Category Archives: Julia Karr

04/01/2015
1 Comment
Bloom Magazine Book Club, Charlotte Zietlow, FARMbloomington, Finch's Brasserie, Julia Karr, Malcolm Abrams, Michael Shelden, Scott Russell Sanders, The Root Cellar

Hot Air

By The Book

A quick one today because I was very lazy this AM and then I had my regular afternoon book writin’ session with Charlotte Zietlow. BTW: The Zietlow memoir is coming along fabulously. We’re working on her 1974 campaign for US Congress right now. Phew — 41 years ago — Charlotte looked like a kid, for pity’s sake!

Here’s a sneak preview of some pix I’ve taken of items from her vast treasure trove of files and images:

Window Card

 

Window Card

●

Tri-fold Pamphlet

Tri-fold Pamphlet

●

H-T Front Page

Good News, Bad News

●

In the above Herald-Telephone piece, Charlotte is anointed the coming star of the Democratic Party in Indiana because she ran such a strong campaign against well-known state senator Elden Tipton. She’d only decided to run in February for the May primary and whupped the bejesus out of four other Dems, including Mayor Frank McCloskey’s chosen candidate.

Man, this stuff is fun.

▼

Sanders Speaks

Bloom magazine threw its second Book Club bash yesterday evening at FARM Bloomington’s Root Cellar Lounge. Just like the first one, featuring author Michael Koryta, last night’s soiree packed the house.

Scott Russell Sanders talked about how he came to write Divine Animal, the book selected by Bloom boss Malcolm Abrams. Frankly, I haven’t read it yet — my queue of books is about as tall as Sally the Dog standing on Steve the Dog’s head. But believe me, Divine Animal‘s in the stack now.

The audience peppered Sanders with Qs for a good hour and a half. He explained precisely when and where he got the idea for the book, how the characters came to him, and his process for letting the characters tell their stories to him before he writes them all down.

This Bloom mag Book Club is the atom bomb, I’m telling you.

You wanna get in on the next one? Okay. The third Book Club selection is Young Titan, a biography of a youthful Winston Churchill penned by Bloomington’s own top-notch Anglophile, Michael Shelden. We’ve got a big order in at the Book Corner so you can start buying it later this week. So far, our two best selling titles for 2015 have been Koryta’s Those Who Wish Me Dead and Divine Animal. We oughtta pay Malcolm a salary.

The meeting for Young Titan will be Tuesday, June 9, 5:30pm, at Finch’s Brasserie.

Here are some snapshots from last night’s get-together:

Abrams/Sanders

Malcolm Abrams (L) & Scott Russell Sanders

●

Here’s something I hadn’t known: A teenaged Sanders had a choice between studying physics at Brown University or accepting a basketball scholarship at another school. He chose physics, natch.

Karr/Stoll

Author Julia Karr & Her Friend, Caren Stoll

●

Karr just finished writing the first draft of the last book in her Young Adult trilogy featuring teen Nina Oberon and her travails in a near-future dystopia. Book one was entitled XVI (or Sixteen, for those of you who don’t recognize Roman numerals) and its sequel was Truth. The third has no title yet; Karr’s only begun revisions and corrections within the last few days.

Sanders

Sanders Tells His Tale

●

The title of Sanders’ book comes from a line written by Ralph Waldo Emerson in his essay, “The Poet.” Emerson’s line reads:

As the traveller who has lost his way, throws his reins on his horse’s neck, and trusts to the instinct of the animal to find his road, so must we do with the divine animal who carries us through this world.

Sanders & Fans

Sanders Chats With Fans

●

Alright, get going on Young Titan.

▲

06/25/2014
1 Comment
Anti-Vaccine Movement, Anti-Wheat Movement, Big Talk, Carl Sagan, Frank Deford, Julia Karr, NCAA, NPR, The Ryder, WFHB

Hot Air

Everybody’s Talkin’ At Me

Young Adult author Julia Karr sat and talked with me recently for the latest installment of Big Talk. An eight-minute snippet of that tête-à-tête ran on WFHB last week.

Karr

Julia Karr

■

You ought to listen to it, especially if you’re an aspiring writer, say, or a high school dropout. Julia Karr has pushed through a ton of barriers to achieve that most glorious status in life: published author. She has written the dystopian fantasies XVI and Truth, about young Nina, a rebel in the year 2150. In that world girls who reach the age of sixteen are expected to become sex playthings; there’s little more a young female can hope to do. Nina, though, has other ideas.

