wind in the poplars hisses sea-whispers and booms over the hills with the bellowing notes of the organ of the deeps rain on the meadow falls a flurry of steely grey tossed by the wind moving on leaves crystal drops on window panes moon tossed from cloud to herringbone cloud the ocean sky […]
This afternoon I have been watching the 2018 film anthology “A Field Guide to Evil”. It’s not great. Yawn. A few tales are kind of interesting, but that’s about it. Nothing to keep you on the edge of your seat. Not much gore. A few things to bewilder the audience. The Imdb and Wikipedia articles tell you all you need to know about this puzzling waste of time.
Today, I am giving away copies of the e-version of my only poetry collection Nocturne: Poems of Love, Distance, and the Night, a callous and disinterested lover in commemoration of the birthday of the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, author of A Season in Hell (Une Saison en Enfer)
Nocturne is a collection of my poetry written from the mid-80’s to mid-90s, a turbulent, fluid time in my life in many ways, but especially romantically. I have taken many of the poems written during those years and compiled them into a dark narrative capturing the emotional turmoil of a narrator who descends from romantic love for a woman into a lonely world of alcohol and night clubs, where his only love is the night that envelopes him psychologically, emotionally, and physically. It is about 110 print pages in length and lavishly illustrated with photos I found in the public domain (no, those are not photos of me or my former paramours).
You can find it and my other works at my Amazon author’s page: Amazon.com/author/philslattery.
I have tried to make this a wonderful experience for the reader, exploring the bliss of love to the depths of despair and then to resignation to one’s fate in an existential crisis.
Don’t forget to leave a review on Amazon or Goodreads!
While there, you might want to check out my other work on relationships: The Scent and Other Stories. In this collection of short stories, I explore the dark, sometimes violent, sometimes twisted, sometimes touching side of love, the side kept not only from public view, but sometimes from our mates. Set in the modern era, these stories range from regretting losing a lover to forbidden interracial love in the hills of 1970’s Kentucky to a mother’s deathbed confession in present-day New Mexico to debating pursuing a hateful man’s wife to the callous manipulation of a lover in Texas.
Check back frequently for updates.
Lo! ’tis a gala night
Within the lonesome latter years!
An angel throng, bewinged, bedight
In veils, and drowned in tears,
Sit in a theatre, to see
A play of hopes and fears,
While the orchestra breathes fitfully
The music of the spheres.
Mimes, in the form of God on high,
Mutter and mumble low,
And hither and thither fly-
Mere puppets they, who come and go
At bidding of vast formless things
That shift the scenery to and fro,
Flapping from out their Condor wings
Invisible Woe!
That motley drama- oh, be sure
It shall not be forgot!
With its Phantom chased for evermore,
By a crowd that seize it not,
Through a circle that ever returneth in
To the self-same spot,
And much of Madness, and more of Sin,
And Horror the soul of the plot.
But see, amid the mimic rout
A crawling shape intrude!
A blood-red thing that writhes from out
The scenic solitude!
It writhes!- it writhes!- with mortal pangs
The mimes become its food,
And seraphs sob at vermin fangs
In human gore imbued.
Out- out are the lights- out all!
And, over each quivering form,
The curtain, a funeral pall,
Comes down with the rush of a storm,
While the angels, all pallid and wan,
Uprising, unveiling, affirm
That the play is the tragedy, “Man,”
And its hero the Conqueror Worm.
On October 18, I posted a comment on the “Writer’s Digest” article “How to Write a Science Fiction Novel” by Robert Lee Brewer published on August 19, 2019.
The article is well written and gives some good places for a novice to start exploring writing a sci-fi novel and coming to know its trials and travails. However, I had to throw in my two cents about writing science fiction and writing in general, because I started out reading books on how to write, but it helped me little. The thought that kept going through mind was that if the author of this book on writing was a great writer, why haven’t I heard of him? Why isn’t he making a living just writing fiction? Why does he need to write books like this. Yes, Stephen King wrote a great book on writing, but it’s hard to find another famous author who has.
The key for me to learning how to write has been to read great writers, read their comments on how to write, and to learn everything I can about English grammar (here I have an advantage over most because I have a verifiable knack for linguistics and have college credit in about six languages). The two books that have helped me more than all the others are The Elements of Style by Strunk and White and Webster’s New World Guide to Punctuation. Both are very concise and very short and inexpensive. I recommend them highly. Most importantly though is to WRITE! WRITE! WRITE! and READ! READ! READ!
