Steven's Happenings

You probably don't care all that much but I thought I'd tell you:

I'm working on the draft of a new, rather long (for me) poem that I hope to share here shortly. It started as a tribute to John Paul the Great, but it had a transmigration of soul and became something different.

I'm reading:

Philip Roth The Plot Against America
Day Keene Home is the Sailor--This is part of an interesting "noir" revival series by Hard Case. Day Keene was an author of the mid-fifties and this is one of their works (it was the pseudonym, apparently of a team, like Manning Coles and Ellery Queen). Other in the series include, for some reason, Top of the Heap by A.A. Fair (I'm uncertain why this one was chosen in particular--I would probably have taken something like Bedrooms Have Windows or Owls Fly at Night, but I'm not the editor on the series. Then there is a large group of modern writers placing themselves in the Genre--Richard Aleas, Max Allen Collins, Lawrence Block, Dominic Stansberry, Alan Guthrie, Donald Westlake.
Ruth Burrows Ascent to Love

and about a million others in bits and pieces.

And I'm planning one of those excursions that you hope for all of your life. I'm going to get to see the prison of Dr. Samuel A. Mudd--imprisoned for complicity in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln because he set John Wilkes Booth's broken leg. This prison happens to be located about sixty miles west of Key West in the Dry Tortugas. I have wanted to visit these hinterlands forever, and it appears that an opportunity is opening up for me. I'll keep you posted.

Now, if I can just find a way to visit Hungary and Australia in the next couple of years.