the book bum

      I know much less about music than I do about books, but I can definitely tell you that my taste in music is influenced by my appreciation for good writing.  I especially love songs with wordplay or that take on a slightly different meaning the more you listen to them.  With this in mind, I've compiled a list of my favorite poetic singers in the hopes that they will confound and delight you, too. 1. Marina Diamandis aka Marina and the Diamonds - She's probably my favorite singer of all time.  "Mowgli's Road" is one of her most poetic and clever songs, but I was totally mystified by it for a while. It's pretty clear that she's feeling pressure to conform to what the music industry wants from her, but then there's also this weird silverware metaphor about how "the cutlery will keep on chasing me" and how the "spoons are metally mean and "the knives are bloody cold".  It took me weeks before I suddenly had a eureka moment l...

          Hello!!!  I'm feeling very cheerful tonight, because a few hours ago I went to an event called LIT Crawl and had a wonderful time.  And since it was a literary event, I thought I'd share it with you-all.           LIT Crawl is an event that takes place once a month in Brooklyn.  It is like a pub crawl in that many businesses (including bars) take part in it, but that is where the similarity ends, because instead of offering discounted alcohol, these businesses host free (!!) literary events all night long (or at least from 5:00 to 8:00 pm).  These events occur in three shifts so that people can fit in three different events in one night.  The events change from month to month, but they vary pretty widely.  For example, tonight I went to a performance art/poetry reading in a laundromat, in which the two performers danced on top of washing machines and discussed the voyeuristic and weirdly personal ...

    My personal kind of beat-up copy      I read this book for the first time a few years ago in middle school, when I got it as a birthday present from  an adult who had heard I liked to write stories.  At that time I was in this phase where I believed that the more adjectives and the bigger words I used, the more authoritative I sounded.  So when William Zinsser popped out and started telling me to Simplify, simplify, simply,  my first impulse was to slam the book shut. But soon I saw the value of his advice, and that is how On Writing Well  changed my life and my perspective on writing.      What really convinced me to listen to him was how well he wrote.  Zinsser has this awe-inspiringly simple voice when he writes.  Reading his book was like sitting in an English class.  It was like listening to a soft-spoken but amicable relative talk.  True to his own teachings, there was not a single unnec...