An American Lion

This is where Norman Rogers practices the manly art of curation.

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The Frisky Mole Boy of Groton

Norman Rogers recounts the summer he spent hiding from the stern love of his father and living as the world-famous “frisky mole boy” in the Groton, Connecticut sewer system. The Frisky Mole Boy of Groton seduced the women of the town and solved crimes, all while subsisting on a steady diet of depravity and confusion.

Rampage of the Innocents is my unfinished but brilliant Historical Romance Novel (now, with more sex and violence for my teenaged readers)

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    An American Lion

    Entries in Creativity (4)

    Saturday
    Jan162010

    Celebrating a Web Site Redesign

    Screen Shot for KeithHennessey.com

    Keith Hennessey redesigned his website, and saw fit to post about it:

    As you can see, I have given the site a facelift.  There’s still some work to be done, so don’t be surprised if things keep changing over the next few weeks.

    And please let me know of any technical problems you experience, using the “Contact Me” link at the top.

    Thanks.

    This is a Wordpress hosted blog that he is using, and I enjoyed Wordpress. I think they do great things over there. I wouldn’t part with Squarespace now if you paid me, however.

    The design works on many levels. The white on blue in the header is fine, but the subtitle of Hennessey’s blog disappears for my eyes. That’s easily offset by a color change, nothing major. I rather like the tiles, which require the reader to click on them and thereby “add” a page view (does that sound right?). It’s a very functional and modern design. I like how he has chosen his top “tags” and put them in the bar across the top.

    Everyone should tap into their skills and make changes. Yes, there are pros who can help. I think anyone can come up with a great website design, even the mentally ill and the criminally deranged.

    Monday
    Dec072009

    Patricia Highsmith Reconsidered

    Scene from Strangers on a Train (1951)

    I have often wondered what they will say about me when I'm dead. I hope they say awful things. Nothing else would do.

    It's too bad that Patricia Highsmith isn't around to enjoy having terrible things said about her:

    "She was a horrible human being," recalls Otto Penzler, one of her publishers. It's an apt eulogy for a novelist whom Graham Greene, rather more charitably, dubbed "the poet of apprehension," a 20th century demiurge whose "world we enter each time with a sense of personal danger, with the head half turned over the shoulder." The first words of Joan Schenkar's splendid, sinewy new biography, "The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith," concede the point: "She wasn't nice," Schenkar admits; "She was rarely polite." Yet the "toxic brilliance of [her] trail goes on glowing" 15 years after her death in 1995 -- when "she drove a last, devoted visitor from her hospital room and then died unobserved."

    She, of course, is crime novelist Patricia Highsmith, born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1921, later creator of Tom Ripley -- whose exploits, chronicled in the five-volume "Ripliad," have inspired numerous films, including Anthony Minghella's 1999 poisoned Venetian valentine "The Talented Mr. Ripley" -- and author of "Strangers on a Train," which Hitchcock adapted in 1951. Misanthropy seeped through her work like blood into terrazzo (one short-story collection even features homicidal pets exacting lethal vengeance on their masters); she hated Jews with rancid fervor; she "seemed to be the sole curator of a Museum of Twentieth-Century American maladies," suggests Schenkar.

    But throughout 22 novels and dozens of short stories (if not her improbable children's book, "Miranda the Panda Is on the Veranda"), Highsmith revolutionized the field of suspense fiction, perverting and inverting a genre once synonymous with moral education and civic virtue. Her output rebuked the essentially wholesome stories of Chandler and Hammett, in which detectives punish felons, restore order and admonish readers; "Nothing," Schenkar argues, "could have been more American" than the scenarios Highsmith fashioned in turn: "two men bound together psychologically by the stalker-like fixation of one upon the other."

    Greene noted that Highsmith's "characters are irrational, and they leap to life in their very lack of reason; suddenly we realize how unbelievably rational most fictional characters are as they lead their lives from A to Z, like commuters always taking the same train." Biography, too, tends to trundle along settled tracks, departing from the childhood platform, admitting and ejecting passengers at intervals, finally arriving at the terminus of legacy and legend -- a linear transit in many ways ill-suited to the reversals and revisions of subjects' lives. Dispensing with the familiar acorn-to-oak approach, Schenkar instead declares that "[o]bsession . . . will be the organizing principle of this work," and exhumes Highsmith via a taxonomy of neuroses.

