My friend Tim sent me this excellent link: http://www.unnecessaryquotes.com I don’t think much more needs to be said, other than perhaps bravo. Or rather, “bravo”.
Happy Birthday
Today is the seventieth birthday of my father, Julian James Lynch George. Happy Birthday, Dad. I wish I could be with you today. You don’t mind if I post these photos, do you…?
Recent Listening
In an effort to keep myself honest, I am going to try and record for posterity (or whatever the bloggy equivalent of posterity is) every CD I purchase from now on. I am sure that my wife must look at all the entries for “amazon.com” on our credit card statement and wonder what on earth I’ve been buying. Well, mainly …
Inspiring Quote About Inspiration
When asked if he wrote to a regular schedule, or just when he was struck by inspiration, Somerset Maugham answered, “I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp.” Clever man. If you sit around waiting for inspiration to strike before you begin writing, guess what? Inspiration will toddle off and do something else. …
Death Becomes Me
All of my previous books have taken place over a relatively short time period, and one of the things I wanted to do with my new novel was to try something altogether bigger in scope and subject matter. But I hadn’t realized until I was well into the book is that there is a severe drawback to writing a story that …
Flashy New Design Coming Soon
Watch this space. With the help of a certified internet genius, I have been working to upgrade this site from humdrum-but-free wordpress.com to the swankier-and-not-free wordpress.org, which allows me more flexibility with lay-out, design, and so forth. I hope you will find the site easier to navigate and enjoy. With a bit of luck, it will also be easier to …
Welcome Back, Jazz Times
Nice surprise waiting for me at home yesterday afternoon – a copy of Jazz Times was delivered in the mail, with none other than my man Joe Lovano on the cover. The magazine had ceased production earlier this year and at the time there was much mourning and chin-scratching in the jazz blogosphere about the financial viability of small-interest publications …
Back to School
My friend Tim wondered yesterday whether the Facebook servers would be able to cope with the massive surge of back-to-school photographs that would be uploaded in the forthcoming days. So I’m ignoring FB and posting mine here. Goofiness, ahoy. And no, this post has nothing to do with writing, or reading, or publishing, or music, or any of the things …
Feeling Stupid?
I am. Having read a rave review in Gary Giddins’s excellent book Natural Selection, I bought a copy of Grown Up All Wrong by Robert Christgau, who is the senior music critic at the Village Voice. This is a collection of some of his pieces over the past several years. I am thoroughly enjoying it, although I am not familiar …
Distractions and Prevarications, Part 6
Well, duh. Actually I’ve only read the first five of these – trying in vain to keep up with my eight year-old, who ripped through the entire series in two months. The last one was something like 870 pages long. Oh, the relief when it was over.