Anyway, here is a link to the “Writer’s Digest” article for your edification and/or entertainment. My comments are currently awaiting moderation, but will hopefully be up soon. It will be interesting to see the responses I receive.
As soon as the comments come up, I will update this article.
On the cover of Catriona McPherson’s latest crime novel Ann Cleeves calls it ‘disturbing.’ Obviously in a complimentary way, but disturbing is disturbing. A facebook friend – I forget who – mentioned reading it and said what a great book it was, but perhaps not for bedtime. I immediately decided I wouldn’t read it, and […]
My novelette, Click, is available free today on Amazon Kindle.
For it or the paperback version, go to my Amazon author’s page: Amazon.com/author/philslattery.
Frank Martinez, a policeman with the Corpus Christi Police Department, has unintentionally shot and killed an unarmed man when called to intercede in a domestic violence case. To recover from the guilt while the incident is under investigation by the CCPD, Frank’s fiancée arranges for him to stay on a secluded island owned by her father’s former law partner. While dozing one night on a lounge chair in the yard, he awakes to find two hitmen slipping onto the island and breaking into the cabin. Are they after him? Are they after the cabin’s owner? Most importantly, how is he going to reach his pistol in his luggage in the bedroom?
Reader Charles Stacey gave “Click” five stars on Amazon and commented:
“Author has a wonderful ability to develop the characters using few words. Great foreshadowing to build suspense. And then a really outstanding twist at the end that left me smiling.”
Joe Leonardi gave Click five stars on Amazon commenting: “An interesting story with a double twist ending that left this reader wanting more….” while he also reviewed Click on his website, ShortStoryScribe.com, saying:
Author Phil Slattery takes us on an interesting ride. He gives a twist ending to the story, that once revealed, you realize he peppered the story with clues. The second twist ending hits out of left field, and left this reader wanting for more.
The motivation is as old as storytelling, but that doesn’t make it bad. Slattery’s words make us care for the main character and seeing his view of his marriage leave us, in the end, feeling sad for him in his moment of triumph.
Edward Z gave Click five stars on Amazon and commented:
A policeman on leave on a secluded island after shooting an unarmed man with a toy gun finds himself under siege by two criminals looking to use the place themselves…
A lot of detail goes into both the psychological aspects of the story as well as the action. This one is packed with every character’s motives, inner dialogue, and very well thought out. When it gets to the action it keeps this up as well as adding a lot of excitement.
Smart, fast-paced, and full of action. The characters are well done and don’t suffer from the usual boring tropes too much, and the two criminals are interesting as the author knows how to do ‘bad guys’ rather well.
An Amazon customer gave Click five stars and commented:
“This novelette is a quick and very entertaining read. It opened with a grabber (“Tell me again whey we have to kill this guy…”) and kept pulling me in from there. Frank Martinez is a cop trying to recover from a shooting incident in solitude on an island off the Texas gulf coast. T.J. and Benny are the bad guys. Their hunt and chase on the small island kept me in suspense. It ends with a surprise twist. Slattery proves here he is a good storyteller.”
While on my author’s page, check out my other works.
Don’t forget to leave your own review on Amazon, Goodreads, or other social media.
I received a review copy from the publisher. This does not affect the contents of my review and all opinions are my own. Imaginary Friend by Stephen Chbosky Mogsy’s Rating: 2.5 of 5 stars Genre: Horror, Mystery Series: Stand Alone Publisher: Grand Central Publishing (October 1, 2019) Length: 720 pages Author Information: Website | Twitter So, wow, lots to unpack […]
via Book Review: Imaginary Friend by Stephen Chbosky — The BiblioSanctum
My novelette, Click, is available free today on Amazon Kindle.
For it or the paperback version, go to my Amazon author’s page: Amazon.com/author/philslattery.
Frank Martinez, a policeman with the Corpus Christi Police Department, has unintentionally shot and killed an unarmed man when called to intercede in a domestic violence case. To recover from the guilt while the incident is under investigation by the CCPD, Frank’s fiancée arranges for him to stay on a secluded island owned by her father’s former law partner. While dozing one night on a lounge chair in the yard, he awakes to find two hitmen slipping onto the island and breaking into the cabin. Are they after him? Are they after the cabin’s owner? Most importantly, how is he going to reach his pistol in his luggage in the bedroom?
