Barry Graham's Blog, page 84
September 17, 2013
TWO DEAD THINGS
I took these pictures at the corner of 22nd and...
TWO DEAD THINGS
I took these pictures at the corner of 22nd and Glisan in NW Portland. What was obviously a campaign’s headquarters now lies as empty as the corpse of the bird on the ground near its door.
September 16, 2013
Am I unusual in not noticing ads online?
This article about Twitter’s going public says:
Like Facebook, Twitter makes its money primarily by selling ads, which gain a lot of their value from the advertiser’s ability to target specific groups of users.
I’m so used to ads on social media that I don’t even notice them anymore. I must somehow register their presence, but I seem to automatically ignore them. This is true of Facebook and Twitter - I’ve looked at both this morning (I found the article I quoted l...
September 13, 2013
Tony Black chooses The Book of Man as one of his five top reads
It’s nice when one of my favorite authors likes my stuff too. Tony Black - who interviewed me for his book Hard Truths - named The Book of Man as one of his five favorites in the Scottish Daily Record. I’m in illustrious company; the other four are Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Peter Carey’s The True History of the Kelly Gang, George Douglas Brown’s The House With the Green Shutters and Stevenson’s Treasure Island.
He writes:
The Glasgow author explores the...
James Johnson, a.k.a. J.J. Johnson, Jameson Johnson and Jimmy Carroll Johnson, is not an ex-cop or ex-rescue swimmer - but he's still an ex-armed robber
"J.J.Johnson’s" OK Cupid photo - does the T-shirt mean another new name is imminent?
The fascinating thing about convicted armed robber Jimmy Carroll Johnson, later known as Jameson Johnson and, most recently, J.J. Johnson, is his mix of intelligence and stupidity - or perhaps insanity.
If you had gone to a new city to reinvent yourself and leave a criminal past behind, would you constantly call attention to yourself by becoming a public figure and telling absurd, Walter Mitty-esque stori...
September 12, 2013
September 11, 2013
September 9, 2013
Something Else - my latest column in The Big Click
This column is written against writing in crime novels, against acting in crime films, and is for… something else.
The French filmmaker Robert Bresson did not like to cast any actor in more than one film. He referred to them not as “actors” but as “models,” and said he did not want them to act at all, but just to be. The reason he did not want to have recurring actors in his films was that he wanted the audience to see the character, not the...
September 7, 2013
Moby Dick: Herman Melville's Zen
Moby-Dick might be the greatest Western Zen text. Jim Harrison has written: “There is scarcely a better koan than Ahab before the whiteness of a whale who sees a different ocean from each side of its massive head.”
Melville renders emptiness and interdependence with a clarity no other writer from the Western world I can think of has come close to.
One example:
To enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is mer...
September 4, 2013
September 3, 2013
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