip-hop tribute to Finnegan’s Wake, his observation is irrefutable. It’s not disputable. Perspective is mutable, and everything depends on how fortunate the storyteller is in life’s lottery.

Take, for example, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It’s narrated by Huck Finn, a brilliant storyteller. But would his “adventures” look different if they were told by someone else? Someone with a different upbringing. Would they even be Huck’s adventures? Take Jim, the enslaved man who runs away from Miss Watson. He and Huck spend a lot of time together floating down that grand Mississippi. I wonder if Jim saw that journey as an adventure.

Well, I need wonder no more because Percival Everett has written James, and from the beginning it’s clear Jim sees things differently. First, Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer aren’t Twain’s mischievous scamps. To Jim, they’re “little bastards”. Second, that muddy Mississippi isn’t Huck’s freedom trail. It’s a “vast highway to a scary nowhere”.

Everett is wise. He has no intention of re-telling Twain’s classic, because that would be foolish and impossible. Instead, Everett aims to bring more nuance and depth to Jim, and he succeeds. Like Huck, Jim is a skilled and engaging narrator who’s easily up to the task of telling his story. Many of Twain’s characters show up as well, but they’re depicted as Jim sees them. Most are still recognizable. Huck’s street smarts and moral clarity are still evident. The Dauphin and Duke are still scoundrels, but Jim’s assessment of Judge Thatcher may surprise those familiar with Huck’s opinion of the man.

Strange diction and dialect aren’t just points of pride for Everlast and Mark Twain. They’re the difference between life and death for Jim and his enslaved community. As Jim teaches the children, “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them . . . The only ones who suffer when they are made to feel inferior is us.” It’s harsh but undeniable. In the United States from colonial times until the day after tomorrow, the better white people feel, the safer black people are.

Jim runs away when he learns Miss Watson intends to sell him. This and several other events are consistent with Mark Twain’s story; however, Everett does eventually abandon the Hucklebery Finn plot and crafts a different narrative entirely. Jim spends his time on the river learning to “befriend” his anger. “I hated the world that wouldn’t let me apply justice without the certain retaliation of injustice.” This isn’t Twain’s Jim. This Jim learns how to feel anger. More importantly, he teaches himself how to use it. He becomes James, a name he gives himself. When he returns home to free his family, he’s ready for whatever may come.

The Mississippi meanders, but this story doesn’t. It’s not a raft adrift on a current. It’s a cigarette boat on a drug run. The ending, with its sudden explosion of violence, resembles Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained more than anything Mark Twain wrote. But it works because this is a story told from the perspective of an enslaved black man just as the American Civil War is getting started. Jim’s dialect is gone now and so is Jim. James has mastered his anger and forged a new voice. And it thunders. “I am the angel of death, come to offer sweet justice in the night . . . I am a sign. Your future. I am James.”

Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor

Each Spring Beckons Me Out the Door

A fuzzy pink sweater adorns the cherry tree
and all the ladies, half my age, are smiling at me.

Or so it seems –
maybe they’re just smiling near me.
It’s hard to see with such watery eyes,
as if I’m looking through melting ice.

Each spring beckons me out the door,
but I’m moving slower than the year before
and can’t keep up as the ladies walk past.
When did these women get so fast?

Luvgood Carp, Editor-in-Chief

The Play’s the Thing

There is much to like about Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, assuming you can ignore the title, which is taken from Macbeth. Oh, yes, you’ll also need to ignore all the other references to Macbeth in the novel. But if you’re able to do that (and good luck), you’ll find the novel is an engaging look at video games and the impact they’ve had culturally over the last forty years.

The story relates the decades-long love affair between Sam and Sadie. Refreshingly, the affair isn’t sexual. Their love is built upon a deep friendship and a fruitful creative partnership. They meet in a hospital when Sam is twelve and Sadie is eleven. Sam’s foot has been destroyed in a horrific car crash. He needs multiple surgeries and essentially lives in the hospital for months. Even after the surgeries, he’s crippled – and not just in the physical sense. Sadie’s sister has cancer, so Sadie is a daily visitor to the hospital for much of the time Sam is there. They bond over video games.

The importance of play in life is undeniable. But Zevin’s observations on video games and play have heft, because Sam is the perfect avatar. “Sometimes, I would be in so much pain. The only thing that kept me from wanting to die was the fact that I could leave my body and be in a body that worked perfectly for a while – better than perfectly, actually – with a set of problems that were not my own.” That’s powerful. However, at other times, Zevin’s celebration of play and video games is silly. “To allow yourself to play with another person is no small risk. It means allowing yourself to be open, to be exposed, to be hurt.” Even if that’s true, it doesn’t mean play and video games are unique. The same thing could be said about gardening, being pen pals, going on long drives, or doing anything with someone you have an intense connection with. The activity isn’t relevant, the connection is. And Sam and Sadie have an intense connection that can be tempestuous.

The novel follows their relationship into adulthood where they form an artistic collaboration (because, as Zevin convincingly argues, video games can be art) that becomes a successful business. They have strong personalities and opinions, which give birth to petty jealousies and major clashes of vision. Still, their friendship survives and evolves.