Reader Charles Stacey gave “Click” five stars on Amazon and commented:
“Author has a wonderful ability to develop the characters using few words. Great foreshadowing to build suspense. And then a really outstanding twist at the end that left me smiling.”
Joe Leonardi gave Click five stars on Amazon commenting: “An interesting story with a double twist ending that left this reader wanting more….” while he also reviewed Click on his website, ShortStoryScribe.com, saying:
Author Phil Slattery takes us on an interesting ride. He gives a twist ending to the story, that once revealed, you realize he peppered the story with clues. The second twist ending hits out of left field, and left this reader wanting for more.
The motivation is as old as storytelling, but that doesn’t make it bad. Slattery’s words make us care for the main character and seeing his view of his marriage leave us, in the end, feeling sad for him in his moment of triumph.
Edward Z gave Click five stars on Amazon and commented:
A policeman on leave on a secluded island after shooting an unarmed man with a toy gun finds himself under siege by two criminals looking to use the place themselves…
A lot of detail goes into both the psychological aspects of the story as well as the action. This one is packed with every character’s motives, inner dialogue, and very well thought out. When it gets to the action it keeps this up as well as adding a lot of excitement.
Smart, fast-paced, and full of action. The characters are well done and don’t suffer from the usual boring tropes too much, and the two criminals are interesting as the author knows how to do ‘bad guys’ rather well.
An Amazon customer gave Click five stars and commented:
“This novelette is a quick and very entertaining read. It opened with a grabber (“Tell me again whey we have to kill this guy…”) and kept pulling me in from there. Frank Martinez is a cop trying to recover from a shooting incident in solitude on an island off the Texas gulf coast. T.J. and Benny are the bad guys. Their hunt and chase on the small island kept me in suspense. It ends with a surprise twist. Slattery proves here he is a good storyteller.”
While on my author’s page, check out my other works.
Don’t forget to leave your own review on Amazon, Goodreads, or other social media.
Those of you who do not know who Frederic Beigbeder is, he’s French writer, literary critic and a TV presenter. He created a bunch of awards, was awarded a bunch of awards, wrote some good stuff, wrote some bad stuff, and was once arrested for snorting cocaine off the hood of a car. He’s become less and […]
via Frederic Beigbeder: French Literature’s Enfant Terrible — irevuo
On September 18, 2019, I was interviewed by Traci Hales-Vass on her program, Write On Four Corners, on KSJE radio about my poetry collection Nocturne: Poems of Love, Distance, and the Night, a callous and disinterested lover. Follow this link to listen to the program.
After I watched Equus on Sunday, I decided to ramp up the drama into horrific tragedy by watching Julie Taymor’s bizarre 1999 film version of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus.
This film is bloody enough in its own right, but it transcends the usual graphic horror found in Stephen King novels or teen slasher flicks by showering the innocent as well as the not-so-innocent with the soul-wrenching agony of parents watching their children and the children watching their siblings suffer horrible deaths and torture.
Think of Titus Andronicus as Shakespeare’s predecessor to Game of Thrones with the horror turned up a notch but without the mercy that occasionally pops up.
Wikipedia notes that Shakespeare wrote this to “to emulate the violent and bloody revenge plays of his contemporaries, which were extremely popular with audiences throughout the 16th century [per Joseph Quincy Adams’ Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus: The First Quarto, 1594 published by Scribner’s Sons, 1936].
Shakespeare knew how to work with his audience’s emotion.
Unlike other Shakespeare plays, this one is not based on a historical character. It is set in an unspecified time in Rome after the reign of Julius Caesar. Titus is a general returning from a successful campaign against the Goths (who defeated the Romans at Adrianople in 378 CE followed by the Visigoths sacking Rome in 410 CE). He has brought with him the Goth queen Tamora and her three sons. To pay homage to the gods during the interment of 25 of his soldiers, Titus sacrifices the eldest son of Tamora, who begs for her son’s life. Titus continues with the sacrifice.
The emperor of Rome has died and just after the execution of Tamora’s son, the emperor’s son Satuninus ascends to the throne. Saturninus wants Titus’s daughter Lavinia for his bride and Titus gives her to him, even though she is in love with Bassanius. Just after Lavinia takes her place beside Saturninus, Titus gives him an additional gift of Tamora and her two remaining sons. Saturninus practically drools over Tamora. Lavinia immediately runs off with Bassianus, but Saturninus has the woman he craves, so he decides not to bother with Lavinia. This makes Tamora the empress of Rome. Things keep getting worse and worse for Titus and his family as only Shakespeare can do. Lots of gore and blood and screaming. If John Carpenter, David Cronenberg, George Romero, Dario Argento, and Guillermo de Toro could team up for a movie, this would be the movie they would make, but in King James English. Lots of limbs and heads coming off.
