Looka' here
Thursday, April 19, 2012
Thursday, March 29, 2012
Hey, howdy, how are you? Well we have been working away Una Voce by Dwalia South MD is out and selling well, about to send my pair of the twins to the printer to come out in June. It's called The Uncommon Thread and if you want a taste to see if you like it there is a sampler available on Amazon. sample
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Poe's Birthday
Today is the birthday of Edgar Allen Poe. He was born in Boston in 1809. As a physician I can’t help but wonder how Poe’s life would have turned out if we had developed anti-mycobacterial therapy a century or so earlier. Firstly he may have never become an orphan. As his mother would not have died of tuberculosis when he was two years old. He would not have been adopted by the Allen family, therefore he would be, simply, Edgar Poe. Not being raised by a well-to-do family in Richmond, it is unlikely that he would have ever attended the University of Virginia to receive the tools to become a writer. In his adult life, his young wife Virginia would not have contracted the same disease that had killed his mother, he would not have had to endure her debilitating illness and therefore would have never produced “The Tell-Tale Heart”, or her subsequent death which led to the tone of his work for the remainder of his life.
So, from his birth came the man, and from the scourge of tuberculosis came his art. Happy Birthday Ed,I think that’s what we would have called him if INH or Rifampin would have changed his life. But we would all be less, for there would be no resonance when we heard the word “nevermore”.
So, from his birth came the man, and from the scourge of tuberculosis came his art. Happy Birthday Ed,I think that’s what we would have called him if INH or Rifampin would have changed his life. But we would all be less, for there would be no resonance when we heard the word “nevermore”.
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
Occupy Bourbon Street
Gordon was effected by that too I
guess. He never could stay with a
job for too long. Some said it was
because he’d never had a daddy around to show him what work was. Others said it was having to take care
of his momma his whole life, after she came off of that motorcycle, that’d done
it.
Bettie Lee’d run head on into a
pick-up truck and right through the windshield she went. She never talked again. They called what happened to her
“organic brain syndrome” but everybody around town just shortened it to OBS. Gordon was five at the time.
I don’t really know all that much
about it. Everything I know is
only second hand ‘cause I wasn’t around back then. Gordon’s my cousin.
He’s old enough to be my uncle.
He’s only three years younger than my dad.
Gordon’s been teaching me how to
drive all summer. He did a great
job. I just got my license last
week. I passed the driving test
the first time through.
They closed the battery
reprocessing plant where Gordon worked the same day. I guess they can get a better deal getting them made over in
China where they don’t have to worry so much about lead poisoning. So Gordon was at loose ends when he
heard about the protests that had started up north in New York City.
From what he explained, ninety-nine
percent of the people in the United States were being held up by one percent of
some greedy hogs that were living there in New York on Wall Street.
“They might as well have a gun,” he
said.
Gordon logged on to the Occupy Wall
Street web site to have a look. He
gave them some money and watched a little video somebody posted about how to
start a protest in your own community.
I watched it with him, but I swear, it was about the most boring thing I
ever saw on You Tube. I thought it
was stupid. A protest in Soso,
Mississippi wasn’t going to accomplish much of anything. What was he going to occupy anyway, the
post office?
Gordon saw it different
though. He thought New Orleans was
just about perfect for a protest.
Besides, it was the only city anywhere near big enough that was close to
Soso. I thought, maybe he could
catch a Saints game while he was down there.
He said he could get a couple of
his buddies, catch the Amtrack, and go down there on Wednesday if he could get
me and his neighbor, Mrs. Clanton, to keep an eye on his momma for a few days
while he was gone. I said
sure. Getting away for a little’d
do him good. He didn’t have a job to go to right now anyway. Maybe they could occupy Jackson Square.
He thought about it all day and by
that night he was sure that this was a thing that needed doing. So he went back to the OWS website to
let them know what he was intending to do. OWS thought that that was a fine idea, and gave him some hints
about drums, and collections boxes and what to write on the protest signs and
all sorts of things like that.
He went out to the garage to paint
some protest signs. He had a lot
of paint left from painting the short bus for the Mardi Gras parade back in
February. He made the first sign
purple and gold. He wrote OWS in
big letters. Then stood back to
get a good look to see how it seemed at a distance. OWS looked a lot like the thing his momma had, the
OBS. Maybe it was a sign. Something was trying to show him what
it was that he was supposed to do.
Gordon P. Middleman was going to be a real leader. He was the founding father of his own
protest. Gordon was going down
there and Occupy Bourbon Street to raise money for his momma. So that’s what he wrote on the rest of
the signs.
OBS for OBS
Support your momma
He caught the train on Tuesday. Nobody else went with him. I couldn’t go ‘cause I had school. All our friends had jobs except Wilson,
we call him Boo, and Boo wasn’t getting out of jail for three weeks. Gordon wasn’t waiting. So there wasn’t any of us that could go
with him. I drove him to the
station. He had a lot of extra
signs. I watched as he put them on
the rack above him, then he sat down with that big drum he got from the attic on
his lap, like it was a lunch box or something. That’s the last I saw of Gordon for a while. I heard from him though. He sent me texts almost every day.