We’re putting the finishing touches on the long-form interview with Julia that will run in the July issue of The Ryder.

Meet Bloomington’s most fascinating folk via the Big Talk interview series, co-sponsored by this communications colossus, The Electron Pencil, as well as WFHB and The Ryder.

BTW: Go to Julia’s website. She has a blog that in my humble opin. is tied for second-best in B-town. Natch, you know who’s the boss of the bestest blog hereabouts.

▼

Pay To Play

When the Indiana University Hoosiers cartilage kids challenge for the top spot in any Big 10 sport, folks around these parts go gaga. And, this being the great United States of Murrica, we tend to throw dough at the gamesters, buying tickets by the fistful, wearing T-shirts, and drinking watered down brew out of IU-logoed beer cozies.

Only those cartilage kids don’t share in the swag. College athletes, as you know, aren’t paid. This despite the fact that their field and court exploits are the sole reason we fling our dollars around. Loyal readers already know how I feel about this stinking state of affairs.

IU Hoops

Volunteers Of America

■

Click on over to Frank Deford’s essay on NPR’s Morning Edition. He expounds on the bullshit notion that is amateurism — that is, amateurism the way the NCAA defines it. I like the way Frankie thinks.

▼

Don’t Tread On My Bread

I tilt against peeps who espouse this health craze, that diet, or the conspiracy theory over there all the time. F’rinstance, my oldest and dearest pal in the world and I are howling at each other these days over her recent conversion to the belief that wheat grain products are only slightly less dangerous to humans than an arsenic cookie in a radioactive tin attached to an improvised explosive device.

Our skirmish thus far has remained reasonably civil although my agents have uncovered intelligence that she is a mere two years away from possessing the capability to build the arsenic cookie in a radioactive tin attached to an improvised explosive device. This will not stand. I will not allow a chocolate chip mushroom cloud be the final piece of evidence against her.

Mushroom Cloud

This Means War

■

Anyway, I always caution people I’m arguing with over such things that they should be careful what Internet stories they believe. I say, borrowing (okay, stealing) from Carl Sagan: “Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence.”

My dear pal had one defender who said to me, Look, if it makes her feel better, why fight it? What’s the skin off your nose?

Other than the fact that my Sicilian/Polish beak looks just fine with the acreage of dermis presently attached to it, thank you, my argument is that any individual ideas based on rage, mania, trendiness, and pseudoscience might be only mildly harmful to the possessors thereof but they represent a credulousness that can be far more toxic when applied repeatedly or in certain other more pressing cases.

To wit: the anti-vax movement of recent years. A single family might have rationalized that it really harmed no one else other than, potentially, themselves when they refused to get their kids inoculated.

Here’s the argument that lays that rationalization to rest: it has been learned that a single kid who had not received the MMR vaccination was responsible for an outbreak of measles in Minnesota in 2011.

The parents of the kid were part of a community that bought into the hysteria over childhood vaccinations that arose in the first decade of this century. That hysteria, in too many cases, was fatal.

As important as saving the lives of innocent children may be, the even more dangerous aspect of the anti-wheat movement is the possibility that pizza and pasta may one day be outlawed. Now, that would be a human tragedy of monumental proportions!

Pasta & Sauce

Save Our Spaghetti!

▲

06/04/2014
1 Comment
Bloomington Chamber of Commerce, FiveThirtyEight, IU KInsey Institute, Julia Karr, Mark Kruzan, Masturbation, Parking Meters

Hot Air

Meter Melee: Meh

Talk about Bloomington’s downtown parking meters has largely died down as we approach the one-year anniversary of their installation.

The City Council and Mayor Mark Kruzan approved the meters last spring and workers set them in concrete in August. Blowback was swift and angry. Flyers showing pictures of Kruzan and the six council members who voted for the meters were plastered up all over town and warned that they’d suffer mightily come the 2015 election.

Now, it’s a good bet Kruzan et al will have to worry more about some other hot button issue next year as they run to keep their jobs. It’s doubtful, of course, that the meters will be uprooted any time soon, considering they’ve funneled bushels of cash into city coffers. Indianapolis Business Journal reported in March that meter revenue had passed the magic million-buck mark.