Julie Taymor sets this in a fantasy time, where swords and guns, horses and cars,, togas and suits are used with anachronistic abandon. From what the Wikipedia article on Titus Andronicus says, she did this to show the timelessness of violence. In one of the few obscenities I will use on this website, I will say NO SHIT, JULIE. VIOLENCE IS TIMELESS. TELL US SOMETHING WE DON’T KNOW.
But then, her production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest is also unusual including the gender of the wizard and main character, Prospero, is changed from a man to a woman. Still, If she hadn’t translated these films to cinema, who would have. I am grateful that I got to see them in whatever form, so long as they remain reasonably true to Shakespeare’s script. Setting a Shakespeare play in another time is not unusual. Kenneth Branagh did it with Hamlet and Baz Luhrmann did it with Romeo and Juliet.
Still, with Taymor the effect is still a tad weird. She starts out in the modern day with a boy of about 11 playing violent games with toys on his kitchen table. He is then whisked away to the fictional time and world of Titus Andronicus, where he spends several scenes loitering in the foreground and watching the main characters, before he becomes Titus’s grandson toward the end of the movie.
In my humble opinion, the movie could have done without the character of the modern boy. It’s too distracting from the story and the dialogue. I don’t mind so much the setting being in a fantasy time and world, but the boy is an unnecessary detail that adds nothing to the plot or to the overall story.
Personally, I would have preferred that the movie be more historically accurate, even though the characters are fictional. Julie should have just picked a post-Christ era of the Roman empire and ran with it.
Mel Gibson could have done it better.
Anyway, if you are into horror, like I am (though I don’t go for really graphic stuff), this may be the Shakespeare play for you.
Overall, it was a decent production and NOT BORING. I was definitely wide awake and pausing the movie when I had to take the dog out. I don’t do that for all films. The plot is intriguing and the characters sympathetic with good and evil in each, though often one outweighs the other.
As with all Shakespeare plays made into movies and sticking to the original script, the King James English is tricky to learn at first, but it can be done. I have watched several of these films and it takes a while to adapt, but it helps it you read the closed captions. Once you adapt to it, you will wonder what happened to the beauty of the English language over the centuries. There are some beautiful and incredibly poignant passages in the dialogues, made even more poignant when you understand the overall situation the speaking character is in.
I would write more, but I have a headache from being in the declining phase of a cold and will close it here. Maybe I will write more later. I have wanted to watch Titus Andronicus for a long time and finally got around to it today. I am glad I did.
I recommend this movie highly, especially for all Shakespeare aficionados.
Art is supposed to make you feel something, right? And what more can you ask from a book other than to be moved by it in such a way that you end up shedding a few tears? Also, psychologists claim that crying is kind of good for releasing stress and making you stronger emotionally, so […]
This is the first book I am reading for Diverse Detectives Month hosted by WoCReads. (Or rather the first three books 🙂 ) I decided to start with a book which had a collection of Byomkesh Bakshi mysteries. After finishing one book, I decided to read another and then another. I think there are only […]
Today, I received a link via email about a former (as of August) co-worker of mine named Murray Arviso. Murray is in the Maintenance Division at Chaco Culture National Historic Park, where he has worked for around twenty years. Murray is in a bad health situation and will not be able to walk for a while. His family needs financial help to build a ramp for his wheelchair. Ironically, under normal circumstances, Murray is quite capable of building a ramp. Now that he needs one himself, he is not physically capable of doing it. A ramp is inexpensive compared to a lot of medical needs, so anything you can give will go a long way.
If you would like to help out, follow this link to Murray Arviso’s GoFundMe page, which explains the situation. This condition started a few months ago and has been worsening. Donating even a little bit will help. Here is the note that came with the link:
Hello
I thought you might be interested in supporting this GoFundMe, https://www.gofundme.com/f/expenses-for-home-ramp-amp-home-medical-supplies?utm_source=customer&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=p_cp+share-sheet.
Even a small donation could help Colleen Arviso reach their fundraising goal. And if you can’t make a donation, it would be great if you could share the fundraiser to help spread the word.
Thanks for taking a look!
Phil Slattery, Writer, Publisher 