Gabby Hyman, of Dr. Bob's Nightmare

For Ginsberg's was the syncopated flurry of Coltrane, a cool hipster rap sung in crowded bookstore reading rooms thick with tobacco smoke and a counterpoint of cheap Mexican weed. Bad Gerry was sung to Vivaldi played on a sturdy hi-fi set as you gazed out a dormer window across the Monongahela River where black sparrows alit like a puff of factory smoke in a tree laid nude by winter.

-- Gabby Hyman on poet Gerald Stern.

To find out what it means, you have to go back in time, not too far, just to early December of last year. There’s the first post of Gabby Hyman’s unusually-titled blog, Dr. Bob’s Nightmare: So, Why Not Me? Well, maybe the explanation isn’t spelled out for you here, either, in this short piece on Robert Holbrook Smith, aka Dr. Bob, one of the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous, but it gives you a clue, a trail of words to follow. You can reach your own conclusions.

Gabby Hyman is a writer, plain and simple. He’s been a journalist, a professor of English, and a creator of content for various websites. He edits, he ghostwrites. You can download a copy of his book, Knives and Forks and other stories from Literary Road. But Gabby also writes a fantastic blog, a place for stories from aching memory, sometimes wryly funny, always lyrical.

These tales are told with a grace and a stretching language, all metaphor and rich description, but they also keep you going, wondering what happens next. That night that Gabby walks onstage as the Spirit of Christmas Present, does it go as planned? The final analysis may not be what you think. Who is Myoko Sakatani and how did she save his life? Enigmatic titles pull the reader in -- Last of the Mic-Mic Men? -- but Gabby’s fine writing does the rest: "The Beast was the gangsta-earthmother of the drive-by smile. In fact, she changed everything." The Beast? How did she change everything? You must read on.

Some of the stories are about a world about to be transformed, portraits of life in Southern California before the sixties were in full swing, when the bread man still delivered and milk came to box outside your front door. Others are about the immediate aftermath, the awkward mid-70s (Gabby's trip to the 1976 Democratic convention, for example), or his time as a graduate student in Alabama, where football was king. These pieces aren't necessarily nostalgic, but give a sense of the author presenting the past, remembering and working it over in his mind.

Good writing often leaves you with questions, with blanks to fill in. After reading several of Gabby's essays, I want to know more, to figure out how his circuitous path, which included stints in Alaska, Illinois, and Washington state, transpired, whether there was a plan or a pull or if those seemingly peripatetic days were a matter of controlled drifting, a person trying to find his place in the world. I don't mind these lacunae, these mysteries. The questions only make it more interesting.

So go. Read. Let the words pull you in, get you thinking. You'll be glad for it.

Tags: blog of the month

Revellian Dot Com: Reader Beware. Some of the time.

I can’t do it.

I can’t possibly sum up Revellian.Com. Even its tag line, Psycho-Linguistical Dialectology: From the Edge, while pithy and funny and in a sense descriptive, doesn’t do blogger Bobby Revell’s work justice.

I could say that one of the hallmarks of Bobby’s blog is his transgressional fiction, dark tales with vivid descriptions and on-the-brink characters oozing bodily fluids and squinting through a lucid haze. These stories may not be for everyone. As I write, the latest post on Revellian.Com is "The Demon Witch: Sexual Psychotropic," with lines like "Undulating intentions as she oozed, sticky slime slug melting atop as we engrafted–merging fluidic flesh. She hungered for my warmth and I for iced mucous–malignant sludge folding into one. Suckling human lozenge." Perhaps this is not your cup of tea (and you have been warned). But even a squeamish type–like me, for example–can see the humor and surreal eloquence in Bobby’s fiction.

To call Revellian.Com a horror fiction blog would be misleading. Balancing out the fiction are articles on blogging, with content that delivers. Bobby picks apart the world of money-making blogs and cuts right to the chase on Entrecard, arguing that while it helps raise stats, the quality of the Entrecard traffic is generally low, with most participants staying just long enough to drop. He also takes on the "holy trinity" of Twitter, Facebook, and StumbleUpon.

