Timothy Miller's Blog, page 2

Whole Lotta Love

I remember particularly the first time I heard Led Zeppelin's Whole Lotta Love.It must have been 8th grade--1970. I was with my best friend and his older brother, and his brother's friend, the cool kid who had taught us how to tie-dye tee shirts. (We would later learn how to stress jeans by tying bricks to them and dragging them behind a car;  since none of us had a car at the time, that was more of an aspirational thing.) 
This post is available as audio here on Substack.
The older brother's twi...

Lawsuits in Munchkinland

Harburg KS-A new class-action suit filed on behalf of the residents of a small Midwestern town devastated by a killer tornado two years ago raises new questions of influence and accountability for mass media. The suit, filed by citizens of Harburg, Kansas pits the town against MGM Studios, makers of the 1939 classic The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
(The audio version of this post is available here on Youtube.)

In Harm's Way
The plaintiffs claim that MGM "did lull residents into a false sense of security...

In defense of adverbs

  (This post is available in audio format here on Youtube.)
I'm not much on wrangling over writerly advice. It often seems a pointless exercise. So why get down into the trenches over adverbs here? First because the eight parts of speech are my favorite parts of speech. Second, because I'd like to make a larger point about the word "never" when it comes to doling out advice. A common sense argument, if you will, from someone who has never considered common sense a common attribute among people.



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Review: Falls to Pieces

(This post is available in audio format here on Youtube.)

When we think of Hawaii we're apt to picture a lush landscape of surfer-size waves, with green palms shading flower-bedecked hula dancers. That's not the setting of Falls to Pieces, where a savage jungle landscape is at war with developers who would pave paradise and put up a parking lot. It's a foe to be respected by Kati Dawes and her daughter Zoe, who have gone off grid and incognito on the island of Maui, hoping to escape their past. B...

Christmas v. Easter

(This post is available in audio format 

here on Youtube.)

"Imagine this. It's Christmas Eve and you have to wrap all your own presents. And

that's supposed to be a lot of fun. Even though your presents are all underwear and socks. You know that, because you're the person wrapping them. And on Christmas morning, your presents aren't under the tree. You have to go outside and root around in the bushes to find them before the neighbor kids snatch them up. And when you tear off the wrapping paper, al...

Review: The Wildes

(This post is available in audio format here on Youtube.)
The Wildes seems at first blush to promise a very intimate tale of a very public man, something along the lines of Louis Bayard's earlier novel Courting Mr. Lincoln. until we realize at what point we've been dropped into this tale.

The story begins just before what most people would consider The End of Oscar Wilde: not his death, but his death-in-life, the accusations, the trial for slander, and the consequences. This story could be called ...

Jules Feiffer on writing

 

"Writing, I explained, was mainly an attempt to out-argue one's past; to present
events in such a light that battles lost in life were either won on paper or held to a draw."

--Jules Feiffer 

Jules left us in January. Cartoonist, playwright, screenwriter. Illustrator of The Phantom Tollbooth. Winner of the Pulitzer prize for editorial cartooning. Inducted into the Comic Book Hall of Fame.

Favorites:

Little Murders

Feiffer's America

Carnal Knowledge

Plus a bonus quote:

“When I was young, I was much more...

Review: The Shotgun Approach

 You've got to keep an eye on William Martell. He's a master of misdirection. He lays out the evidence fairly but sneakily in each of his novelettes (novellas? long short stories?).
The Shotgun Approach concerns a formerly hit music duo with more than a passing resemblance to Hall and Oates, except the frontman has had his blonde head blown off with a shotgun and his partner is the prime suspect, along with the victim's ex-wife and his former producer, who all, by odd coincidence, are checked int...

Holmes the bohemian

 

Bohemia, bordered on the North by hope, work, and gaiety, on the South by necessity and courage; on the West and East by slander and the hospital.”

 --Henry Murger,  

La Vie de Bohème 

 

We often think of Sherlock Holmes as the epitome of the scientific mind, "a calculating machine," as Watson calls him. But Watson also acknowledges another side to Holmes: the Bohemian. Here's an excerpt from, aptly enough, A Scandal in Bohemia:

"...while Holmes, who loathed every form of society with his whole Bohe...

Plot and subplot plotted

The Veneerings Dinner, by Sol Eytinge“Where does he come from? Shares. Where is he going to? Shares. What are his tastes? Shares. Has he any principles? Shares. What squeezes him into Parliament? Shares. Perhaps he never of himself achieved success in anything, never originated anything, never produced anything? Sufficient answer to all; Shares. O mighty Shares! To set those blaring images so high, and to cause us smaller vermin, as under the influence of henbane or opium, to cry out, night and ...