Coins

Meters Mean Money

■

The Bloomington Chamber of Commerce is about to release results of a survey it conducted about downtown parking. The survey collected impressions from shoppers, downtown employees, and business owners. Bean counters from Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business and the Center for Survey Research are even now massaging the numbers. The CofC may release results of the survey this month.

We’ll see. Some biz owners downtown wonder if the CofC might contemplate canvassing the assorted restaurants and shops to determine if and how much their revenues have dropped off since the meters went on-line. The whisperers have it that any number of downtown businesses have suffered a 25 percent drop off.

The Herald Times in October ran a three part-series on the meters, leading off with the report that they were a “bust” for downtown businesses. That first story, though, offered up only anecdotal evidence that shops and restaurants around the square were suffering.

A minus-25 percent sales comp could be a death sentence for a small business owner. That is, if the figures being bandied about are true. It’d behoove the Chamber to dig up some more dependable figures. Someone has to ask business owners what their numbers were both before and after meters. If the 25 percent thing is an exaggeration, jangled nerves could be calmed and potential new businesses would be more prone to open up shop around the Square.

On the other hand if the CofC chooses not to find out and release those comps, it might be because the rumors are all too true.

▼

Karr Talk

The next entry in our Big Talk online/print/radio interview series has been committed to zeroes and ones. I sat down with local author Julia Karr on Friday. We spoke for about an hour and I learned, among other things, that a squadron of police officers once rifled through her apartment in a fruitless search for a huge, hairy, scary spider.

Karr

Julia Karr

■

Karr has written the Young Adult dystopic future novels XVI and Truth. A third book in the series is even now taking shape in her fertile imagination.

Expect to hear the eight-minute Karr feature on WFHB’s Daily Local News sometime later this month. The full interview will run about the same time in The Ryder magazine. And stay tuned here for exact running dates and times as well as links to both.

▼

Absolutely Fap-ulous

You go, girl!

The numbers geniuses at FiveThirtyEight reported last week that Indiana University Kinsey Institute researchers have found that women are not keeping up with men in the vital masturbation race.

Men, Kinsey’s National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior tells us, masturbate far more frequently than do women, natch. I mean, golly, it’s there, right? Anyway, a significant majority of women in this holy land engage in America’s pastime within the range of Not-in-the-past-year to A-few-times-per-month-to-weekly whereas a preponderance of my brethren do it in the range of A-few-times-per-month-to-weekly to >4-times-per-week.

Happy Woman

Happiness Is….

■

And here’s a fascinating factoid: One respondent swore he kept an Google spreadsheet to record all his ballgames. No word on whether or not any woman is so meticulous in recording each and every scratch of her itch.

As an added bonus, FiveThirtyEight reveals that there are 519 euphemisms for male masturbation. In the interest of equal time, I found that there are at least more than 370 such verbal codes for female self-play. Women, it’s time to catch up.

Happy strumming!

▲

05/30/2012
Leave a comment
Capitalism, Chris Hedges, Communism, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Elliot Spitzer, Fran Lebowitz, International Amphitheater, John Edwards, Julia Karr, Julian Assange, Maxwell Street Polish, Parliament (band), Soviet Union, The World Is a Ghetto, War (band)

The Pencil Today:

✍

THE QUOTE

“We’ve bought into the idea that education is about training and ‘success,’ defined monetarily, rather than learning to think critically and to challenge. We should not forget that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers. A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, which fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death.” — Chris Hedges

♢

A MIND IS A TERRIBLE THING TO WASTE

A hearty hat tip to Bloomington novelist Julia Karr, who posted the above quote on her Facebook page.

According to Hedges’ criteria, laid out so clearly and forcefully, this holy land has condemned itself to death. I’ll go one step further: it’s already dead.

We’re dead. We just don’t know it yet.

Here Lie Us

✍

We thought we were smart and superior when Soviet communism deservedly died. But as Fran Lebowitz so aptly put it, “In the Soviet Union, capitalism triumphed over communism. In this country, capitalism triumphed over democracy.”

The making of scads of dough became this nation’s — and most of the world’s — one and only pursuit.

✍

Home ownership? Hell, that wasn’t about putting down roots, becoming part of a community, creating a stable base for your kids, or any of that old fashioned silliness anymore. It was about serial buying and selling so everyone could make a quick buck.

