Timothy Miller's Blog, page 4

Happy Shadow Day

In 1962, the song "Me and My Shadow" seemingly enjoyed a renaissance. I say "seemingly" because that's the way I remember it. I was only four at the time, and the first time I saw it performed on tv, I thought it was a new song. That's the way it is when you are very young; each new encounter is a reinvention of the world.

In fact, the song was written in 1927, if Wikipedia is to be believed, by Al Jolson, Billy Rose, and Dave Dreyer. It's been performed by a hosts of artists since. In 1962, it s...

Third Villain

 

As you may know, I published a novel in 2020 called The Strange Case of Eliza Doolittle, in which Sherlock Holmes investigates the transformation of Eliza (lifted from Shaw's Pygmalion)  from a girl of the streets into a lady who could pass for a duchess. There are three villains in the mix, two from the world of literature and one from history. There's one guy who did not make the cut for my third villain, though I was sorely tempted:

Rupert of Hentzau.

Not familiar with the name? Maybe this quo...

Calvin Trillin

 

"I suppose that there are endeavors in which self-confidence is even more important than it is in writing -- tightrope walking comes immediately to mind -- but it's difficult for me to think of anybody producing much writing if
his confidence is completely shot."
 --Calvin Trillin: journalist, humorist, deadline poet.
Favorite books:
Alice, Let's EatUncivil LibertiesEnough's Enough: and Other Rules of Life


Bonus quote:“Every good idea sooner or later degenerates into hard work.”
As Trillin says: Eno...

The magic circle

"That state of mind has been called 'willing suspension of disbelief.' But this does not seem to me a good description of what happens. What really happens is that the storymaker proves a successful “sub-creator.” He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is “true”: it accords with the laws of that world."--J.R.R. Tolkien

 I'll tell you a secret: I don't believe in the willing suspension of disbelief. It's not that I've suspended my belief in suspension of d...

Is the algorithm the terrorist?

An echo in the echo tunnelAfter the horrific event in New Orleans in the early hours of New Year's Day, along with its bizarre echo in front of the Las Vegas Trump International and the theories floated around the radicalization of Shamsud-Din Jabbar(a native Texan, army veteran, realtor--one of us, not one of "them"), a question troubled my mind: how is it that social media helps madmen find their brethren while isolating the sane?

In other words:

Is the algorithm the real terrorist?

Is the answe...

From Poem to Screen

Whose woods these are I think I know,

His house is in the village though; 

He will not see me stopping here 

To watch his woods fill up with snow. 

My little horse must think it queer 

To stop without a farmhouse near 

Between the woods and frozen lake 

The darkest evening of the year. 

He gives his harness bells a shake 

To ask if there is some mistake. 

The only other sound's the sweep 

Of easy wind and downy flake. 

The woods are lovely, dark and deep. 

But I have promises to keep, 

And miles to go before ...

Memoirs of Mother Ginger

Not the 1975 version 


Now that Christmas is over, the tale can be told. I am the Mother Ginger. Or was in1975. The top half, at least.

For those unfamiliar with The Nutcracker, Mother Ginger is a ten-foot tall lady who, for reasons unbeknownst to me still, sidles out to reveal eight little girls under her skirts who issue forth and do a dance number. 

Back story: our high school drama club was pretty well known in Shreveport at the time, so when the Houston Ballet came to town, they got in touch. T...

Action stacking action

 ... or what I learned from William Goldman.

I'm not much on the trend of casting your narrative in first person present tense. It's too much like theatre in the round. I like the distance availed by the proscenium, which gives the audience a wide-angle view--at the expense of immediacy, some will say. But a film that's all close-ups is claustrophobic as well as tedious. (Sorry about the mixed mediums.)

So when do I use close-ups, that is to say, when do I switch from past to present tense? (Which...

Mr. Holmes's Neighborhood

 

Here it is, hot off the presses, my contributor's copy of Mr. Holmes's Neighborhood--34 new Sherlock Holmes stories by members of the Crew of the Barque Lone Star, a scion society of the famed Baker St. Irregulars founded some fifty-five years ago in Dallas, Texas.

I haven't read it yet, but it promises a peep inside the keyholes of the neighborhood surrounding 221B Baker Street, including my own prequel/sequel to Conan Doyle's seminal tale, The Empty Room, which is called--

The Sherlock Holmes A...

Italo Calvino

 "There is nothing for it but for all of us to invent our own ideal libraries of classics. I would say that such a library ought to be composed half of books we have read and that have really counted for us, and half of books we propose to read and presume will come to count—leaving a section of empty shelves for surprises and occasional discoveries. "

— Italo Calvino,  October 15, 1923 –  September 19 1985

Italian writer and journalist.

Favorite Works:

The Baron in the Trees

If on a winter's night a...