    Actually, Penzler said this:

    "She was a mean, hard, cruel, unlovable, unloving person," said acquaintance Otto Penzler. "I could never penetrate how any human being could be that relentlessly ugly."

    Now THAT'S a eulogy of a life spent making an impact on others. I'd shoot for the moon, but I'd probably just land in the weeds.

    Sunday
    Nov222009

    When the Ordinary Dare to Criticize

    There are Verlyn Klinkenborgs everywhere--

    In an "Editorial Observer" column published this week under the remarkable title "Individualism, Identity and Bicycles in Northern California"—is it a 500-word newspaper column or a doctoral thesis?—Klinkenborg finds himself on the campus of Stanford University, contemplating "great clouds of cyclists pulsing between classes along the street called Serra Mall ... like so many slowly charged particles in a physics experiment."

    This puffed-up prose is typical of Klinkenborg, who may be the windiest windbag in newspaper history. But surely poetry is called for in the case of this column: Klinkenborg is recounting an astonishing spectacle.

    At Stanford, he reports, cyclists pilot bikes of assorted makes and gear configurations. Also, they display varying degrees of cycling aptitude. "Some riders are clearly adepts," Klinkenborg writes, while others ride "à la 8 years old, prey to the wobbling clutches of gravity, prone to every distorting posture a bicycle can inflict." The cyclists are clad in a variety of costumes. Some talk on cell phones as they pedal. Many carry bags. It all leaves Klinkenborg in a state of wonder-struck bafflement. "There is a deeply pleasing randomness about the campus cyclists, as though one morning university officials had assigned a bicycle to every member of the Stanford community, come as you are."

    There is, indeed, a randomness "about" the campus cyclists, although it has nothing to do with university officials. The fact is, each of these riders has obtained his or her bicycle individually, often by purchasing them at a store specializing in the sale of bicycles. Similarly, the sartorial variety that Klinkenborg finds mysterious is the result of a process, undertaken by each cyclist at his or her place of residence, whereby a suit of clothes is selected and then donned, beginning with undergarments and proceeding to outerwear. Often as not, these fully clothed individuals then fill a satchel or valise with personal belongings—a corncob pipe, say, or a dog-eared copy of
    Making Hay. This explains the cyclists' "distended bags of every description," which Klinkenborg observes with wide-eyed bewilderment.

    In truth, Klinkenborg isn't bewildered at all. But bewilderment is his shtick. Klinkenborg's columns are literary minstrel routines, starring the writer as an idiot savant—a bumpkin-seer who perceives the marvelous in the pedestrian and pivots to "epiphanies" that elude those of us who haven't spent years watching sunlight dapple the snouts of woodchucks.

    There is a huge audience for the pastoral and the quasi-profound, and the thing I have to keep in mind when I look at material across the Internet is that, more often than not, I'm NOT the target audience. If you can look at things honestly and realize, well, that's not meant for me, you can find yourself giving a more honest appraisal of things. Klinkenborg doesn't write for hipsters, cynical art chicks, emo-rock dudes, media critics, or the pseudo-intellectual elite. Klinkenborg is billed as an "editorial observer" so whatever he observes is what they print (and, perhaps they reject some of his columns or ideas? Who knows?). Someone has made a conscious effort to pick a writer who will broaden the appeal of the newspaper and bring in more readers--imagine that in this day and age.

    Miss Jody Rosen misses the point when Klinkenborg ends his essay with:

    Truly, we are the only species so discontented with our natural gaits, so ambitious to exceed a foot-pace. It all puts me in mind of Thomas Jefferson, on the subject of walking and horses and their deleterious effect on human exercise.

    “I doubt,” he wrote, “whether we have not lost more than we have gained, by the use of this animal.”

    I believe the correct phrase is, "when you put it THAT way..." but she reacts thusly:

    But does he expect readers to buy that he's perplexed by the concept of wheeled transport?

    No. He expects readers to think about that for a moment, and then move on to something else.

