March's blog: Dr. Bob's Nightmare
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.
February's blog: Revellian Dot Com
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.
December's blog: Inside Candy
— 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."
November's blog: The Virtual Dime Museum
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.
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.
October's blog: Melindaville
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.