Zevin succeeds with these themes, but she isn’t satisfied. Intimacy built around art, creativity, collaboration, and friendship are all well and good, but Zevin wants you to know her novel is art, too. And it’s important. She conveys this through frequent references to Emily Dickinson and William Shakespeare. Her obsession, however, with Macbeth is strange within the context of this novel. Macbeth is a different kind of play, and it doesn’t seem well-suited for Zevin’s story.

In Macbeth there is no redemption or rebirth. Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow is how Shakespeare begins one of his great soliloquies. The one that ends with life is a “brief candle . . . a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Death is final in Macbeth, as it is in everything. Except video games. Zevin alludes to this herself and does so unironically. “What is a game? . . . It’s tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. It’s the possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption. The idea that if you keep playing, you could win. No loss is permanent, because nothing is permanent, ever.” Fair enough, I guess. That is, after all, a great description of a video game but it’s a lousy one of Macbeth.

So what are we to make of Zevin’s constant allusions to Macbeth? Is life, friendship, art, and play nothing more than sound and fury signifying nothing? Her novel suggests the opposite, that there is solace and meaning in intimacy, creative collaboration, and even video games. So why bring nihilistic Macbeth into all this? It’s a puzzling distraction in an otherwise compelling and enjoyable story.

Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor

Neptune Returns Home

Lord, could it be I'm not as great
as they've been telling me?
I was told at an early age
that I'm better than the rest.
I have trophies that prove it true,
but now in every contest
I'm beaten by more than a few.
For years I splashed in a tub
pretending to rule the wine-dark sea,
but when I go to Dad's club
no one confuses Neptune with me.
Now here I am back in my old room
(having finished my education)
with an hourly job and minimal pay
and these trophies say participation.
Lord, club-footed Byron couldn't dance
but you gave him eloquence and artistry,
and now he's the avatar of romance.
So, Lord, what gifts do you have for me?

Luvgood Carp, Editor-in-Chief

Not Just Another Nepo Baby

Reading Kurt Vonnegut’s God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater reminded me of something profound I just made up. Only the delusional or masochistic read Vonnegut hoping to find an intricate plot or a deep analysis of a character’s psyche. If anyone reads Vonnegut these days, they do so for his moral clarity and barbed humor. To that I say sign me up, as long as I can still be masochistic in all the other aspects of my life. What’s that you say, Dear Reader? Ouch, that hurt! Say it again, daddy.

The protagonist and hero in this story is Eliot Rosewater, a trust fund baby who is a “drunkard, a Utopian dreamer, a tinhorn saint, and aimless fool.” He also owns and manages his family’s charity, which is worth millions. He tires of his privileged life in Manhattan and moves back to Rosewater, Indiana, a neglected rust belt community that’s also his ancestral home. He wants to become an artist. “I’m going to love these discarded Americans, even though they’re useless and unattractive. That is going to be my work of art.” Most artists have a God complex, but Eliot is a modern-day Christ figure, and just like Jesus he has a difficult and domineering father.

That father is a U.S. senator, who has “spent [his] life demanding that people blame themselves for their misfortunes.” He disapproves of Eliot and would desperately like a grandchild he could approve of. One that would take over the charity and be less charitable. There’s another person who’d like to do the same. He’s a lawyer and he believes he’s found a way to replace Eliot as the charity’s manager. He just has to prove Eliot is insane, and Eliot is doing a wonderful job of unintentionally helping the lawyer prove his case. So who will control the charity? The welfare of Rosewater’s destitute citizens depends on the answer.

In God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater Vonnegut skewers the purported legitimacy of inherited wealth. “I think it’s terrible the way people don’t share things in this country. I think it’s a heartless government that will let one baby be born owning a big piece of the country . . . and let another baby be born without owning anything.” Published in 1970, the story is as relevant now as ever. The novel is the perfect introduction to, or reminder of, Vonnegut’s simple grace, moral outrage, wicked humor, and deep intellect.

But let’s say you only read novels with intricate plots and complex psychological analyses, then read this instead. It’s the best summation of Vonnegut’s works, and it happens to have been written by that grand curmudgeon himself: “Pretend to be good always, and even God will be fooled.”

Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor

Nothing to See Here, Folks

A couple of days ago, I went to CNN to catch up on vital national and international news, and I came across an article informing me that Sheryl Crow sells her Tesla and donates proceeds to NPR (published 10:05 AM EST, Mon February 17, 2025). I was thrilled to see this because I’d been led to believe that some truly awful things were happening to people around the world. Calm down, I told myself. If CNN decides to spend its valuable and finite resources on reporting a celebrity’s publicity stunt, all must be well in the world.

Because it was bait, and I love fish, I clicked on it and learned that Ms. Crow, a rich celebrity, had decided to sell a luxury car she clearly didn’t need to protest the actions of Elon Musk, an even-richer person, who appears to believe he’s president of the United States. Now let me be clear, I have no problem with people peacefully protesting any president, even a pretend one who serves as a distraction for what the real one is doing. I love a stunt as much as anyone.

I was just concerned that real people were being harmed by real decisions being made by a real president. I’m relieved to see that’s not the case and that celebrities can still keep the focus on themselves.

Raven Breathless, Celebrity Stunts Editor