Saving and investing? Not about prudent management of assets nor about slow and steady growth for the future. Hah! How quaint!

College education? Honestly, how many people in these Great United States, Inc. want their kids to go to a university to become a rational, analytical thinker? How many dream that a college degree just might make their young-un a better human being?

I Am Gonna Be So Rich

✍

Pshaw.

I once was involved in a discussion with recent college grad and his dad. I won’t reveal who they were because I’m hoping daddy-o regrets his tone and philosophy. Suffice it to say the three of us knew each other extremely well.

The kid was trying to figure out what to do with himself now that he had a bachelor’s degree in business. Pops was giving him the fish eye because it didn’t seem as though the kid was banging down any doors trying to get a job.

The truth was, the kid really had no idea what to do.

So, silly me, I figured the kid ought to pursue employment in some field that might, you know, bring him a little happiness in his life. I said, “The first thing you have to do is ask yourself, ‘What do I love?'”

What Should I Do With My Life?

✍

Oh, daddy-o nearly popped a neck vein.

“What the hell are you feeding him that kind of shit for?” he demanded.

See, by the time this exchange took place, the concepts of happiness and fulfillment not only were quaint — they were downright dangerous.

Anyway, Hedges is saying what I’ve ranted about in these precincts time and again.

A college education should be a good thing in and of itself, not just because it’ll bear you well as you climb the corporate Jacobian ladder. It broadens your horizons. It opens your mind. It exposes you to the world and the world to you. It helps you learn to think rather than react, to listen rather than spew, to realize that what you’re sure of today might not be what you believe tomorrow.

Blah, blah.

How quaint. How dangerous.

♢

BOGEYMEN

Does it strike you as odd that guys who challenge capitalism’s alpha male set-up seem to get nailed on sex-related criminal charges more often than the average bear?

John Edwards. Julian Assange. Elliot Spitzer. Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Those are just four very, very high profile cases in the last couple of years.

Now, the truth is all four could be as guilty as sin. DSK, for one, has a rough and tumble sexual rep. And Spitzer really did meet with prostitutes in that Washington hotel room.

DSK May Be Warped — But…, But….

✍

Still, I feel sort of itchy about the whole thing.

Is it that guys who see the inherent flaws in the world’s dominant economic system are unusually prone to sexual peccadilloes and transgressions? Even more so than guys whose lives are dedicated to climbing over piles of average citizens to reach an obscene pinnacle of power and wealth?

Or could there be a chance that when guys like Spitzer sniff around places they’re not supposed to go and start telling the public precisely how they’re being sodomized by the plutocracy, the sharp knives of the system get pointed at them?

Maybe I’m just imagining things. Or maybe not.

♢

GET OUT!

Make plans for today. Click on the GO! logo for the best events listings in Bloomington.

♢

THE WORLD IS A GHETTO

War was the very first group I ever saw in concert. They led off for Parliament at Chicago’s old International Amphitheater back in 1973. I’m fairly sure of the year.

My pal Whitey and I took a couple of multi-bus, hour-and-a-half rides to and from the Amphitheater that night. We didn’t get home until around 3:00am.

Funny my partner should have been nicknamed Whitey — we were among the very few white guys in the place. Oh, and the reek of pot — we couldn’t believe our noses!

Naturally, we had to stop off at Maxwell Street Polish for a couple of dogs smothered in grilled onions after we left.

Munchies, you know.

♢

01/21/2012
1 Comment
Abbie Hoffman, Ann Coulter, Barack Obama, Doonesbury, Garry Trudeau, GOPac Memo, HL Mencken, John Wayne Gacy, Julia Karr, Liberals, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Republican Party, Rick Santorum, Ronald Reagan, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, US Supreme Court

The Pencil Today:

✍

TODAY’S QUOTE

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” — H.L. Mencken

♢

NEWT’S LATEST BOGEYMAN

Our boy Newty has created a brand new bete noir.

You may recall that almost 20 years ago Newt Gingrich, as the virtual capo of the Republican Party, wrote the infamous “GOPac Memo.”

Mob Chieftan

✍

The memo advised Republican candidates for Congress that specific words and phrases would galvanize public opinion for the GOP and against the Dems. In fact, the memo’s title was “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control.”