    Monday
    Oct192009

    Leave My Foreign-Source Income Alone, Poindexter

    Being able to make money overseas is my business. The Internal Revenue Service should let me make my money and it should not come after me for more taxes. What incentive do I have to make money overseas if the government is going to come after a small portion of it to pay for things that I don't need, like health care or putting every welfare queen in Chicago, Illinois in her own Escalade:

    A debate is underway about how the United States should tax foreign-source, corporate income. Currently, the United States allows domestic corporations to defer tax on the earnings of their foreign subsidiaries and also gives credits for foreign taxes paid, while most other developed countries exempt the active earnings of their multinational corporations' foreign subsidiaries from domestic tax. The debate has focused on economic issues with little attention to tax administration. GAO was asked to describe for a group of study countries with exemption systems: (1) the rules for exempting foreign-source income, and (2) the compliance risk and taxpayer compliance burden, such as recordkeeping, of the rules. The study countries, selected to provide a range of exemption systems, are Australia, Canada, France, Germany, and the Netherlands. For these countries GAO reviewed documents; interviewed government officials, academic experts, and business representatives; and compared tax policies, compliance activities and taxpayer reporting requirements.

    The study countries exempt some corporate income, such as dividends received from foreign subsidiaries, from domestic tax. However, the study countries tax other types of foreign-source income such as royalties. Multinational corporations present a compliance risk because they can use subsidiaries to convert taxable income into tax-exempt or lower taxed income, eroding the domestic tax base. Although quantitative estimates of noncompliance do not exist, tax experts interviewed by GAO identified sources of compliance risk and taxpayer burden in each of the study countries. These issues, particularly the ones below, have also been identified as sources of compliance risk and burden in the United States. Transfer prices--the prices for transactions between related parties--can be manipulated to shift profits. Tax experts in the study countries said the growing importance of intangible property such as trademarks and patents is making international transactions more susceptible to transfer pricing abuse. In response, the study countries have all increased their scrutiny of transfer prices, including increased demands for documentation and more audits, resulting in increased compliance burden for taxpayers.

    In a nutshell, the government could very well come after the royalties I make from the music that I recorded in the mid-1980s when I was an international pop star.

    My Dutch Single, "Ha Meg Dutchy Dutch" went to #3It would be a shame if they tried to tax the royalty checks that I've been getting--I think the last one totalled exactly $12.65. Thankfully, my French, German and Czech Republic royalties are still being paid to me. I haven't heard anything from Denmark, Sweden or Italy in years; I'm assuming there are small amounts being held in those countries. I once got a $900 check from Norway, but it was so heavily taxed, I think I had to send them a money order for $8 just to get a tax form back that allowed me to write off certain expenses. What a mess! Look, this is no lie--I went through the International pop star world like shit through a goose, and the only reason why I didn't stay in it was because it was boring. It was as boring as having sex with toast. Okay, also, I have never liked dancing in front of people. Who does? I'm not a piece of meat.

    As to the GAO report, I had to laugh when they mentioned the Netherlands because I was signed to a Dutch record company and there's no way to get your money out of a Dutchman when you're in the music business. You might as well try to get a Democrat to cut taxes and make people take personal responsibility for their actions.

    Never mind that I made them a mint--never mind that my appearance at Pinkpop, my private nightclub shows, and my concerts in music halls all over the country were sold out affairs. Never mind that I mastered the Dutch language and taught myself to sing as if I were a hipster from Utrecht--they still cheated me out of about $800,000, American. Do you know how many pieces of Dutch fan mail my new assistant, Mr. Peej, has to destroy each month? In June of this year, he had to shred 78 letters, burn 12 packages, and take a pair of women's underwear to the County public waste incinerator, and when he was done, he had to throw the tongs and the gloves and the protective hood that he used into the incinerator and then we had to have him deloused--it was costly, but necessary. Good thing he knows how to cowboy up and take one for the home team.

    I must confess--what is "passive" income? Is it "passive" if I'm not actively trying to wring what is mine out of some unscrupulous hack? Is it "passive" if I was smart enough to have done all of the work years ago in order to ensure that someone would have to keep paying me for something that I did? Why do I have to suffer for being a talented and creative person? Those songs took a few hours to get right--hours during which I could have been doing something.