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Did you know that if you click on the word Archives at the top of the list of monthly archives you'll see a list of all the posts at onegoodmove. There are two ways to search the site. The search box top right and the Google Search at the bottom of the page.

"When it gets hot, so hot you can't stand it and the steam is rising from your scalp, do you worry about global warming? Well, George Bush is now also worried about global warming, but he has a plan. He's going to invade the sun." --David Letterman

One from the archives Underwear goes inside the pants.

Reading With Fresh Eyes

Recently, some Brits and Aussies have played tricks on unsuspecting publishers by submitting classic works from famous authors. The hapless publishers, of course, fell right into their hands by rejecting works from the likes of V.S. Naipaul and Patrick White. A dirty trick? A telling sign of the times?

Well, perhaps the truth lies in the middle; regardless, I tend to look at publishers, even those who fell for this trick, as occupying an honorable place in our literature ecosphere. They read through page after page of horrible manuscripts so that we don't have to. Yes, that means that they get to decide who gets published, but it also means--as more than one publisher has told me--that they have hardly any time to read anything but manuscripts.

Poetry for the masses.

Olbermann dons O'Reilly mask at TV meeting

I've read hundreds of books by Georges Simenon . If you like detective fiction read about Chief Inspector Maigret his other novels are what I call psychological novels.

Curious Georges

Georges Simenon, prolific genius of literary reduction, takes readers on a very bad road trip.

Simenon’s genius is the art of reduction. He can teach you how to run a restaurant in a few sentences scattered throughout a novel and how to poison your spouse with even fewer lines—in the same skinny book (Dimanche), no less.

Some of his characters turn into murderers, others dump their families and jobs and disappear to chase obsessions they didn’t know they had. A man or woman may simply break loose from a tedious existence, inhabit a new identity for a while, then return, changed or not, to the safety of former habits and routines. Simenon, who never outlined his plots in advance, generates continuous tension by keeping a novel’s several possible outcomes immanent until the last page or so. Like Patricia Highsmith, he grasped the psychopathology of the twentieth century at its intractable roots; the century started with alienation, and ended with alienation and sociopathy.

Simenon also practices a radical economy of language, using almost no adjectives or adverbs—his white space is more expressive than much of Hemingway and all of Raymond Carver.