Gingrich was convinced that the repetition of these words would create indelible images within the minds of voters, much like a TV sitcom hypnotist’s use of trigger words.

Here are some of the words Gingrich recommended Republicans use to associate with themselves and their party:

  • Common sense
  • Confident
  • Courage
  • Duty
  • Family
  • Liberty
  • Moral
  • Pro-flag
  • Proud
  • Strength
  • Tough
  • Truth

✍

As for the Democrats, Gingrich urged his confreres use these terms:

  • Anti-flag
  • Bizarre
  • Cheat
  • Collapse
  • Decay
  • Disgrace
  • Impose
  • Lie
  • Pathetic
  • Radical
  • Shame
  • Sick
  • Taxes
  • They/them
  • Traitors
  • Waste

Democrats, According To The GOPac Memo

✍

You had to figure the word taxes would be in there. The first word a Republican infant utters upon emerging from the womb is taxes.

Garry Trudeau in his “Doonesbury” strip called the GOPac memo “The Magna Carta of attack politics.”

Anyway, the single most damning, uncomplimentary, insulting word on the list would turn out to be liberal.

To be branded a liberal was tantamount to being barred from winning another election for the rest of your life.

One of the reasons the Democrats so infuriate me is that, instead of embracing the liberal label, they ran from it as if it was analogous to child molester.

Otherwise Known As The List Of Prominent Liberals In Indiana

✍

Thanks in huge part to the GOPac memo, the GOP staged its mini-revolution in the election of 1994. The party gained control of both the House and the Senate and Gingrich became the Speaker of the House.

Say what you will about the craven, cynical nature of the memo, it worked. And Newty is nothing if not an astute politician.

Today, you can be forgiven for thinking liberals don’t even exist in this holy land.

So, now that the Georgia Doughboy is running for president, he finds himself in need of another monster under the bed. He has found it. And he’s got a name for it.

Gingrich’s sworn enemy in these Republican primaries is Mitt Romney. Ergo, Romney must become Newty’s new Godzilla or John Wayne Gacy.

Romney

✍

This week, Newty found the damning terminology for Romney. Since the liberal dragon has been slain, Gingrich has had to move the enemy bar lower.

Here’s the crushing epithet Gingrich now uses against Romney: He’s a Massachusetts moderate.

The horror — a moderate.

Yep. That’s what he called Romney this week, his voice dripping with Newt-ish contempt. “I am the only viable conservative candidate,” Newty added.

Yikes. If these Great United States, Inc. move any further to the right, Ronald Reagan’s gonna be lumped together with Abbie Hoffman.

♢

LEFT BRAIN-LESS

Some of my pals on the far left seem to be going just as batty as Newty — only, of course, in the opposite direction. A lot of radical bloggers and Facebook-posters are so disgusted with the wishy-washy politics of Barack Obama that they’re actively calling for his defeat this November.

They say, What’s the difference between Obama and the Republicans?

Well, I have the answer, in three words: Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

The nation’s second female US Supreme Court Associate Justice will turn 79 in March. She’s already been walloped in recent years by colon cancer and pancreatic cancer. She’s as frail as a newborn robin. Plus, she has indicated she’d like to retire at the age of 82, which would mean whoever is president in 2015 will select her successor.

I shudder to think of who Newty Gingrich or Rick Santorum might tap to become the sixth conservative member of that august ennead.

Ann Coulter?

She’s No Moderate

♢

TRUTH IS FICTION

Boxcar Books hosted a book release party for Bloomington’s Julia Karr last night, before the region was iced in.

Karr’s new book, “Truth,” is the sequel to her young adult dystopian novel, “XVI” (or “Sixteen” for the Latin-deprived among us.)

✍

She read a few pages from the fresh tome and took questions from the audience. Karr then revealed she has to split up her writing session each day, sitting at her keyboard for a few hours each morning before going to her day job and then doing the same thing after work.

As expected at these affairs, there were plenty of questions about how an unpublished author can break into the business. Karr kindly advised the wannabe scribes on how to write the perfect query letter and how frustrating and heartbreaking the whole process of trying to get a first book published is.

✍

Karr handled the questions better than I would have. Forget about getting your book published, I’d have advised. Try something easier, like climbing Denali in the middle of winter.