Day One
Well, my OBS protest isn’t working worth
a damn. At first nobody else on Bourbon Street even noticed I was there. I was
just standing there by myself with my signs, beating on the drum. A few people gave me money. Some others
spit on me. Folks stuck Saints
stickers on my signs. Tomorrow I’ve got to get some help.
Day Two
a.m. – Slept behind some garbage cans, a
guy peed on me. Threw my clothes away and washed off with a hose.
Day Three
Ohhhhh…my head is killing me. Started on Canal. I was beating on my drum and a kid with
a trumpet and a girl with a violin started playing along. Next thing I know a seven-foot tall
giant in a green tutu, torn fishnet stockings, high heels, and a Tulane
football jersey took my green sign and tore it so it only said “Support you
Momma” and gave it to a chubby girl in a clear plastic raincoat and nothing else.
A boy took a marker and changed OBS on one of the signs to Oh Baby Show me, and
off we went, marching along. All
kinds of folk were following us, throwing beads and stuff, girls up on the
balconies were pulling up their shirts.
We were sure doing some protesting now. Police on horses even rode along beside us. We spent the donation money on some of
those tall hurricanes. I slept on
the girl with the raincoat’s couch.
Day Five
Somebody stole my drum last night. The girl I’m staying with is a stripper
at the JoyLuck Club. I hope she
didn’t give me something. I only
have one sign left and it’s all covered with stickers so you can’t tell what it
says.
I didn’t hear anything else for a week
or so then Gordon showed up at home.
He said he felt bad about leaving his momma alone for so long but he
wasn’t getting enough donations and the raincoat girl threw him out. After that, he didn’t have enough
money to buy a ticket home, but it was worth it.
Gordon and I are both pretty sure
he taught those greedy hogs up there in New York a thing or two.
Monday, October 17, 2011
Time Donors Wanted paper book
Well, the book version will be out by the end of the month, available in trade paperback from Amazon and beyond. Scott
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
Looking to the Future
Today PRNewswire released the results of a Harris poll conducted 7/11-7/18, 2011 on reading habits in the US. The headline was that one sixth of the population is now using an e-reader of some sort, with the same number projecting that they are likely to purchase one in the next year. Various variables are analyzed but what do they really mean in terms of book sales. I decided to do the math. With the current penetration of the market, and assigning median values of 1.5, 4, 8, 15, and 25 for the number of books purchased per year, we can figure the number of books sold per 10,000 people. That comes out to 45,390 books / 10,000 folks for conventional book sales and 15,030 books / 10,000 people for e book sales. So about a third.
What is interesting is to extrapolate where we'll be if the projected growth in e readers materializes. In that case, conventional book sales would be expected to drop to 37,380 books/10,000 people and the number of e-books should jump to 30,060 e book sales/ 10,000 individuals. So at 30% penetration almost half of sales are of e books. When costs and profit margins are taken into consideration, I think where we're headed is obvious.
Scott Anderson
IsoLibris Publishing
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
What is interesting is to extrapolate where we'll be if the projected growth in e readers materializes. In that case, conventional book sales would be expected to drop to 37,380 books/10,000 people and the number of e-books should jump to 30,060 e book sales/ 10,000 individuals. So at 30% penetration almost half of sales are of e books. When costs and profit margins are taken into consideration, I think where we're headed is obvious.
Scott Anderson
IsoLibris Publishing
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
Location:Mississippi
Sunday, September 11, 2011
The Uncommon Thread Project
I guess I better explain how there are so many Uncommon Thread shorts coming out. Well, there were a bunch of them that were in a book that is coming out jointly by China Grove Press (Hardback) and IsoLibris (e book) later this year called Una Voce, that was a compilation of work by Dr. Dwalia South and myself. But Una Voce as it was compiled cut off before the death of Dr. South's dear husband Rob, and the things that she has written in the interim are so compelling that I reworked the collection and pulled my own work out, because of the gravity and excellence of the material available from her alone.
We had already planned to put columns from my more recent column "The Uncommon Thread" out through the Kindle singles program, but that program has a lot of particular constraints, one of them being that the material should be of an intermediate length that isn't suitable for either a novel or a magazine article. Well since all of these have already appeared in the JOURNAL of the Mississippi State Medical Association, we got rejected on that one.
Oh well, because we now have access to the older material and we aren't constrained by the Kindle singles program, we've bundeled collections of 6-10 columns into short format releases that run about 50 pages each. So far I've put together five of them. These will represent about all of the things that I've put out that have a general interest appeal, I don't guess you care about specific issue topics or medically based subjects so these were tossed from consideration. We will offer another collaborative volume next spring of the best of these that will be offered in both hardback, by China Grove, and e book, by IsoLibris. So I hope you give them a try. If you like one, try more. If you have suggestions about which stories are your favorite let us know and that's what will go into the book. You get to determine what we publish. I hope you'll be a part of deciding what we put out. To do it, go to www.IsoLibris.com and then click on my page. Thanks, Scott
This is your chance to direct what gets put in a book!!!
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