Barry Graham's Blog, page 48
March 23, 2015
I’ve been a fan of Hilary Davidson for some years now—I admire...
I’ve been a fan of Hilary Davidson for some years now—I admire her novels, but love her pitch-dark, twisted short stories—and we have mutual friends, but we had never met until Left Coast Crime just over a week ago. She’s as impressive a person as she is a writer.
March 22, 2015
How the myth of Mother Teresa began
It’s good to see this piece in the Washington Post taking a look at attempts to make a saint of Mother Teresa. I think it should also have explained how her reputation was founded.
Mother Teresa was a monster, as close to pure evil as any media figure could be. She was a heartless, self-serving thief, a friend of the Haitian dictator Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, and a friend of the American swindler Charles Keating.
She had no compassion for the poor. She said that tending the p...
March 21, 2015
Tam's Granny: new short story by me on Kindle
From an author whom reviewers have compared to Bram Stoker, M.R. James and Stephen King comes this short, jarring tale of psychological horror.
Tam is seven years old and lives with his family in a tenement building in a Glasgow slum in the 1970s. He’s obsessed with ghosts and monsters,and he knows his Granny will protect him from them. But there are other kinds of monsters, and his Granny is dying…
March 20, 2015
todayinlaborhistory:Today in labor history, March 18, 1937: New...
Today in labor history, March 18, 1937: New York City police evict and arrest striking Woolworth clerks occupying stores and demanding a 40-hour workweek. Police were met with huge protests at the stores and the precincts where the workers had been taken. Once freed, the clerks returned to the stores and re-occupied them and, in the end, they won a one-year union contract, an eight-hour day, six-day workweek, and a 32.5 cent per hour minimum wage.
March 17, 2015
questionall:Do you still bank with the big 4 banks? Why? Follow...
March 12, 2015
Noir at the Bar PDX crew: me, S.G. Redling, Josh Stallings,...
Noir at the Bar PDX crew: me, S.G. Redling, Josh Stallings, Hilary Davidson, Johnny Shaw, Todd Robinson, J. David Osborne
Crimelandia
Noir at the Bar PDX last night was great. Packed house, and dark, funny performances by Johnny Shaw, J. David Osborne, Hilary Davidson, Todd Robinson, Josh Stallings, Blake Crouch, S.G. Redling and my good self.
Interestingly, though I had books on sale, no one bought any physical books, but quite a few people went online on their phones and bought ebooks. This makes me skeptical about recent speculation I’ve read that paperbacks are making a recovery and ebooks are on the way out.
I recited a...
March 11, 2015
Tonight in Portland: Noir at the Bar will be decadent and depraved
The third Noir at the Bar PDX is tonight. Since many writers are in town for Left Coast Crime (at which I’ll be moderating one panel and speaking on another), we have quite a line-up. I’m going to recite a chunk of The Champion’s New Clothes (written in 1989, published in 1991) from memory.
March 10, 2015
Lucha Noir: How Christa Faust Wrestles with Reality in Hoodtown - The Big Click
In the new issue of The Big Click, I wrote about Christa Faust, lucha libre and noir.
February 24, 2015
Meditation, not fantasy
I read Peter Matthiessen’s account of visualizing himself as an eagle during zazen. I recall one of my early teachers telling me to visualize being a mountain…
Instead of imagining being something else, what if we can stop even imagining that we are the body and mind that we normally identify as?
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