♢

 

01/11/2012
2 Comments
Barack Obama, Book Corner, Boxcar Books, Christopher Morley, Dennis Kucinich, Elaine Irwin, George W. Bush, Howard Zinn, Jamie Dimon, Jerry Boyle, John McCain, Joy Division, Julia Karr, Lloyd Blankfein, New Order, Peter LoPilato, R.E. Paris, Rachel Maddow, Rockefeller Republican, Roe v. Wade, Ryder, Sarah Palin

The Pencil Today:

✍

TODAY’S QUOTE

“The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple.” — Christopher Morley

♢

BARRY’S OKAY — JUST OKAY

I have no idea why but I feel I must defend Barack Obama these days — tepidly, of course, because his presidency has been rather ho-hum, for my money.

For all the excitement he generated among the commie, pinko, homo, abortion-crazed, tax-happy, put-the-white-man-in-jail, apologize-for-America, femi-nazi, Manchurian-candidate-cabalist population of this otherwise holy land when he was merely candidate Obama, Boss Obama’s reign has been pretty much a let down.

Every Right Winger’s Wet Nightmare

✍

Many of my lefty pals feel their blood pressure reach quadruple digits when the current POTUS is mentioned. The radical lawyer Jerry Boyle goes so far as to call him a “traitor” (to the left‘s cause — not, as the other side would have it, to the nation.)

How can a guy be a traitor when he was never part of the club?

If anybody had paid a bit of attention to how he voted when he was Senator Obama, they’d know he was, in truth, the biggest Rockefeller Republican since that very man who passed from this vale of tears at the age of 70 while banging his secretary on her desk back in 1977. (Yeah, yeah, I know — allegedly.)

The Original Rocky (Bust In The Senate Gallery)

✍

Anyway, as I’ve pontificated before, perhaps my happiest day as a voter and taxpayer in this greatest nation in the history of our corner of the Solar System was when Barack Obama was elected president. Not that I expected him to outlaw guns in cities, care for the sick, tend to the poor, pull the soldiers out of Iraq and Afghanistan the next day, and order the summary executions of Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon, but because the election of a (half) black man demonstrated that these United States had grown up a bit since, oh say, the 1970s.

That and the fact that Obama wasn’t George W. Bush nor was he craven enough to have chosen as his running mate a MILF-y knucklehead from Alaska.

Every Right Winger’s Wet Dream

✍

The fact that Obama has surrounded himself with so many unindicted felons from the Goldman Sachs mob makes me want to retch. Then again, I never expected him to name among his advisers Dennis Kucinich, Howard Zinn, and Rachel Maddow.

So, that’s my roundabout way getting to the fact that I am categorically, incontrovertibly, without question or fail, voting for Barry come November. As long as nobody better comes along.

You think I want to see Roe v. Wade overturned? And all those Wall Street baboons given free reign? The privatization and profit-ization of basic human services? The digging for oil in every citizen’s backyard? Rush Limbaugh smiling?

Hell no, babies. I’m a staunch(ish) Obama man from here on out.

♢

TRUTH — REALLY

Bloomington author Julia Karr waltzed into the Book Corner Monday, carrying the galley copy of her forthcoming book, “Truth.”

It’s the follow-up to her successful 2011 release, “XVI,” a murder chiller set in a dystopian future.

‘Truth” will go on sale a week from tomorrow with a book release party Friday, January 20, at Boxcar Books.

Julia Karr

✍

Karr brought in “Truth” for our town’s Book Babe R.E. Paris, who’s reviewing it for Ryder magazine.

I was chatting with another customer at the time, a man whom I don’t know. When I told him he was in the presence of a big time pen lady and then told him about all the other successful authors in town, he said, “No kidding? I had had no idea this was such a center for authors.”

It is, pal. It is.

♢

BLOOMINGTON’S BOOK BABE LOOKS BACK AT 2011

Speaking of R.E. Paris, I mentioned yesterday that she looks at the year in publishing in the current issue of the Ryder. Peter LoPilato, the Ryder’s majordomo, has been kind enough to let us run selected pieces from the magazine in these precincts.

The Ryder

✍

So, let’s take a look at R.E.’s retrospective, no?

◗ 2011: The Year in Books, by R.E. Paris

In which I discuss some interesting titles from 2011, note others, and leave out yet many more worthy of mention among the hundreds of thousands of books published last year.

