Tim Westover's Blog, page 5

Catchy Jingle for Nu-Grape circa 1926

I was listening to Art Rosenbaum's podcast, "Backroads and Banjos" today. He opens the 4/29/2009 show with this jingle recorded in 1926 by the Nu-Grape Twins. "I Got an Ice-Cold Nu-Grape" by the Nu-Grape Twins (MP3) Now I want to buy a Nu-Grape, which I've never before had in my life (though I used to get [...]

That's One Big Collard Plant

Here is Mr. and Mrs. Homer Tuggle's epic collard plant, circa 1951: If it's just one giant collard leaf, is it still a "mess" of collards? Source: Stancil, W. Dorsey. Vanishing Gwinnett. Lawrenceville, GA: Gwinnett Historical Society, 1984.

A Poster in Honor of the Baby Lime

My very talented friend Cherry DelRosario made this poster for The Lime, our little one. I love it!

Occupy Pike Street, circa 1915

Fed up with the puddles on Pike Street, a number of Lawrenceville, GA, citizens make their displeasure known: At the far left, two men are dredging the puddle with a seine. In the middle, the ringleaders – Charles Mason and his son Clarence – are using the tried-and-true "firearm" method of fishing (e.g. they have [...]

Swamplandia!, You Broke My Heart

Karen Russell's Swamplandia! has been getting a lot of buzz (they're even going to make an HBO miniseries from it). And for the first 83% of the book, I was on board, I was loving it. The premise (the dissolution of the Bigtree family of alligator wrestles following the death of their matriarch) is amazing; [...]

Review of "Seal Skin" by J.A. Pak

I have given better books fewer stars, but I think "Seal Skin" provides a good return on the modest investment (in time and money) that it requires. "Seal Skin" is short (68 pages) — it's not a novel or even a novella. A "long short story" would be an apt if oxymoronic description, both in [...]

Hedgehog in the Fog: The Pumpkin

One of my favorite things is Yuriy Norshteyn's Russian animated film Ёжик в тумане (Hedgehog in the Fog). It's a stunningly beautiful piece of work: quiet, mysterious, profound, spooky. Hayao Miyazaki has called in an inspiration, and it won a 2003 Japanese award for the "Best Animated Film of All Time." So, if that's not [...]

The Nose

Gogol's short story "The Nose" is one of my all-time favorites. When I was in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 2004, we had to track down the house where the main character wakes up to find that his nose has disappeared from his face, and what's more, it now outranks him. Sure enough, there was a [...]

New Story at Fantasy Faction

I have a new story, entitled "Unbroken Lines", posted at the website Fantasy Faction, as part of their October Writing Challenge. You can read (and vote) for it there: http://fantasy-faction.com/forum/writ... A quick excerpt: In our neighborhood, all the houses were alike; their complex geometry, indistinguishable. But mine was the most splendid of the identical houses, [...]

Review: "Pilgrim of the Sky" by Natania Barron

Pilgrim of the Sky is a fantasy / vaguely steampunk novel published by the small indie publisher Candlemark & Gleam. It's a competent, but not particularly compelling, adventure story that frequently feels more like a romance novel. Maddie, our comely young main character, is unwittingly pulled into a parallel world in search of her dead (or [...]