Just when you think you've gotten this blog figured out, that it's a little transgressional fiction mixed in with informative blogging tips, Bobby gets personal, writing about his struggles with depression. He discusses philosophy. And to lighten things up, there’s twisted humor as well!

Revell has been writing most of his life. He is also (among many other things) a guitarist and a student of several martial arts and the practice of Zen, interested in "the mysteries of human thought and everything in between." He believes "in truth, not mythology." And his platform, Revellian.Com is definitely worth a closer look, no matter your predilections.

Tags: blog of the month

Careful to leave dust of longing undisturbed, for fear that it might rise again— up my nose, induce fits of passion; or worse: contentment.”
— from Clarity, a poem by Candy Tothill

Candy Tothill of Inside Candy

I am officially jealous. Well, not exactly jealous, just dumbstruck with admiration. South African blogger Candy Tothill is a business owner, a mother to three, and one hell of a writer (who in her spare time is working on a book). Her blog, Inside Candy, is an enticing combination of poetry, rant, and keen observation.

Candy’s writing is evocative. Her poems dance around sadness and loss as she captures the elusive nature of a moment or a fleeting thought, the glimpse into someone else's window, a view into another way of being. In between the poems, she mixes it up with critiques on South African politics and thoughts about life. And while there's a lot of good stuff on her blog, she's written for several publications, too.

So, what are you waiting for? As Candy says, "Be not afraid. It will only offend readers to whom life itself is offensive."

Tags: blog of the month, Reviews, writing

The Georgia Wonder

This month's featured blog, the Virtual Dime Museum, is a shift from personal history -- October’s Melindaville -- to popular history, offering a change of pace for November.

The Virtual Dime Museum provides a peek at advertisements, news stories, and sundry entertainments from the mid-1800s into the early 20th century. It is full of oddities and bizarre medical concoctions, sideshows and haunted houses. Writer Lidian, born and raised in New York City and now living in Canada, has created an entertaining and well-written three-ring circus of pop history, Brooklyn and New York history, and Victorian pop culture.

The Big Bad Bilious Wolf

Whether it’s digging up an 1896 item about a skeleton hand found in Flatbush or profiling Victorian fascinations such as the animated bust, Lidian brings a sense of humor to the Virtual Dime Museum. Her interests in genealogy and history combined with her mad research and writing skills results in a diverting and dryly funny read. And if you like your pop history a little more recent, check out her other blog of kitsch and camp, Kitchen Retro.

Tags: blog of the month

What could life be like after recovery from hardcore drug addiction?

Today Melinda Roberts Tyler is a successful and award-winning professor of psychology, happily married to her soulmate, full of warmth and gratitude for life. Over fifteen years ago, however, she was a heroin and cocaine addict living on the streets of San Francisco, at rock bottom with very little will to live.

Melindaville chronicles her journey from hardcore addict to honors student and professor. It is a fascinating, though often harrowing, story. After moving to San Francisco to pursue an acting career in the early 1980s, Melinda gets involved in the burgeoning punk scene and performs as part of the band Wild Women of Borneo. Along the way she becomes an exotic dancer and high-priced call girl, as well as demonstrates an entrepreneurial spirit by starting “the world’s first fantasy phone service,” Julie’s Hotline. As her dependency on drugs intensifies, her life begins to fall apart. It takes twelve years of addiction before she begins to put it back together again.

The blog contains excerpts from her memoir in progress (working title: Lost and Found: A Journey) as well as consciousness-raising posts on the nature of addiction as a health, not moral, issue, with underlying causes and more sophisticated solutions than “just say no.”

Melinda’s ultimate goal is to use the proceeds of her eventual book sales to fund a foundation for sex workers. Drug addiction and the sex industry are intertwined. Many sex workers choose that path after suffering childhoods of abuse. Maybe they start working in the business to support an existing habit or begin using just to get through the workday. Drugs like heroin or cocaine provide compelling comfort in a small package, a way to numb the pain of the past and present.

Melinda plans to fund treatment and higher education for these men and women who are so often invisible and voiceless. I can think of no better champion.

Tags: blog of the month