Swerve: How the World Became Modern, by Stephen Greenblatt, (Norton), is a very readable history of the intellectual inheritance of the Renaissance. Greenbaltt shows that history ties the modern world to the classical one…. read more

♢

TRUE FAITH

New Order was born of Joy Division after that band’s lead singer committed suicide. Joy Divison had led the post-punk movement in the late 1970s and New Order took the sound to a new level with its incorporation of then-new electronic technology.

And, BTW, New Order has a bit of a Bloomington connection. The video for “Round & Round” featured the face of super-model and recent local divorcee Elaine Irwin (go to the 3:15 mark.)

Elaine Irwin Decorates New Order’s “Round & Round” Video

✍

Anyway, here’s “True Faith”:

♢

12/23/2011
2 Comments
670 The Score, Air Jordan 11 Retro, Animal Tool Behavior, Book Corner, Chicago Mercantile Exchange, College Sports, Dan Bernstein, Erik Estrada, Herald Times, Home Improvement, Indianapolis Zoo, Jerry Sandusky, Joe Paterno, Julia Karr, Morning Edition, Nike, NPR, Penn State University, Robert Shumaker, Ron Jeremy, Tammy Faye, Tim Allen, Trishelle Cannatella, Truth, XVI

The Pencil Today:

✍

TODAY’S QUOTE

“… Tammy Faye calls me and Ron Jeremy calls me. Erik Estrada sends me a Christmas card every year.” — reality show mannequin Trishelle Cannatella, testifying that even celebrity zombies enjoy Christmas.

♢

A GIFTMAS CAROL

Hah! The Herald Times put my mug shot up. Must be a slow news day.

♢

ANIMAL MECHANICS

Some pretty smart cookies live and work at the Indy Zoo. And I’m not just talking about the keepers and the animal researchers there.

Rob Shumaker is one of the alpha males at the zoo. He’s the boss of the Life Sciences department and is a world renowned expert on orangutans. He and two other critter scientists have written a book that dispels many of the notions we have about animals using tools. I’m not revealing too much by saying it isn’t just monkeys, apes, Republicans, and humans who use tools.

Shumaker

✍

The book, “Animal Tool Behavior,” co-written with Kristina R. Walkup and Benjamin B. Beck, asserts that brain size and general smarts don’t determine which creatures use tools, as has been considered gospel until now. Wasps, spiders, dolphins, polar bears, and a host of other species could just as easily as Tim Allen been the star of “Home Improvement.” Maybe easier.

Guess: One Of These Two Is An Animal, The Other Is A TV Star

✍

Wasps use rocks to smooth out soil. Some spiders throw sticky balls at flying insects and reel them in for supper.

The more we Homo Sapiens sapiens learn, the more we realize we (and Republicans) ain’t so special after all.

♢

YES, BUT DO THEY USE TOOLS?

So, Nike has introduced a new pair of ugly sneakers, the Air Jordan 11 Retros. And — wouldn’t you know it? — some of Indianapolis’ finest citizens rioted at a couple of locations when they went on sale yesterday.

Just Looking At These Makes Me Want To Go Out And Break Windows

♢

WE DO FACEBOOK SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO

A no-spamily, no-brattle zone.

◗ Bloomington author Julia Karr scored big with her teen dystopia novel “XVI.” Now, she’s back with the sequel, “Truth.”

Don’t take chances; buy both.

✍

◗ Don’t these guys ever learn? The business-suited baboons at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange are discontinuing their charitable giving for 2012. This despite the fact that the mob of them made a pretty penny — $826 million, to be more precise — last year. Oh, and the cartel also has some $750 million just laying around — cash reserves, they call it. But, sorry kids, there ain’t enough to spare for your schools.

✍

◗ Hundreds of football ironheads from Penn State University have signed a fawning letter of support for their embattled former coach, Joe Paterno. Sports yapper Dan Bernstein of CBS-owned 670 The Score dismantles the letter point by point. Paterno, you may recall, heard about his pal Jerry Sandusky being seen sodomizing a little boy in the Penn State shower room. He grudgingly told his putative superiors (in truth, no one at PSU was superior to Joe Pa) and promptly forgot the whole thing. Meanwhile, Sandusky allegedly continued to have his way with young kids.

This is a tough thing for me to say in Bloomington, Indiana, but the more I learn about big-time college sports, the more it turns my stomach.

♢

%d bloggers like this: